Mario's Mustache Is a Hardware Workaround

Mario was designed inside a 16-by-16-pixel box. That's the constraint Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were drawing into in 1984, building the character that would star in Super Mario Bros. on the Famicom — released in Japan on September 13, 1985, and on the NES in North America the following year. Almost every recognizable feature of him is the answer to a hardware question, not an aesthetic one.

The mustache is the cleanest example. At 16 pixels tall, you cannot draw a face that has a nose and a mouth and reads as either. Miyamoto drew a big nose and put a black line under it. The reader's brain fills in the rest. A mouth would have been a single pixel, ambiguous, lost on the blurred CRT signal that most Japanese living rooms used in 1985.

The cap solves a different problem. Without it, the team would have had to draw hair, animate it bouncing as Mario jumped, and re-draw it for every frame of motion. A red cap is a flat shape that doesn't move relative to the head. It also gave Mario a recognizable silhouette at a distance, which mattered when he was rendered tiny on a 20-inch tube.

Overalls did the work for the body. On a non-overall sprite, Mario's arms swinging would have been hard to pick out from his torso, especially at running speed. Overalls put a contrasting color block in the middle of him, so the arms read as separate limbs every frame. Miyamoto told Satoru Iwata in a 2009 Iwata Asks session that he basically had no other clothing option that would let the animation read.

None of this was meant to be iconic. It was meant to be parseable on a 1985 CRT. The character outlived the constraint by about forty years and is still wearing the workaround.