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Around 1980, Mario Segale rented a 60,000 square foot warehouse from Nintendo, a Japanese video game company, which was seeking to expand into the US market.
Mario A. Segale, a Seattle-area property developer who has unintentionally lent his name to the most famous video game character in history – Mario de Nintendo – died in a hospital on October 27. He was 84 years old.
Kim G. Brown, of the Marlatt Funeral Home in Kent, Washington, confirmed the death. The cause has not been specified.
From the 1950s, Mr. Segale built a small empire in the construction and real estate sector in Tukwila, a suburb of Seattle. Around 1980, he rented a 60,000-square-foot warehouse to Nintendo, a Japanese video game company, as it sought to expand into the US market.
In his book titled "Game Over: How Nintendo conquered the world," David Sheff wrote that a small business team had one day met in the warehouse and had some wrong to find the American names of the characters in the arcade game "Donkey Kong". They were stuck in the character of a squatting carpenter dressed in a red cap when someone knocked on the door.
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It was Mr. Segale, who had come to blame Minoru Arakawa, then president of Nintendo of America, for not paying his rent.
Arakawa was already under strong pressure to succeed and Segale "blasted" him in front of everyone, Sheff wrote. Arakawa, pissed off, swore that Mr. Segale would get his money soon.
And as soon as he left, Sheff wrote, the team knew it was called "Super Mario!"
Super Mario had only a secondary role in "Donkey Kong", but by the 1990s he had become the beloved mascot of Nintendo and the star of one of the video game franchises the most popular so far. (He also changed profession, from carpentry to plumbing, when he had his own game.)
In a video released by Nintendo in 2015, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed from a simple nod that Segale had inspired Mario's name.
Mario Arnold Segale was born in Seattle on April 30, 1934, of Louis and Rina Segale. The online obituary of the funeral home describes him as the only child of Italian immigrant farmers.
He created his company, Mr. A. Segale, with a single dump truck, according to the obituary. He became a major construction contractor in the northwest. Mr. Segale also continued buying land from his parents around Tukwila, where he established a commercial park in the early 1970s.
Mr. Segale sold the construction business in 1998 to focus on Segale Properties, the family's real estate business. The company also owns commercial properties in Seattle and farmland, including a vineyard, in east Washington.
The family is reluctant to talk to the media. An article published in 2010 by the Seattle Times about a mixed-use project predicted that Mr. Segale and his son, Mark, had not spoken to reporters since the 1990s. (The family n & # 39; 39 did not speak with the Seattle Times for this article and did not respond to calls from the New York Times on Friday.)
Mr. Segale leaves behind his wife, Donna, with whom he married in 1957; three girls, Lisa Atkins, Tina Covey and Nita Johnson; and nine grandchildren.
His obituary acknowledged that Mr. Segale had inspired the name of Super Mario, but that he had "always ducked fame and instead wanted to be known for what he had accomplished in his life".
He broke his silence in 1993, shortly after the publication of the story of Mario's name in Sheff's book. The Seattle Times asked Mr. Segale what he thought about using his name in such a popular game.
"You could say I'm still waiting for my royalty checks," he said.
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