I was playing Mario Kart 64 the other day, and couldn't help but notice how bizarre the artistic direction was. Everything about it felt very Japanese. I'm wondering Mario is full of cultural motifs that I'm unaware of.
There are many things to look at here: story of a lone everyman rescuing a woman from a castle, turtles depicted as being evil, mushrooms and veggies being magical, the acid-trip art style, to name a few.
Nuclear weapons and civil strife influenced Akira, were there any influences the first few Mario games (say, pre n-64).
I'm on mobile and having trouble finding the interview, but Iwata sat down with Miyamoto to interview him on Super Mario Bros.
The gist of the story is this: they, Nintendo, were designing a Popeye arcade game, but by the time the game was ready for production, they didn't have the license, so they changed the sprites to the familiar Donkey Kong arcade game. This proved very popular in the United States.
Meanwhile, the Famicom was prospering in Japan with Donkey Kong, DK Jr, and (I think the finally licensed) Popeye. They hesitated to bring it to the US, but after the video game crash in the early 80s, Nintendo swept in with a quality product and slew of games.
After Donkey Kong came the Mario Bros game, which was a two player fighting game (you may have played it). This proved so popular, they decided to find something else for the Mario asset to do, and somehow Miyamoto decided on running. He specifically wanted ~60 second levels, and his compatriots were thinking he wanted 60 screens of level because it took roughly 1 second to run across the screen, but of course he imagined obstacles and only about 20 screens per level.
For all the item designs, they specifically made them symmetrical to save on ROM. It was easier to store half a design and mirror it than to shrink the design to fit their requisite grid. The only enemy originally was the Koopa Troopa. The Goomba was added late in development because the Koopa was deemed "difficult" as a first enemy to defeat (requiring two hits). They would draw each level on grid paper, hand it off to the programmer, and by day's end test the design.
I wish I could remember more or find the interview on my mobile. I've heard that there's a mushroom that gives a "growing" sensation and this inspired the growing Mario, but I've never seen that in a source I trusted.
There were many cultural influences on the 60s-70s Japanese youth culture which would have led to many of the artistic choices in the Mario series. This article talks about how the movie Easy Rider was a huge influence on Japanese culture.
"When it comes to the pop culture in general, the movie Easy Rider was kind of a bible for our generation," Miyamoto told website CVG. "A writer or director like Peter Fonda, who made Easy Rider, must have had a great influence upon myself when I was young."
The movie itself was heavily influenced by the LSD and Marijuana culture of the United States, and so the Japanese market was prepped for video games which would picture surreal and "triply" characters and backgrounds.
There are a few other articles which are related to the artistic influence of early Japanese video games:
In "Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism" the author makes the argument that a lot of Nintendo's artistic direction comes from its relationship with the West. Japan, since the 1800s, modernized and westernized, and imported many cultural tropes from the West. The example of the "everyman saving a woman from a castle" can be connected to Western European knights and princesses myths, as Princess Peach is clearly a European-styled princess, and so are Bowser's castles.
Super Mario Brothers, for example, does not invoke the image of Japan. Both his name and appearance are designed to be "Italian"...Japanese producers are even more intent to localize (Americanize) poke'mon characters.
Despite the heavy Western influence on Nintendo apparent in The Legend of Zelda particularly, there are some distinctly Japanese traditional views and characters that occur in their games. In Super Mario, Bowser is named "Kuppa" (and there are koopas in the Americanized versions), related to the Japanese mythical creature Kappa - or, apparently named after a Japanese dish. The famous "Super Mushroom" comes from a generic look for a psychoactive mushroom; the mushroom is actually based directly on the Amanita muscaria which was used in various cultures as a psychoactive substance. Also the Tanooki is very popular in Japanese folklore.
I don't know the sources behind this, but Gaijin Goomba's videos seem to be pretty well-researched. Here is one: "Japanese culture in Kirby, Mario, and Zelda". He goes into the origins of the Triforce in Zelda and the Whomp coming from a Japanese folklore demon.
Its worth noting that more or less none of those things appeared in the first mario game. The first 'mario' game was Donkey Kong, which didn't have any of those and was sort of similar to King Kong.
The first true Mario game was Mario Bros, and it wasn't Japanese at all. The brothers were Italian-American plumbers, and the enemies they bumped into were the kind of animals you'd expect. Only this is actually sort of backwards, because the idea of him being a plumber and the setting of the game comes from two unrelated mechanical/gameplay issues.
One: it's hard to tell what's supposed to be what on a tiny sprite. In order to make it more clear he was running, they wanted different colored arms and torso, and overalls were picked to show this.
Two: The original prototype of the mario featured Mario defeating enemies from below. The problem was that that meant there was no real danger, since you were far away from opponents while fighting them. So they needed an enemy that could be 'damaged' from below, but not beaten--such as a turtle, who flipped when you bumped it.
There's actually a whole lot of mario's 'lore' that comes from technical issues with the original games. Why do some koopa troopas have wings? It's not a piece of Japanese cultural influence, but instead a limit with the system. They didn't have enough space for a new creature, so instead they just added wings to the existing turtle enemy.
So that's why turtles are an 'evil' recurring enemy.
Sources: http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/nsmb/0/1
This is more of a history of Nintendo in general (with a focus on Nintendo of America) in the 90s / early 90s but according to Game Over by David Shire Mario was named after Mario Segale, the Landlord of the warehouse where NoA were taking deliveries of early Donkey Kong arcade machines. Minoru Arakawa, the head of NoA got into a fight with Mario about unpaid rent.