Super Mario’s red hats are undoubtedly one of the hallmarks of the Nintendo character, but apparently only one of them is truly red. And you know something else? The shades change from game to game.
Waiting for news on the Super Mario film with Chris Pratt, who may show another shade of red for the hat again, a site specializing in curiosities about the mustachioed plumber had this formidable intuition and immediately verified it.
Using the classic Photoshop and identifying the shades on a hexadecimal basis, the one to be clear of the color palettes in HTML code, these users have established that so far there has been a single pure red for the character’s hat, and it is the one seen in Super Mario 64.
The reddest that Mario’s shirt and hat have ever been was in Super Mario 64, where they were the hex color FF0000, the purest red representable on a screen. All Mario sprites and models before and after this used various less pure shades of red. pic.twitter.com/BfPkZLrkCM
— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) March 8, 2022
The others are variations on the theme, let’s say so, in some cases linked to the technical limitations of the hardware on which they ran: see the red tending to brown of the original Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3.
The parenthesis of the liveliest red continued in Super Mario Sunshine, after which the developers opted for a sort of middle ground in Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World, darkening the color.
It remains to be seen if these variations are desired, and can be interpreted as a sort of Nintendo Easter egg , or if they are random changes, also and above all linked to different artistic needs from time to time.