How a joke changed the Super Mario's Penguin for one occurence.
Chloris chloris ludis
When it all began in 1996, a baby Penguin had to find his mum in one of the famous Super Mario 64 missions. Once he's found, the player receives the grand prize - a collectible star. But the player can be dishonest and throw the baby penguin off Cold Cold Mountain, the name of the level. This is something that almost everyone does (don’t say no !) , as it doesn't change the outcome of your quest: you can still take the star. This Penguin design would become a standard for future games on Nintendo 64 and beyond, still the same today, with a few exceptions, notably in Super Mario Galaxy where some Penguins have a more elaborate morphology.
In 2017, Nintendo decided to celebrate Mario's journey into uncharted territories in Super Mario Odyssey, the latest 3D Mario game to date, 21 years before our hero's first step into three dimensions. More surprisingly, this game is also a celebration of birds. Each kingdom Mario visits is an opportunity to discover a new species of bird, more or less realistic (we will speak about it later). The Boneyard kingdom, for example, has a white bird with a hat on its head, while the Forest kingdom is a fairly good representation of the North American Blue Jay. Each bird has to be logically chosen in terms of its environment. And of course, penguins are reserved for a more snowy/icy theme.
But rather than keeping it identical to the previous 20 years, the character's artist, Akiko Hinno, came up with some very different ideas for the bird. Five designs were imaginated. One of the first was to keep it classic, fairly classic, like it was in Super Mario 64. The second was to retain the proportions of the bird seen in the game and make it more penguinish, a trick used by some games to reuse a model for several textures ( where the same model is applied to Crows, Seagulls and Pigeons in a same game,for example). The third was to break up the morphology so that the bird looked more like a snowman. But these two previous designs were eliminated from the race fairly quickly. Then came the idea of making it... realistic. Replace the blue plumage with black one, the large eyes with small dots and have a longer beak, but always to stick to the Super Mario Odyssey aesthetic. But also something special (and a bit off): making it fly.
Penguins belong to the Spheniscidae family, which includes all species. They are all native to the southern hemisphere, with the exception of one, the Galapagos Penguin, which is found above the equator, and all these birds are unable to fly. The only bird related to the Penguin (in a bad way) is the Razorbill, a seabird found along the coasts of Europe and Western America. And it flies. In France, we have a big problem with it. Because the word we use for Penguin is “Pingouin” and vice versa. That's why a lot of people make mistakes when they talk about these two types of birds yet. Akiko Hinno wanted to let this bird fly in the game for fun, as he had conceived of it in the Super Mario Odyssey artbook as “Something funny/surreal”. A thing that would survive until the game's release. In the end, Hinno couldn't choose between the classic design and real one, and decided to go with both, keeping the strange flying feature but re-adopting the traditional plumage of the series' Penguin in a more realistic morph, a more traditional looking penguin was dropped as a result.
