Mario is named after the landlord of Nintendo's warehouse

—And why is he called Mario? —a kid from a secondary school in Pola de Siero asked me, standing in front of a case of Roman coins that had nothing to do with it.

They always ask me that at the museum, and never about the coins. The question stuck with me between that group and the next, and I ended up looking it up with my phone propped against the glass of the case.

Mario is called Mario because of a man from Tukwila, south of Seattle, who built and rented out warehouses and could not have cared less about video games: Mario Segale.

In the early 80s Nintendo wanted to sell machines in the United States and needed somewhere to put them. Segale rented them a 60,000-square-foot warehouse, about 5,600 square metres: my whole school playground with the sports hall next to it. That is where they set up their American head office. The character was not called Mario yet. He was Jumpman, “the one who jumps”, and in that game he was a carpenter, not a plumber. The wrench and the pipes came later.

The scene everybody tells is in “Game Over”, the book David Sheff published in 1993: the Nintendo people going round in circles over the name, somebody knocking at the door, and it was the landlord, come for the rent they had not paid in months. The moment he left, Sheff writes, they had their name.

Sheff was not there. Don James was, the man who ran the warehouse, and in 2012 he told another version on a podcast: that he and Minoru Arakawa named the character Mario as a joke, and that the joke worked precisely because Segale kept so much to himself that none of the people working in the warehouse had ever met him. Neither version can be proved, and I go with the warehouse manager's, because christening a character after somebody you have never laid eyes on is far stranger and far more like an office.

The big thing is confirmed, and you can watch it. In 2015, for the character's 30th anniversary, Nintendo UK put a video on its channel called “Mario Myths with Mr. Miyamoto” to promote Super Mario Maker. They throw myths at him and he says whether they are true or false. When they ask him whether Mario is the landlord of the warehouse, Shigeru Miyamoto nods. He does not say a word. He nods.

Segale got nothing out of it and he was not after it either. In 1993 a reporter from The Seattle Times asked him and he answered that you might say he was still waiting for his royalty cheques. Then he carried on with his warehouses in Tukwila. When he died, on 27 October 2018, aged 84, his obituary said he had always ducked the fame and wanted to be remembered for what he did with his life.

Between the line about the cheques and the day Miyamoto nodded, 22 years went by, and three more until the funeral. Cheques, none.