Back when Mario was nothing more than an 8-bit sprite on our NES consoles, we were not all that concerned about age. After all, he's the jumpy mushroom guy, who cares how many birthdays he's seen? This is the kind of mentality that's been carried through into most of the subsequent games. Even as the character's design became increasingly detailed, his age wasn't at the forefront of our minds because we had other, gameplay-based things to think about. But now that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is here, all of a sudden, we care.
No longer is Mario just a character that we control, but we've seen another side to him thanks to Illumination and Nintendo's film. We've seen that has a life of his own outside of the games. With this comes questions that we might not have asked after playing, say, Super Mario Odyssey: what are his hobbies? Does he have any dreams? And, most importantly, just how old is this guy?
The issue is that we're still no closer to knowing the answer to this final question, and the movie may have even muddied our thoughts. The Mario Movie presents us with a couple of different options, all separated by a good decade or so, so while we left the cinema with a smile on our faces, we were also scratching our heads. Before we get into the specifics of the film itself (don't worry, we'll let you know when we are about to enter spoiler territory), let's break down what we know about Mario's age up until this point.
Back in 2016, The Independent unearthed an interview from 2005 with Shigeru Miyamoto. In this discussion, Mario's creator made a pretty definitive statement on the issue of how old Mario is — "he's about 24-25 years old", Miyamoto responded. That's despite many fans assuming the plumber is middle-aged, but Miyamoto gave the character this age at the time because it would allow him to be used in other games.