Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 45 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 45th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

In this article I will analyze what the most correct way to refer to the lives in Mario games is, according to the games themselves.

Gain a Mario, Lose a Mario

Since the dawn of video games as a medium, certain universal concepts appeared and needed to be given names that are both useful at describing the concepts in question and memorable enough so that they would become part of the audience's vocabulary. Some names arose from the earliest games' own wording - like the phrase "Game Over" - while some came from the way players talked about video games, like calling end-of-level enemies "bosses", and eventually found their way back into the games themselves. 

One particular notion that applies to the majority of games, and especially to games that have a clear end goal and clear losing conditions, is the number of tries remaining. If the designers wish to not completely reset the game upon losing, but rather provide a player with several chances, as well as ways to gain more chances during gameplay, a word needed to be invented for this system.

Pinball machines act as precursors to video games in many respects, such as having several tries (extra balls), and ways to earn additional ones. In fact, the term "1-Up" to refer to gaining an extra try originated in pinball machines, as I have previously covered on the Supper Mario Broth Twitter account:

But pinball machines did not use the one prevalent word that video games choose for this concept: lives. It is very difficult to trace back the earliest usage of the term "lives" or "extra lives" in video games, but the most common belief is that it started being used by the audience when playing the 1978 arcade Space Invaders. The game itself has little text, and the instructions on the side of the cabinet call the lives "laser bases", so it was the players themselves who came up with the term. Starting with the early 1980s, the wording of the games already started to reflect this audience-suggested jargon.

Now, without looking it up, most players would likely say that the lives in Mario games are called just that, lives. But that is not entirely true. Particularly in older games, the manuals (and sometimes in-game text as well) would call lives "Marios" instead. In this article, I will go through a number of manuals chronologically and point out the different references to lives, the ways the words changed, the strange discrepancies in the wording in different places within a single manual, and finally the general tendency of the naming of the lives.

Please note that the images in this article are taken from scans of various manuals and do not have the source attribution at the bottom; instead, the text before or after the image in question explains what game's manual it is from. All manuals used are North American versions.

As is common knowledge among fans of the series, in his first appearance in the Donkey Kong arcade in 1981, Mario was not yet known as Mario, but as Jumpman instead (the name change happened in 1982 before the release of Donkey Kong Jr.) Here is what the instructions on the side of the cabinet call the lives in this game:

"Extra Jumpmen". This is the first of Nintendo's long history of referring to lives as "extra" followed by the character's name. Consider for a moment the implications of this. Many games that choose not to use the term "lives" do so because losing a life implies that the character has died. Here, the implication is that the character is replaced by an identical copy of himself, with no indication of what happened to the previous copy. While this does technically avoid the insinuation of death, it also introduced the insinuation of cloning, magical copies, or some other way of creating multiples of a single person, which is more child-friendly, also much less grounded in reality - which, of course, is not a high priority for such cartoony games.

There exist, of course, other versions of Donkey Kong, made after Mario was given his name, who also all use this convention. This is the NES version's manual:

This is the Game & Watch version's manual:

However, cracks are beginning to show and the colloquial word "lives" is beginning to creep in with licensed versions by other, non-Nintendo companies, like the Atari 7800 version:

Note how the first line calls it a "life" but the rest of the text switches back to "Marios". This will be a very common theme throughout this article, of manual writers seemingly forgetting that the lives are supposed to be called "Marios" and switching to the common name for a single line.

In 1983, the Mario Bros. arcade was released. That game referred to lives absolutely nowhere either in-game or on the cabinet, but the NES version again calls them "Marios":

This is also the first time Luigi gets his own lives, called Luigis.

For this game, the Atari versions (all using the same manual template) do not bother with the convention and call them lives:

Evidently, whatever internal guideline Nintendo had for the naming of lives was not important enough to communicate to companies that were producing licensed games.

An interesting case occurs with Wrecking Crew, which was released for the NES shortly before Super Mario Bros.:

The manual uses "Marios" and "Luigis" until this one line:

Here, the manual calls losing a life "losing a man". This was another slang word for lives in the 1980s, but which, unlike "lives", lost popularity and was no longer used widely in the 1990s and onwards. Still, this means that at least one official Nintendo product refers to extra lives in a Mario game as "men", so if you are the kind of person who likes to use this term, you have legal precedence to do so.

In the Super Mario Bros. manual, we have the first example of the word "life" being used in a mainline Mario game on a Nintendo console, instead of a licensed version:

However, even here, the "Mario" term is still used, in the same paragraph as "life". This is highly mystifying; usually, game manuals are very strict with their terminology. No game that calls its levels "courses" would switch over to calling them "stages" mid-manual or mid-game (the nomenclature of which I plan to write an article about in the future, as well), so why does this happen to something as central to the gameplay as the lives system? Of course, some of this could simply be sloppy writing, as was common for some manuals at the time; note the missing dash between "1" and "up" and the missing capitalization of "Mushroom". There is even an instance later on of Mario's own name not being capitalized. Still, this shows that at least this specific aspect underwent nearly no scrutiny compared to some others.

I will also show how the manuals of other versions of the same game, even ports or remakes on later platforms, to show how the wording changes over time while referring to the same scenario. The Game & Watch version of Super Mario Bros. (released shortly after it but featuring different gameplay - more in yesterday's article) both calls them Marios when discussing the items:

...but then calls them lives in an segment written like a letter from Princess Peach:

This also suggests that characters call them "lives" in-universe.

The Super Mario Bros. segment of the Super Mario All-Stars manual does call them "Marios" consistently:

...but as we will see later, it is only consistent within the subgames, not across them.

In Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, the wording was changed to only lives:

As Super Mario Bros. Deluxe was published in 1999, it is significantly newer than the original and reflects Nitnendo's shift to calling them "lives" in modern platformers.

For Super Mario Bros. 2, the manuals called them lives from the beginning in the NES version:

This is upheld through all the remakes, such as Super Mario All-Stars (despite it clashing with the "Marios" in the Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 sections):

And in Super Mario Advance:

There is an actual possible explanation for this. As the game features four playable characters: Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Toad, calling the lives "Marios" would be excluding the other characters. Of course, Luigi is playable in many of the games that call the lives "Marios" as well, but he is usually limited to being playable in multiplayer mode, so to a single player, all lives will be Marios.

However, as is clear from these examples, there does not seem to be an actual rule regarding the names of the lives in relation to the number of playable characters. In many games, only Mario is ever playable and the lives are not called "Marios", while in others, other characters are playable yet they are called "Marios".

Super Mario Bros. 3 held on to the "Marios" naming in its original NES version:

(although it is misspelled here as "Mario's"). Interestingly, it briefly mentions another alternative term for them: "players", in this paragraph:

"Players" is later also used in Super Mario Land and Super Mario World, but then never again after that, so it seems to be a reflection of some jargon that was in vogue at Nintendo in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

In the Super Mario All-Stars version, they are still called Marios:

...although as you can see from the end of the paragraph, they were misspelled as "marios" without a capital M.

In Super Mario Advance 4, as in the other games in that remake series, the wording is changed to "lives":

Super Mario Land, released in 1989, also used "Marios" most of the time:

Although it does use "players" once:

This is particularly baffling. Unlike Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, the other games that use "players", this one has only one playable character: Mario. There is no one else that "players" can refer to, so the usage of that word is superfluous when "Marios" is already being used elsewhere.

Super Mario World was released a year later, and again (for the last time) uses "players":

There is a segment that is particularly erratic, using "players", "Marios", "Luigis" and "lives" simultaneously (note that the term actually appearing in-game is "Marios"):

It is this particular segment that really raises the question of how much quality control these manuals underwent at the time. Modern Nintendo games would never allow the same object to be referred to by that many different names in this manner. This is even pointed out in-game as a joke on Nintendo's insistent terminology in Super Mario Maker 2, where Yamamura the pigeon corrects Nina, the tutorial character, by reminding her that the levels in that game are called "courses" whenever she calls them something else.

There are also more instances of discrepancies:

Again, the Super Mario Advance 2 remake converts them all to lives:

Super Mario Land 2 is consistent with calling them Marios:

Interestingly, around the same time (1994-1995), all the three major Mario spin-off franchises started: Wario with Wario Land, Donkey Kong with Donkey Kong Country (previous Donkey Kong games are considered part of the Mario franchise instead) and Yoshi with Yoshi's Island. Let us briefly discuss what lives are called in those franchises.

Both Yoshi and Wario started out with the exact same convention: calling the lives the main character's name. Here is the Wario Land manual:

However, by the next game in that series, Virtual Boy Wario Land, it had switched over to lives:

No further games in that series featured lives, but it is likely they would still be called that if the series ever resumes and continues using lives.

The same exact sequence of events happened to Yoshi. In Yoshi's Island, they are called "Yoshies" (note that this was the official plural of "Yoshi" in the 1990s before it was changed to "Yoshis"):

However, by the next game in the series that had lives, Yoshi's Island DS, they were renamed to "lives" and remained that way since:

Note also that as in the other examples, Super Mario Advance 3 renamed Yoshies to lives, as well:

As for Donkey Kong; that franchise has called them lives from the beginning, as seen in Donkey Kong Country:

The 1990s marked the phasing out of "Marios" from non-mainline titles. Mario Clash for the Virtual Boy still had them:

However, Donkey Kong for the Game Boy, commonly known as Donkey Kong '94 (the last Donkey Kong game that is not part of the Donkey Kong franchise due to starring him as the antagonist), did not:

The infamous Hotel Mario has a hybrid approach, by using the world "life" but calling the item (who is really a regular mushroom transformed into a Toad, a unique scenario that never appears in the series before or after) an "Extra Mario Mushroom":

The mainline Mario platformers continued to hold out the "Mario" nomenclature. Super Mario 64, released in 1996, uses only "Marios":

However, as with the other remakes, when it was remade as Super Mario 64 DS in 2004, the wording was changed to lives:

This may also be due to Yoshi, Luigi and Wario also being playable; but nevertheless, it is part of a trend to phase out the "Mario" term.

Finally, even the mainline Mario platformers stop using it (at least in the manuals) with Super Mario Sunshine in 2002:

From this point onward, no games use "Marios" in their manuals. The 2D platformers completely drop it; here is New Super Mario Bros.:

And New Super Mario Bros. Wii:

The same happens to the side games. Here is Mario's Pinball Land from 2004:

Or Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix from 2005:

However, there is one exception. Although the manual for Super Mario Galaxy calls them lives:

...the game itself calls them Marios:

However, at this point, this appears to be the end for Marios as the preferred term. The manuals from the late 2000s onward, as well as the digital-only manuals from the 2010s, all use "lives", as it seems that the Nintendo quality control has finally solidified its mandated terms for in-game elements. 

Of course, lives in general have been slowly phased out of video games as an industry-wide phenomenon since the 2000s, as well, as most players prefer to merely have checkpoints, and having each failure only reset the player back to the checkpoint instead of keeping a count of how many times this is allowed before a Game Over is reached and the progress is reset more severely, e.g. to the beginning of a world. The most recent mainline Mario platformer, Super Mario Odyssey, has done away with lives as well, instead merely making the player lose 10 coins (which can even be recollected if the player manages to reach the same place again) and resetting Mario to the most recent checkpoint.

Although the days of having the lives officially be called Marios are over, there are still remnants of this. The 100 Mario Challenge as seen in Super Mario Maker gives the player 100 lives, and represents them graphically as 100 actual Marios:

This appears to be calling lives Marios in spirit, but the actual digital manual makes it clear they are still lives and the Marios are simply a whimsical way of displaying them:

To summarize, here is what we can conclude from this analysis:

-At some point, Nintendo preferred to call extra lives in Mario games "Marios", but this was slowly phased out in the 1990s and has been nearly nonexistent for the last 20 years.
-Even though not the currently used terminology, it is still being referenced by modern games.
-The official terms that Nintendo has used for Mario's lives, and which you, the reader, can use yourself with the justification that Nintendo has used them, are: "lives", "Marios", "players", and "men".

I hope that the article was an informative dive in the history of Mario's lives!

Thank you very much for reading.