This digital puppetry, with Martinet's comic performance, was a novelty at the time. Martinet could see the attendees by means of a hidden camera setup, and a facial motion capture rig recorded his mouth movements in order to synchronize Martinet's mouth movement with the on-screen Mario mouth movement. This system was called Mario in Real-Time or MIRT and was developed by Pasadena based SimGraphics. Working for Nintendo since 1990, Martinet started voicing Mario at video game trade shows in which attendees would walk up to a TV screen displaying a 3-D Mario head that moved around the screen and talked. He went on to become a founding member of the San Jose Repertory Theatre for four years. Upon returning to California he joined the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. After training with the Berkeley Rep for several years, Martinet went to London to attend the Drama Studio London, where among other skills, he discovered his talent for accents and dialects. Eventually, Martinet earned an apprenticeship at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. His first role was a monologue from the Spoon River Anthology. A friend suggested to him to take acting classes to combat his fear of public speaking. In his senior year he decided to discontinue his studies after a tutor told him to 'regurgitate information he'd written in his book, chapter-by-chapter'. Martinet attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he originally intended to study international law. He attended the American School of Paris and graduated in 1974. His family moved to Barcelona when he was 12 years old, and later to Paris.

Martinet is of French descent and speaks fluent French and Spanish.

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