Super Mario series

The Super Mario series is the most successful video game series that debuted with the arcade video game Donkey Kong. The popular game later spawned two sequels and Mario Bros., though the series became a household name with the release of Super Mario Bros. on the NES and Famicom, the game that can arguably be considered the game that saved the industry.

The second game in the Super Mario Bros. series was released in Japan, though Americans and Europeans wouldn't be able to try it out until the release of Super Mario All-Stars. Instead, we were treated with a remake of a Japanese only title called Doki Doki Panic, which was renamed Super Mario Bros. 2. It was basically the same game with new sprites that featured Mario themes.

Super Mario 64 was released in 1996 on the Nintendo 64, and is considered just as revolutionary as the first Super Mario Bros. title. It introduced Mario and gamers to a new, 3D world. It became a huge hit and spawned two more 3D games - Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy on the GameCube and Wii respectively.

In-depth history
Video games were booming in the early 1980's, and the introduction of Pac-Man brought characters into the mix. Before Pac-Man was released, players were essentially limited to only controlling space ships or paddles. The creator of Pac-Man wanted to introduce new players to video games, and came up with the concept of controlling a character around a maze, who gobbled up little dots. According to him, he looked down at a 1/4th eaten pizza, and saw the face of his masterpiece. The truthness in this claim is unknown, though nevertheless Pac-Man was a major influence on game designers everywhere, including Shigeru Miyamoto.

Radar Scope
Meanwhile, Nintendo had successfully entered the gaming market by introducing the Magnavox to the Japanese market, creating the Game & Watch, and developing a popular console called the Color TV. They decided to broaden out to America, and developed a game titled Radar Scope. However, it took too long to arrive there, and once it did people were apathetic. Nintendo now had thousands of Radar Scope units that they needed to use, and decided to use the arcade units and replace them with a new game. They had no game designers, and turned to Shigeru Miyamoto, a young man who didn't have much experience in creating games.

Donkey Kong
Shigeru Miyamoto constructed a game in which a man run across platforms, jumping over barrels thrown by an enraged ape known as Donkey Kong. The character, then known as Jumpman, would attempt to get to the top and annihilate the monkey's antagonistic plans. When the game was ready to be released in America, NoA (Nintendo of America) regarded the game as a failure and desired that Miyamoto create a shooting or maze video game, as at the time they were popular. The NoA president reassured his company's employees that they had a hit on their hands, and released just one arcade unit in a bar. A week later the arcade unit was filled with quarters, and NoA ordered about 2,000 more units from Japan. However, the good times didn't last forever.

Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd.
About a year after the release of Donkey Kong, Universal Studios, one of the msot successful Hollywood movie companies, threatened Nintendo by stating that Donkey Kong was a blatant violation of copyright against their supposed ownership of King Kong. However, the fact is that Universal didn't in fact own the rights to King Kong, but that its characters and plot were rather in public domain. Eventually, Nintendo ended up the victor of the case, an outstanding accomplishment against a big player in the movie industry. It can even be said that this actually benefited Nintendo, seeing that Universal ended up having to pay them $1.8 million for multiple reasons.

The plumber and his brother
Nintendo needed a name for the character, and thus named him after NoA's landlord, whose first name happened to be Mario. At the time, Mario's occupation in the video games was just a carpenter, though a collegue of Shigeru Miyamoto told him that he looked more like a plumber, and thus based their next game, Mario Bros., around a plumbing theme. They also gave him a twin brother, who understandably looked almost identical, but with a slight change of clothing. They named him Luigi, and thus the Mario brothers were created.

In the game, Mario and/or Luigi would go through pipes destroying the pesky foes that have been clogging them up. Miyamoto originally wanted the characters to simply jump on them to kill them, though hardware limitations wouldn't allow this, so rather they just made the duo jump under the characters, then get rid of them.