Miyamoto explains how he came up with the famous Mario pipes

Have you ever wondered how the famous pipes in the Mario series came to be? Thanks to creator Shigeru Miyamoto, we’ve got some insight.

Shumplations recently translated a classic interview that Game Maestro conducted with Miyamoto in 2000. As he stated during that discussion, Nintendo needed to come up with a way for enemies “that went to the bottom had to re-appear at the top of the screen.” Then while he was walking in Kyoto, he “saw a plastic pipe sticking out of a wall,” and that was the solution he came up with.

Below is the relevant interview excerpt in which Miyamoto discusses the pipe origins for Mario:

The original Mario Bros. also established that Mario was a plumber.

We were trying to think of what other enemies the Mario Bros. could have in addition to turtles, and we came up with crabs and flies. So we figured the only environment with all three of those creatures – turtles, crabs, and flies – would be an underground tunnel. (laughs) Some huge underground tunnels that must exist somewhere… like under New York, I thought.

Hah! Your design process is like a free association game. It must have been a lot of fun working in this way.

At this point though, we still hadn’t thought of the pipes yet. Due to the way the screens worked, enemies that went to the bottom had to re-appear at the top of the screen. So that got us thinking, OK, we need a path or some way for them to get back up there. Then one day I happened to be walking through the streets of Kyoto, and I saw a plastic pipe sticking out of a wall.

And thus the pipe was born. Despite taking place in New York, the pipes were inspired by Kyoto.

Well, I’d never been to New York. (laughs) I guess we should say Mario Bros. takes place in a New York-ish kind of place, really. Anyway, finally we got the team together to talk and make sure all this stuff fit together. The first priority, you see, is the game itself―making things consistent is done after-the-fact.

Thanks to Shmuplations for the excerpt above.