Mario was supposed to look wrecked in Brothership, but Nintendo was like ‘nah’

Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the long-awaited revival of the Mario & Luigi series released for Nintendo Switch in early November, did not reinvent the wheel. For the team at Nintendo and the studio behind the game, Acquire, that was kind of the goal.

In a multi-part interview conducted by Nintendo itself, producers and developers from both teams explained their ultimate goal for Brothership: to link up with the design legacy of the franchise while delivering a snazzy installment that could “keep up with hardware advancements.” Nintendo recruited Acquire after the success of Octopath Traveler, hoping the studio could bring its prowess in the 3D space.

But one thing Acquire wasn’t allowed to do: make Mario rugged.

When asked about the challenges of blending 3D visuals with the art style of Mario & Luigi games, Acquire designer Hitomi Furuta told Nintendo that at first the assignment seemed simple — until it wasn’t. The studio didn’t want its Mario to look like other 3D versions of the character, so the team went in a totally new direction. Nintendo didn’t care for it. Here’s Furuta:

Our challenge was to develop 3D visuals that would bring out the unique appeal of the Mario & Luigi series and differentiate it from other Mario games. 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) 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.

According to Nintendo producer Akira Otani, the company reviewed Acquire’s designs for Rugged Mario and ultimately, “they gave the impression of something different that just resembled Mario.” I would assume the impression was “this guy fucks.”

While Mario has been rendered in a number of styles of the years — pixels, paper, ass-less — Nintendo is notoriously protective of the overalls-wearing plumber, and were ready to rein in Acquire despite adoring the company’s creative energy. Acquire director Haruyuki Ohashi admits in the interview that the studio had rarely worked with other companies’ IP before Brothership, and that the push to do something new in the 3D space ultimately went too far. Or as Otani frankly puts it, “we’d unleashed Acquire into the wild…only to go chasing after them again.”

Acquire landed on a hyper-cartoonish style that fits the legacy of Mario & Luigi, and the entire interview is a fascinating look at the long road to landing in the middle-ground between eye-popping and brand safe. But I think we can all agree Rugged Mario deserved a chance to thrive. Nintendo and Acquire chased Game of the Year when Mario could have been out here bagging People’s Sexiest Man Alive.