I've never heard that the character was "based on" Mario Segale, just named after him.
It is my dim recollection from reading Game Over by David Sheff many years ago that the incident when "Segale was said to have made an impression on his tenants when he allegedly stormed into Nintendo's offices in Tukwila, Wash., demanding they catch up on late rent" (as the NPR article writes) happened when they already had the Donkey Kong cabinets in their final form.
The article from Benj Edwards cited at the end of the NPR article says
> Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.
And that seams eminently plausible to me; that someone said to Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario's creator) "hey, they guys at the American office have started calling the character 'Mario' because he looks like our landlord who is named Mario" and Miyamoto ran with it.
It is my dim recollection from reading Game Over by David Sheff many years ago that the incident when "Segale was said to have made an impression on his tenants when he allegedly stormed into Nintendo's offices in Tukwila, Wash., demanding they catch up on late rent" (as the NPR article writes) happened when they already had the Donkey Kong cabinets in their final form.
The article from Benj Edwards cited at the end of the NPR article says
> Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.
And that seams eminently plausible to me; that someone said to Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario's creator) "hey, they guys at the American office have started calling the character 'Mario' because he looks like our landlord who is named Mario" and Miyamoto ran with it.