Nintendo “considered giving up” on the Mario & Luigi series

Nintendo has opened up about finally bringing back the Mario & Luigi series with an original installment after nearly a decade, which happened with Brothership.

Producer Akira Otani revealed in a just-published interview that there were various discussions about continuing the franchise following Paper Jam, but “needed to aim for something new that would keep up with hardware advancements while maintaining the appeal of the classic Mario & Luigi games.” After not being able to accomplish this, Nintendo “thought it might not be possible to make any more games in the series and considered giving up.” But after reaching out to Acquire, things progressed from there and that led to Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

Below are Otani’s full words:

Of course, for a long time, we’d been having a number of internal discussions about a new installment in the series following Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. We needed to aim for something new that would keep up with hardware advancements while maintaining the appeal of the classic Mario & Luigi games. It wasn’t easy to achieve both at the same time… We kept trying various things, but there was a time when we thought it might not be possible to make any more games in the series and considered giving up.

There were a lot of discussions, and eventually we decided to reach out to Acquire. After speaking a number of times with Ohashi-san, I felt that Acquire might be able to realize our dream of making Mario & Luigi in 3D, so we agreed to start joint development.

Of course, it was also important to keep that “Mario & Luigi-like” feeling, so we also had some former AlphaDream staff members who were involved in the development of previous titles in the series join the project.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership just launched on Nintendo Switch last month. Find more coverage here.