Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto Says Super Mario Bros.'s Biggest Invention Was Letting Mario Jump Over Bowser Instead of Fighting Him

Shigeru Miyamoto got asked for a Super Mario secret and picked a confession. “The biggest invention, or the behind-the-scenes story, of Super Mario is that Mario doesn’t fight Bowser,” he said in Japanese, in a quote Denfami Nicogamer printed in full. “Normally, if there’s a boss at the end, you have to fight it. But making a fight was really hard, and I agonized over what to do.”

The setting was Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto on October 22, a press conference held the day before Japan’s education ministry announced him as a recipient of the Order of Culture. GameBusiness.jp reports he’s the first person from the games field to receive it, one of eight honorees this year, with the investiture at the Imperial Palace on November 3.

The way out came from the shape of the game itself. “It’s a game where you keep running to the right, so what if getting to the far right is the win?” Miyamoto said. Then it clicked: “Then you could just jump over him without fighting.” Mario hops over Bowser, “and after that Bowser falls on his own. When I tried it, it was surprisingly fun.”

He built up to that answer by explaining why Donkey Kong had been harder to read than Pac-Man or Tetris. Clearing a maze or a row is obvious to anyone watching, he said, while going from point A to point B isn’t, so a gorilla running off with a girl gave the player someone to go rescue. Super Mario started from wanting “a game where a jumping Mario could keep running on and on,” and from his idea that the hero would run on land, swim in the sea and fly through the air. He called that “land, sea and air” and said, “That was probably the invention.”

So he gave reporters two inventions in one answer, and he put the Bowser one on top. He also pointed out that it didn’t last: “As we made the second and third games, Bowser gradually started actually fighting.” He didn’t say which part of the fight his team couldn’t build.

Design stories like this one tend to surface only when someone asks the right question at the right moment, and the November 3 ceremony at the Imperial Palace is one more of those moments. Each new telling can reorder the old ones: “land, sea and air” was the invention in Miyamoto’s own words for years, and in this answer Bowser outranked it. What his team actually tried before settling on the jump, and whether any of that abandoned boss-fight work survives at Nintendo, nobody has said.