Summary
- What we now know as Mario & Luigi: Brothership was actually set to be called something else entirely.
- According to an interview, Acquire had proposed Mario & Luigi: Wonder.
- Of course, Super Mario Bros. Wonder took the title, and eventually Brothership was decided on.
While 2024 was a somewhat quieter year when it came to Nintendo releases, compared to the monster that was 2023, there were still some notable highlights. Among the games released in 2024 included remasters of Mario vs. Donkey Kong and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, along with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Super Mario Party Jamboree and Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
The latter represented the most recent entry in the RPG offshoot of everyone’s favorite plumbers. It also marked the first game in the series since 2018, and the first true entry since 2013. In other words, it was a long time coming.
That said, while we know it now as Brothership, there was a period of time when the game was planning to be released as something else entirely. That is until Nintendo stepped in.
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We Wonder What Happened
As first spotted by Nintendo Life, developer Acquire wasn’t originally planning on Mario & Luigi: Brothership, to be called exactly that. In fact, it was going to be named Mario & Luigi: Wonder. In an interview, producer Akira Otani shared just what happened to the original title and how Brothership eventually came to be.
“Actually, I wanted to add ‘Wonder’ to the name at first,” he revealed. “Like ‘Mario & Luigi Wonder.’ But while we were making it, Super Mario Bros. Wonder came out first, so we couldn’t use that.”
As it turns out, Brothership was a far more fitting title, according to Otani.
“So Nintendo and Acquire came up with a lot of ideas, and in the end, one of the candidates from Acquire was ‘Brothership,'” he revealed. “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.'”
And so Brothership was born and eventually released, with Otani noting the double meaning. “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!'”
While things did work out in the end, it would be pretty interesting to live in a world where it was Mario & Luigi: Wonder. That would also mean Super Mario Bros. Wonder would have to be something else, which is equally fascinating.
