Mario exhibits more talents than your average plumber. His leg strength is unparalleled, making him able to fall from any height and flatten most any creature in the Mushroom Kingdom. His fists aren’t too shabby either, able to break blocks of bricks from underneath. And his ability to draw power from nature rivals that of a druid, gaining supernatural abilities from plants and even the stars. No actual person could hope to do all that. Even early video game heroes like Pitfall Harry are fairly grounded in reality comparatively. But this is a good thing, as Mario proved that video game designers should let their imaginations run wild.

Games before the NES classic Super Mario Bros. had to be far more simplistic by necessity. The extremely primitive graphics meant you had to use imagination simply to tell what the images were supposed to be. This is why you saw more conservative concepts in games at this time. Designers had to stick with familiar concepts so players could know what was going on. Mario’s debut game, Donkey Kong, was no different, riffing off of King Kong’s famous climax. Mario, here named Jumpman, had all the powers of a real man with the ability to run, jump, and swing a hammer. Falling from too high meant death and his ability to jump was severely limited when compared to his later games. Everything veered towards an odd type of realism even while being a fair bit more imaginative than everything that came before.

With the arcade Mario Bros. came the ability to fall from any height without penalty and defeat enemies by hitting blocks below them. Given the new direction Mario was going in, the stage was set for Super Mario Bros. to shove realism aside and let imagination run wild. The now-superpowered Mario would battle mutated turtles, living mushrooms, and literal live ammunition in a world full of giant mushrooms, pipes, and glowing blocks. All this made the game extremely fun, but it also proved that games could create worlds that had previously never been seen in an interactive medium.

Doing things we never thought possible in unfamiliar settings is much of the appeal of games, and a big reason why Mario has endured. As games are trending back towards realism, developers would do will to look to what made Mario successful: He gave games the license to break away from reality.