Mario… Red…these two things go together just like mario and luigi. But why? Why red? There a few reasons…

Mario has included red in his colour palette for the longest time, in basically every game he’s been involved in, with exceptions being other colour variations like in smash bros, or just other styles like in mario kart 8 deluxe. Mario’ colour is one of his most defining features, having a large impact on everything surrounding him, from special edition switches, to box art design, to cereal boxes, to merch.

Ever since his debut as ‘jumpman’ in the arcade classic donkey kong, he’s had the same colour palette, however in that game it was inverted, with him having red overalls, which was later changed.

I’m sure there are a few conspiracy theories saying how the red is to cover up the colour of the blood spilled from the enemies he’s murdered or something.. but lets not get into that.

One reason for this colour choice is because in the game donkey kong, you play as jumpman against a dark black background, and in order to see the character clearly, nintendo picked a contrasting colour. They could have picked a number of colours, but they decided to go with red. A bold, bright colour making him easy to see against the black background.

Moving on to super mario bros, you can see he had an outfit change. This is due to the different hardware and therefore different limitations. With 8 bit, you can only have so many colours with a sprite, so they went with this, but still attaining the red theme. Again, this is useful against the blue background of the sky as it contrasts well. But come on, the can’t be al there is to it, right? One of the most prominent features of mario being done for the sake of functionality. I mean, if that were the case, he could well have easily changed his colours throughout the games if it didn’t mean too much. Yet, if we imagine him in a different colour, say blue, it invokes a completely different feeling about him to us. It’s almost as if his characteristics have seemingly changed…. Eh?

Nintendo is clever with their subliminal messaging. They use other colours to represent different powers simply, rather than actually changing any other aspect of the character. Not all the time though. Because of this, mario needs a ‘default’ form. So , they stick with red to show him as his normal self.

You may ask: well if mario is red, why is luigi green of all colours? Well, along with the fact that is also works well with the background, if you look at a colour wheel, green is the exact opposite to red. People believe these colours for the brothers are symbolic, too. With mario being short, brave and heroic whereas luigi is tall, cowardly and shy. Hence, these two characters can be seen as opposites in a sense. Due to the characters being indistinguishable other than their colours back in the day, this has led it to be one of the most defining features of the characters influencing a lot of nintendos designs, such as their logo background and game box arts.

There’s no one true reason to why mario wears red. Rather, there’s lots of different reasons and ideas. Some people believe mario and luigi are red and green to represent the Italian flag. I have a few problems with this, however. I thinks its a just a loose correlation that people have put together. I mean sure they’re red and green and that’s in the Italian flag, but what about white? That’s not a defining colour of the characters. Some say fire mario fixes that problem as he’s white, or that luigi used to have white, but come on.

Others say that its because its miyamoto’s favourite colour, but I’ve done some research and cannot find anywhere where this claim is based, so I’m guessing its just an assumption. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened to be true though.

Also, mario is the only famous video game character to wear red. This makes him very unique. I don’t think this was done intentionally by Nintendo, however it could be that other companies have refrained from using the most famous video game characters colour in order for them do differentiate themselves. For example, Sonic being blue.

So, to sum up, there are many reasons why mario wears red, be it subliminal messaging, symbolism or just functionality. What initially started as just a convenient colour to use eventually resulted in one of the most defining features of one of the most famous video game characters.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have your own idea that i may have missed? Let me know in the comments!

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