The voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, has received a Guinness World Record for doing exactly that. Martinet was presented with the Guinness World Record for the most video game voiceover performances as the same character. He has voiced Mario in 100 games as of the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Martinet, who began voicing Nintendo‘s Mario as far back as 1992, received the award earlier this week. The renowned voice over actor began voicing Mario at trade shows with a real-time facial capture rig known as MiRT (Mario in Real-Time) alongside another voice actor. Martinet’s debut game as Mario was Mario’s FUNdamentals, a 1995 Windows game developed by Interplay. However, most people were introduced to Martinet’s Mario with Super Mario 64 in 1996. Martinet has voiced Mario in all versions of every Mario game since, and his English-language voiceover is even used in the Japanese versions of the game.
Martinet’s appearance as Mario in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate marks his 100th in the role. He received the Guinness World Record earlier this week, and appeared on an episode of the Guinness World Records “Gamer’s Podcast” as well.
Martinet also voices Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, and several other Super Mario characters across a wide range of Nintendo’s titles. He has also voiced non-Nintendo characters including Paarthunax in Skyrim, Orvus in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, and appears as himself in Runner3.
His high-pitched, squeaky Mario voice is a sharp contrast to early Super Mario material. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show saw Mario with a more typical Brooklyn New York accent in a deep voice. Martinet transformed the character, and imbued new personality into the many denizens of Mushroom Kingdom since the early 1990s.
Martinet began voice acting in 1986 after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley where he was studying international law. He started pursuing acting after leaving school, and landed the job of a lifetime with Nintendo in 1990. As Martinet tells it, he was originally going to play Mario similar to his appearances in the Super Show cartoon. He ended up going for something similar to Gremio from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, playing Mario as a “mama mia, nice ol’ Italian guy” instead. The casting director he read for loved it, and Martinet has voiced Mario ever since.
