They are called Goombas.
"A 'chestnut' in Japanese is 'Kuri,'" Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto told video game website Eurogamer in an interview. "Which is why the name 'Kuriboh,' which is 'goomba' in Japanese, came about." So, why the word for chestnut when goombas are "evil mushrooms?" One hilariously simple reason:
"The original drawing I had was a black mushroom. And so a programmer started saying, 'It's a chestnut, it's a chestnut.'" Apparently Miyamoto's drawing wasn't clear enough, or the programmer in question had never seen a black mushroom before. Either way, "kuri" — the Japanese word for "chestnut" — quickly turned into "kuriboh," a Japanese affectation of the word for "chestnut."
Learn how to draw a Goomba from Nintendo's Super Mario video games with this step-by-step tutorial and video shared by Easydrawingtutorials.com.
Super Mario Bros. for old school Nintendo was released on September 13, 1985. So, in honor of the video game that changed the world, here the etymologies of the names of several of the major players in the Mario universe shared by 11points.com.