This amazing Nintendo “Character” style guide was discovered by the blog “Press the Buttons.” From both a retro gaming point of view and a design point of view this is an absolutely amazing document.
The document starts by describing Mario’s personality traits. This almost reads like a modern UX persona, with more detail. It even goes into Mario’s preferred music! It continues to the specific colors and relative sizes of the characters in the Mario universe as it was at that point. It then goes into other Nintendo characters, even more obscure ones like Pauline.
Honestly, this is a great document from both a design perspective and from a video game enthusiast perspective. It has good ideas or designers now, as well as just being straight up interesting. I haightly recommend taking a look.