This is Pixel Zoo, the show that dives into the wildlife of some of our favorite video games.
But what can video game animals tell us about animals in the real world?
Well, quite a lot, apparently.
Today, we're looking at probably the most famous game world of all time,
our favorite Italian plumber.
The world of Mario.
Mario has been appearing in video games for over 40 years.
Don't say that makes him super old in front of your parents, as it will make them very sad.
Ok? But did you know his first starring role wasn't even in a Mario game?
He actually first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981.
Since then, there have been a huge amount of characters
both heroes and villains based on animals and plants from the natural world.
Clearly, the creators of Nintendo were inspired in their artwork by looking outside from gorillas to dinosaurs,
venus flytraps to aggressive turtles, the Mario World is full of nature for us to
unpack. Here are some of our favorite natural world connections that you can find in plain sight
across the Mario Universe.
Mario's first appearance was in Donkey Kong, where you play as Mario,
trying to climb up layers of platforms to rescue a girl called Pauline.
Donkey Kong has a whole collection of other primates
that join him in the other game.
So just like as in real life, all the apes and monkeys of the Mario World are super social, too.
Gorillas live in social groups called troops, led by a dominant male
called the silverback due to the grey silver colouring on his back.
He defends a group of females and offspring from other potential males that may try to replace him.
In the first Donkey Kong game, he threw barrels down at Mario to jump over and this association with barrels
has kept up even into the modern games.
But is this even possible?
Now we know gorillas are strong, but are they strong enough to like, pick up a barrel and is that
empty or full?
and like surely it depends on what it's full of, what if it's got, like, I don't know, feathers.
I think I'm overthinking this.
Let's do the actual maths.
An empty barrel, depending on the size,
weighs around 50 or so kilograms, say it's a 40 gallon barrel.
That much liquid would weigh
approximately like another 190 kilograms
sort of bringing the total up to about 240 kilograms if my maths is right.
It's hard to measure strength but a male gorilla is estimated to be up to 10 times strong as a
human and the record for an overhead lift for a very, very strong person is around
250 kilograms.
Wow, I'm so weak, even with the average person being able to lift much less than that - OK?
I feel normal, a gorilla is plenty strong enough.
So not only could Donkey Kong lift and probably throw a barrel at Mario,
he could do it pretty easily, barely breaking a sweat.
So what have we learnt from that?
Well, gorillas are scarily, scarily strong
and clearly spend a lot more time in the gym than I do.
Now jumping on from our gorilla turned friend is another of the oldest characters in the Mario Universe, and that's
Yoshi.
Everyone's favorite green - well, I don't know what is he?
Well, it turns out,
according to Nintendo, Yoshi is actually a dinosaur, even though he's got a shell on
his back. like a turtle.
He also has some kind of spikes or mini sails on his back.
Maybe he's got Spinosaurus blood in there somewhere, too.
First off, though, Yoshi's actual full name is T.
Yoshisaur Munchakoopas.
I mean, imagine having to spell that all the time on the phone every time you make a booking.
Now there's a T in there, and if it's like a T as in T.
Rex, like it could stand
for Tyrannosaurus, I guess, Which would make sense.
Meaning tyrant lizard Tyrannosaurids are bipedal dinosaurs with large heads and smaller front
limbs. They were carnivorous too often, if not always top of the food chain.
In some of the Mario games.
Yoshi uses a long tongue like a chameleon to grab and eat creatures in his way.
It's called a slingshot tongue.
This kind of tongue is used by chameleons to attack and grip insects
and then, like, pull them into their mouths.
And oh my goodness, I have to say that's the first time I've actually seen that
and it's kind of gross, but awesome, but gross.
Now, we don't know if any dinosaurs actually had tongues like this,
but it does show that Yoshi had, you know, a bit of a predator's lifestyle.
Bowser is the main enemy in Mario World, usually kidnapping Mario's love Princess Peach
.
Bowser looks like an enormous turtle mixed with a dragon.
The original inspiration for Bowser, as we know him today,
came from the Chinese soft shell turtle, a bizarre shelled animal that the designer said
the most aggressive turtle I know, these turtles are very strange creatures.
One of their rarer talents
is the ability to excrete urea.
Wait, what in their mouths?
Essentially, to wee out of its mouth, which is one animal skill I'm glad that I don't have.
Speaking of substances coming out of his mouth, Bowser has that dragon like ability to breathe
fire. Where did this myth of fire breathing actually come from, though?
A popular story is that Komodo dragons may be the inspiration of this.
Just like a snake, it whips its pink tongue in and out of its mouth,
tasting the air like a sense of smell.
And maybe it was kind of this flickering tongue that gave the appearance of fire.
And now onto one of the most iconic villains of the Mario World.
Almost everyone would recognize them,
but far fewer people will be able to name them.
Piranha plants, which makes a lot of sense.
These vicious plants do their best at taking a bite out of anything that comes close to them
and despite there being no exact replica in real life,
we think that they may seem like a combination of two organisms.
I mean, first off, obviously, is the piranha.
Makes sense.
Okay, so these predatory fish aren't exactly like what you'd see in films with, like humans disappearing
into like a whole load of red water and then vanishing.
But they will give you a very nasty bite,
and that's exactly what Mario's Piranha plants do too
So we get that piranhas of predators, but plants?
Well, actually, there are far more kinds of animal eating plants
than there are piranhas.
Over 600 species in fact.
They're not quite like piranhas or piranha plants
taking bites out of you.
Their method, though, is arguably a bit cleverer.
They hunt using clever traps and tactics, to entice their prey into their clutches
until there's no escape.
It is as cool and dramatic as that, to be honest.
The most famous of these, and the one most similarly resembling a piranha plant is, of course, the venus flytrap
with its teeth looking like tendrils.
This plant smells good to insects which land on it,
and when a couple of hair like trip wires are touched, shh-zap!
The plant closes shut and digests its prey.
There are other methods that plants use to like pitcher plants, which contain liquid and have slippery slides
so that when an insect puts a foot wrong, weeeee...
all the way down into a watery demise.
And maybe some of my favorite carnivorous plants are the ones that use adhesive traps.
These are covered in tentacles with a blob of a glue like liquid on the end, which looks a bit like
nectar.
Once an insect touches it, it gets stuck - and struggling only gets it more and more stuck
as the plant rolls it up in a death grip.
Whoa. As annoying as those piranha plants are in the game,
and let's be honest, they're very annoying, it sounds like it's a much, much grisly end
if you were to come into contact with them in real life.
But we're not insects, so we're probably fine.
Mario has been appearing in games for over 40 years, and he's run through tens and tens of game worlds.
In many of these worlds, the natural world is a massive part of the inspiration, so it's no surprise
that over the decades, a huge amount of biodiversity is shown in the Mario Games.
You've got walking mushrooms, ink squirting squid, more turtles, more dinosaurs, more gorillas,
monkeys, flowers, mould, cacti, a variety of different birds from seagulls to penguins.
I mean, that is a dizzying amount of biodiversity that our Italian plumber friend spends his time
with. I mean, you'd think that he was a zoologist, not a plumber.
Looking more closely into the life that surrounds Mario,
it's clear to see just how much real animal knowledge Nintendo has crammed into this amazing
zoo of pixels. Join us for the next episode, where we'll be diving into another of your favourite games.
and seeing just what we can learn about the natural world from its Pixel Zoo.