Mario's True Creator Reveals Himself

You find a lot of weird stuff on YouTube. Recently, I've stumbled across this one particular video of a man named Arden Lawrence, claiming to be the original creator of Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and the Mushroom Kingdom, as well as all their names. His story sounds very believable.

But to save you three-and-a-half minutes, I'll sum up what he says because he kinda rambles on. Arden Lawrence first created Mario in 1977 and based him on a real person; his best childhood friend whom he grew up with in Bard, New Mexico, named Mario Padilla Garcia, who was an underground demolitions expert for UV Industries and died of cancer in his early twenties. Luigi was based on a chief of police named Louis Verines, whom Arden and Mario worked for after school from the ages of twelve or thirteen until they graduated from high school (he never mentions what the work was). And Princess Peach was based on Arden's first wife, Eleanor Peach Lawrence.

Arden Lawrence's original inked artwork of the Mushroom Kingdom, as shown at the end of the video.

He mentions that he has contacted Nintendo and hired a copyright attorney who told him he did not have enough evidence to incite a case. Arden also mentions how his ideas could have been stolen. He says he was introduced to a girl named Sofia who offered to show his artworks to her brother who worked in animation in California, but he never heard from her again. Since then, many art students he met have had copies of Arden's artworks and used them without his permission. He also lost an air force duffel bag containing a set a Mario artworks in Colorado while traveling from New Mexico.

He also updated the description to that video about a year ago linking to an original drawing of Mario, here's that same drawing.

Mario as drawn by his alleged original creator, Arden Lawrence.

Also on this man's YouTube channel is a dance video devoted in memory to the late Mario Padilla Garcia, who inspired the name and maybe likeness of the current-day Mario, but it has yet to be continued.

As we can infer from Arden's claims, Mario's name was obviously not inspired by Mario Segale of Nintendo of America lore. Speaking of him though, a photo of Segale was released onto the internet just about a year ago after nearly three decades of anonymity, but so much for him.

However, there's one video on the channel that's so contrived and bizarre, you can no longer take any of these claims seriously. It's the third upload on Arden's channel after the first two videos I posted. In it, there's a completely different man calling himself Arden Lawrence and claiming to have made the original Mario artworks, the inspiration of which was induced by marijuana. It makes less sense that a reupload of the first video was uploaded right after this one.

The videos uploaded after this and the reupload of the first video are what I presume to be just some local boxing videos. But there you have it, either Arden Lawrence really is Mario's true creator and the video above is just a joke, or this is one of the best trolls on YouTube.