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Nintendo and Acquire brainstormed over 100 possible names for Mario & Luigi: Brothership

Posted on December 29, 2024 by (@NE_Brian) in News, Switch

Mario & Luigi Brothership name

December 5: The Mario & Luigi: Brothership name has been well-received by fans, but it seems that it wasn’t an easy process to get there.

Associate producer Tomoki Fukushima and producer Akira Otani spoke about this in a new interview published today. It turns out that Nintendo and Acquire brainstormed over 100 possible names for Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Also shared is that both the west and Japan are using the same title for the first time.

Fukushima and Otani noted:

Fukushima: The subtitle for this game is “Brothership”. We decided on this after brainstorming over 100 options with Acquire. I think it fits the game’s theme perfectly. It refers to their bond of brotherhood, but incorporates the word “ship” from Shipshape Island, which connects the various islands.

Otani: Until now, the Japanese and English game titles in the Mario & Luigi series have had different names, but for this game, we decided to go with “Brothership” for both.

Fukushima: It was also well received by our North American and European colleagues because, in English, it also sounds like a play on the word “mothership”. It’s fair to say that your base, Shipshape Island, is a mothership.

Thanks to Nintendo for the news above. It was also revealed yesterday that the Big N considered giving up on the series, which you can read about here.


December 29: Otani spoke more about this in an interview with Nintendo Dream. Interestingly, the team wanted to call the game Mario & Luigi Wonder. However, things changed once Super Mario Bros. Wonder came around.

Otani shared the following in that interview:

Actually, I wanted to add “Wonder” to the name at first. Like “Mario & Luigi Wonder”. But while we were making it, Super Mario Bros. Wonder came out first, so we couldn’t use that (laughs).

So Nintendo and Acquire came up with a lot of ideas, and in the end, one of the candidates from Acquire was “Brothership”. The word “ship” means, of course, a ship, and this refers to the brothers’ base, the ship island. It’s also used as a word to mean friendship, like “friendship”.

So if it’s about the bond between brothers, then it’s Brothership, and it has a double meaning, and I thought, “This is it!” It really fit perfectly, and although the title usually changes when it’s released in North America or Europe, this time it’s the same title.

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