In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Tanooki Suit could make Mario fly. For years people have questioned... why?

One of the more obscurely interesting topics to crop up during Nintendo's E3 developer roundtable last week was Mario's iconic Tanooki Suit first seen in Super Mario Bros. 3. A curious power-up, the Tanooki Suit gave Mario a full-body fur coat, bushy tail and the ability to fly. It returns in Super Mario 3DS later this year, but without the ability of full flight. Producer Yoshiaki Koizumi explained the reasons behind this decision.

"So it's true that Mario was able to fly with the Tanooki suit in past games, but there was also, I believe, a form that had a tail and ears but couldn't fly? And one of the reasons that we decided to go with the "Raccoon" Mario style in this game is that flying does present some interesting issues in three dimensions. You do have the slow fall, which makes certain types of gameplay more accessible, but having the character fly in 3D on the smaller 3DS screen would have been a little bit difficult. So we decided to bend the rules of the Mario world [on the 3DS] and solve that problem."

The Tanooki Suit makes its debut in Super Mario Bros. 3. No-one understood it then either.

But perhaps an even more pressing question is: why can this bizarre suit make Mario fly in the first place? Thankfully, veteran Nintendo designer Takashi Tezuka was on-hand to not beat around the bush explaining the thought process behind his famous creation.

"So actually the idea for the Tanooki suit came originally from wanting to put a tail on Mario, and so we started off by putting a tail on Mario in Super Mario Bros. 3 and we wanted to use that tail so he could do the little spin move and hit enemies with his tail, as sort of an attack. But then, once we had the tail on Mario, we thought: We've got this great tail. Isn't there something else that we can do with it? So, then the next thing we started to do was to have the tail kind of flutter back and forth, and we thought that that's kind of like a propeller, so that flutter motion would make Mario a little bit lighter, so he could jump further. But once we started doing that, it felt so good that we said; 'let's just make him fly'."

Ironically, Nintendo have otherwise been sorely lacking when it comes to making the most out of Mario's existing features, as we still await a fully-fledged moustache-maintenance simulator with high-end graphics and authentic motion controls.