35 years ago, Mario became a video game icon in Super Mario Bros.

A priori, celebrating your 35th birthday is nothing exceptional.

Except in the world of video games where such an age would make you a true ancestor!

And that's the milestone just reached by 

, Nintendo's game that turned a simple mustache plumber into the most iconic pixelated hero in history.

Released on September 13, 1985, it instantly became a cult favorite and popularized the genre of side-scrolling platform games.

Thus launching the career of Mario, a still popular hero 35 years later.

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Stammering beginnings before colossal success

However, it took a little while for Mario to become a video game icon.

First called "Mr. Video" in the prototypes, it is under the name of "Jumpman" that the character made his debut in 1981 in the Nintendo arcade game 

.

Already, he must rescue a princess captured by a giant gorilla.

Mario is "really" Mario became the following year in the arcade game

.

Under his new name, he's… the bad guy!

This is the one and only time he's been the antagonist of a game, namely for capturing Donkey Kong.

In 1983, it is still arcade on the Italian-American plumber terminal gets its own game:

.

Mario faces strange creatures there with his brother Luigi.

Despite a nice success, its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, is not satisfied and wants to improve the game and the hero.

It was really in 1985, in

that Mario became the character we all know, this guy in overalls (red at the time, blue from 1988) who jumps, runs, collects plays and faces off against funny creatures to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser's clutches.

A hero everyone identifies with

A first name but no last name, unknown origins, no real voice either (his famous "It's me Mario!" But hardly any more)… Mario is nobody and everyone at the same time.

A hero that all players can relate to.

A recipe of astonishing simplicity which allowed Nintendo to sell 40 million games of

.

Since then, the success has never wavered.

Driving a kart, as a doctor, accompanied or not by his brother Luigi, in 2D or 3D and even to the far reaches of the galaxy, Mario has survived the decades, where others, like his rival Sonic, declined.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of

, Nintendo puts the small dishes in the big ones.

The Japanese publisher is firing on all cylinders: a collaboration with Lego, a Mario Kart in augmented reality to transform his living room into a circuit or even an updated pack of three 3D adventures of his most lucrative hero (

,

and

).

As for the nostalgic, they can rush on a collector's edition of 

integrated into a Game & Watch, one of Nintendo's first portable consoles.