 When Shigeru Miyamoto needed a voice for his most iconic character in Super Mario 64, he already had an idea of who to choose. Charles Martinet was given an opportunity to audition thanks to his proven track record with Nintendo. His particular set of skills had proven invaluable in the past, and as Nintendo further explored voice acting in games, there was an opportunity to redefine how Mario sounded. Martinet's approach to Mario was unique, at a time when the character was primarily seen as a gruff New Yorker, Martinet took a different path, one that would come to define Nintendo's mascot for over 20 years. This is why Charles Martinet matters. It all started, naturally, on a beach. Martinet was an aspiring actor, living in Los Angeles. One day in need of work but without prospects, he found himself talking with a friend who knew of a mystery audition. Nintendo wanted a voice for Mario, their most famous character, and the company was auditioning actors nearby. Martinet's friend insisted that he should head over and try out for the role. For this kind of audition, though, an actor couldn't just turn up uninvited. Could they? Said Martinet. I said, Buddy, there's no way I would ever crash an audition. I'm a professional actor. Where should I go? Even as he joked about turning up and demanding to be heard, Martinet wasn't convinced. He said, I thought, I'll just stay here and watch the sunset. Finally, right at the end of the day, Martinet made a move. He was almost too late. He said, it was about five o'clock, and I knocked on the door and they had already put the camera in the bag, and I said, Excuse me, can I please read for this? And the producer, who looked at his watch, said, Oh, yeah, okay. So, through sheer luck, Martinet was given his big chance to audition to voice Mario. There was just one problem. He didn't know who Mario was. Super Mario's English-speaking voice was already fairly established by the time of Martinet's audition. The video game character's popularity had seen him make the leap into animation several times already, including an early Donkey Kong cartoon in which he was voiced by longtime Optimus Prime actor Peter Cullen. Mario's most high-profile cartoon role at the time was in Super Mario Super Show, a Saturday morning cartoon with live-action sections in which he was played by wrestler Lu Arbano. This cartoon leaned into Mario's identity as an Italian-American Brooklynite, and a thick New York accent would later also be used by Bob Hoskins in the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie, and also attempted by Chris Pratt in the 2023 animated film. At the time of his audition, though, Martinet had never heard of the character. He wasn't familiar with video games nor with children's Saturday morning cartoons. I had never heard of Mario, he later said. I had never heard of Nintendo when I crashed the audition. Thus, when he was given the very simple direction to voice an Italian-American plumber from Brooklyn, Martinet didn't copy what had been done with the character before. Instead, pulling from his experience with Shakespeare, he based his performance on his take of the character Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew, a comedic character for whom he used a high falsetto voice and an exaggerated faux Italian accent. It was fundamentally different from everyone else's take on the character, something that nobody else would have attempted for Mario at the time. If the casting director had been hoping to get home on time, he made one fatal mistake. According to Martinet, the director told him, start talking to people. And whenever you stop talking, that's your audition. Martinet then simply didn't stop talking. The hunt for Mario's new voice wasn't intended for a video game. The 8 and 16-bit home consoles of the time couldn't handle voice clips with any degree of ease, bar the occasional technical flexing that got a Sonic game to scream, Sega at startup. Games on CD could feature voice clips, but this wasn't what Nintendo had in mind. Instead, they were looking for an actor to bring Mario to life at trade shows. The Mario in Real Time system was a tremendously primitive kind of motion capture, which read a person's facial movements, along with other inputs on a computer, to manipulate a 3D puppet on a TV screen. This was a gimmick, something to draw crowds to Nintendo's booth at consumer electronics shows, and little more. It was a digital version of a mascot costume. The challenge for Nintendo was finding an actor who could ad-lib convincingly, in character, for hours at a time. Someone who could joke with attendees in a family-friendly, Nintendo-approved way without running out of material or getting tired. Whether or not Charles Martinet's voice was what the casting director had in mind is debatable. What is certain is that he definitively proved that he had what it took to play Mario on a convention floor. He never ran out of material, said Martinet. And I don't know how it happened, but I just kept talking non-stop until the tape ran out, and I think literally that was about half an hour. I was at the producer's marriage anniversary recently, and he said, you know, when you were talking, I turned to the camera guy and said, do you think if we walked out that door right now and came back in 20 minutes, he'll be talking? And the cameraman said, I bet he would, let's go. He said, great, great, stop, stop, the tape stopped and we'll be in touch, which to an actor is like the kiss of death and you're done for when they say that. And I said, okay, I'll go back to the beach. No sooner had I got out the room, the producer picked up the phone and called someone at Nintendo and said, I found our Mario. And mine was the only tape he sent up there. So I guess I did something right. Martinet left the audition with low expectations. He had no idea of what was in store for him. For a brief moment in the early 1990s, there were two competing voices for Mario. On the one hand was the Brooklynite accent used in cartoons and the live action film. Meanwhile, proving himself to be an invaluable asset at various trade shows, Martinet was asked to voice Mario in a few games that could support voice acting. First an arcade pinball machine. Then the 1994 classic Mario teaches typing. Martinet's early roles were fringe spin-off games without the clout of a mainline series release, but paved the way for what came next. As the Super Mario Bros movie proved unpopular with critics, audiences and Bob Hoskins alike, Mario's harsh, rough New York accent slowly began to lose ground against Martinet's more exuberant, optimistic take on the character. This culminated in Super Mario 64, at the time the most high-profile game to feature Martinet's voice and the game that finally introduced this version of Mario to a wider audience base. Now, 20 years later, as Nintendo finally moves away from Martinet's voice, it's clear how much this one actor has shaped the way that modern audiences relate to the company's mascot. Martinet made Mario sound fun. He created a version of the character that gamers of all ages can enjoy, and even as he is replaced, he remains one of the most influential contributors to Mario's legacy. The moral of the story? Do things your own way, rather than copying what has come before. You might not have the success of Charles Martinet, but you'll have a lot more fun along the way.