Shigeru Miyamoto is the artist and designer behind video game titles including "Donkey Kong," "Super Mario Bros." and "Legend of Zelda." Miyamoto has been creating video games for more than 30 years. He was recently in New York to help launch "The Year of Luigi," which includes the release of Luigi-themed games like "Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon" for Nintendo 3DS.

We interviewed Miyamoto, with the help of a translator, at Nintendo of America's offices in New York. Read on to find out the origins of "Super Mario Bros.," Luigi and what he hopes kids gain by playing videos games.

TFK: What was the inspiration behind the first "Super Mario Bros." game?

MIYAMOTO: Before the original "Super Mario Bros.," I had created games called "Donkey Kong" and "Excitebike." After we created "Donkey Kong" where Mario was very small, we wanted to create a game with a bigger character that you could move around. The problem was that if you had a bigger character, there was less space to move around. In "Excitebike," the screen scrolled so that there was more room to play. We used this screen scrolling technology to create a bigger Mario and allowing him more room to move. So we made Mario bigger and had him running across the screen, which turned out to be fun. However, when we made Mario smaller, the space in the game seemed bigger. We enjoyed the big and small Mario so we thought it would be more fun if Mario could change sizes during the game and that is when we introduced the super mushroom to allow Mario to change size. That is how Mario became Super Mario.

TFK: How did you come up with the idea of Mario and Luigi as brothers?

MIYAMOTO: Before "Super Mario Bros.," we made a game that was just called "Mario Bros." In that game there were two characters that would knock over turtles that were dropping down from pipes and kick them off. The two characters would play at the same time. The problem was that when we were making that game, the amount of memory available in the computers at that time was very small. Even though we wanted to make two different players, there wasn't enough memory in the computer to make two different characters. We had to use the same character design for each player. Also, there was a limit to the number of colors you could use in video games so we couldn't add a new color to make a new character. We had to use colors we were already using in the game. So, we took the green color from the turtle shells and applied that color to (Mario's character template). We spoke to our colleagues in America and wanted help finding a name for the second character. They said that if you want Italian brothers and the first brother is called Mario, you should call the other brother Luigi. We noticed that ruiji, which means "similar" in the Japanese language, was very close to Luigi, so it became a joke in Japan that Mario is similar to Luigi.

TFK: Why is 2013 "The Year of Luigi?"

MIYAMOTO: This is the 30th anniversary from the release of the first "Mario Bros." game. Also, by coincidence, we have a number of people at Nintendo who are Luigi fans and have been working on Luigi games. All of those games happen to be coming out this year. So we decided to make this year a "festival" celebrating the Luigi character and games.

TFK: What do you hope kids gain from playing your games?

MIYAMOTO: The most important thing about interactive entertainment like video games is the way the player thinks about what they can do with the game. What's important is that the player think creatively, then try out what they're thinking and then see it (come to life) in the game. For example, when playing a game like "Super Mario Bros.," the players hit blocks to find different items. I want that player to think about all of the possibilities of what they might find or new worlds that they might uncover. My hope is that kids will test their creativity and think of different fun and silly ways to interact with the game.

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TIME FOR KIDS is a registered trademark of Time Inc. used under license.

TimeforKids.com is a registered trademark of Time Inc. used under license.

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