Miyamoto explains why Mario is chubby

[Stewy12]

All plumbers are fat, you should see my brother.........

 

[Rydian]

Lol hardware limitations...what about Bowser? How did he come into play with that look??Bowser only needs to have proper collision from the front (of whatever way he's facing).

QUOTE(DeMoN @ May 13 2011, 12:41 AM) This doesn't even make any sense. According to that logic then all NES characters should be fat.

I believe the hardware he is referring to is the arcade machines that Mario appeared on before the NES existed. Like the original Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr arcade games.

The NES as well, and I think most games on the SNES still used collision boxes, though they sometimes combined them.

Here's MUGEN for an example of how collision boxes work.

The blue boxes are the areas you can get hit, and the red is the attacking area. With newer engines you can use multiple boxes that overlay a specific way (as you can see with Ken's leg kick) to make very specific areas collision area, but for older things that had to work with less processing power they're set up in simpler arrangements, as you can see the guy on the left has only two boxes (and for older things like the NES/SNES days they'd try to make it so you had a single box, to make the game engine have to do even less calcuations).

 

[ProtoKun7]

Wow mario's design is pretty much all from hardware limitations...

I was going to say the same thing, and point out about how he got his moustache due to it not being possible to render a mouth on his sprite back then.

 

[machomuu]

Truth: Mario is fat to appeal to Americans.

It's just like an American to make fun of Americans.

 

[jerome27]

That's a lie. Mario's fat because he's Italian and he loves his spaghetti with he's momma's homemade ragu!

This.

Pasta is full of carbs and Italian food makes you fat. Especially all that cheese.

 

[ZAFDeltaForce]

It would've been funny to see fatty Mario getting stuck in a pipe as he's descending into it