Nintendo Shot Down Mario & Luigi Dev’s Attempt At a Sexy Mario

We were all shocked to see the announcement of Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Even more surprising, developer Acquire originally had plans to create a sexy Mario design for the latest Mario & Luigi title.

This insight into what we lost as a collective gaming society was published in a Ask the Developer interview on the official Nintendo website (via VGC). Designer Hitomi Furuta, when asked about creating a unique style for the game, admitted, “I’m ashamed to say it, but we weren’t conscious of that when development started, which led to us making a huge detour. And in our search for a new Mario & Luigi style, at one point we ended up trying to present an edgier, more rugged Mario instead… (Laughs).”

Looking at the concept art, it is clear we were denied a dashing, dare I say hot, Mario, complete with a cape and rain boots. These pictures offer a glimpse at a version of the Mario Bros. that depicts them as battle-hardened and dirty. Certainly a unique vision of the characters we haven’t seen in quite some time.

Furuta continued, “Then we received feedback from Nintendo that we should aim to make the art direction identifiable by fans as belonging to the Mario & Luigi series. After that, we were able to narrow down our focus to how we could combine two things: the appeal of illustrations featuring, for example, solid outlines and bold, black eyes, and the charm of pixel animations depicting the two characters moving around comically in all directions. I think that’s when we finally started to develop an art style that’s unique to this game.” Akira Otani, who is part of the Entertainment Planning & Development Department, then joked about the whole ordeal, saying, “Yeah, it’s like we’d unleashed Acquire into the wild…only to go chasing after them again.”

I am enjoying my time with Mario & Luigi: Brothership, but what could have been! Nintendo can be quite conservative with developers attempting to change up its design philosophies. Remember that interview where it was revealed developers could not modify Mario characters or create original characters that are related to the Mario universe for the Paper Mario series? That was quite disheartening!