Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 36 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 36th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

Today, I will explore a very surprising reference to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga found in WarioWare Gold.

Wario: Superstar Saga

WarioWare Gold was one of the last games released for the Nintendo 3DS, and in fact the last game developed even partially by Nintendo for the system. Despite this, a lot of effort and care was put into the game, with it being the only game in the extended Mario franchise (which for the purposes of Supper Mario Broth coverage consists of all Mario, Luigi, Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong games, as well as games centered on side characters from those franchises like Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker or Diddy Kong Racing) to feature full voice acting for all cutscenes.

The game contains 316 microgames, the largest amount of any WarioWare game to date; however, only 54 of them are truly new, with the rest being updated remakes of microgames from older entries in the series. One of these original microgames is "No Solicitors", found in the Wario introductory collection of the Mash League (microgames centering on pressing buttons, as opposed to using the touchscreen or tilting the system). Here is an animated .GIF of a single round of No Solicitors (video source):

The game is very simple. All the player has to do is keep pressing A rapidly for the duration of the microgame, which results in Wario keeping someone out of his home. On Level 1, it is a typical salesman, on Level 2, a Japanese oni demon, and on Level 3, a bear. Failing to mash fast enough will cause the door to be broken in.

But the gameplay and action is not the point of the article - the point is in the background of the microgame. Usually, WarioWare microgames have the most simplistic backgrounds possible; it is not unusual for them to use either a color gradient, some scribbles, a repetitive pattern, or even a flat solid color as a background, such that a full-color drawn background is actually the exception.

Let us take a look at the background as extracted from the files:

First, let us briefly talk about the right side, inside Wario's house. It depicts the design of the house found in most games in the series starting with WarioWare: Twisted:

Note the purple wall and the striped light and dark brown floorboards. Interestingly, the house in the actual story mode of WarioWare Gold looks different, so we can establish that the microgame deliberately references another game (unclear which exactly as several games use this design, but most likely WarioWare Twisted as only that game has dark blue outlines between the floorboards); a fact that I must ask you to keep in mind for the rest of the article. The mouse that can be seen in the footage above also debuts in that game:

Note also the mousehole in the center right of the image, which matches up roughly in shape with the one in WarioWare Gold. The mouse also later reappears in Game & Wario. However, the actual furniture in No Solicitors does not match up with any instance of Wario's house seen in the series. Wario's couch in this version of the house is always light brown, as seen in the first WarioWare: Twisted screenshot, and never blue. The lamp and painting also do not appear anywhere else.

Now, let us get to the actual point of the article: the left side of the background in No Solicitors - the outside of Wario's House. Without much ado, here is a screenshot from the opening of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, of Luigi hanging up laundry to dry outside of the Mario Bros.' house:

The resemblance is uncanny. Let us look at the similarities in detail. First, here are both images side by side for more convenient comparison:

First, we will look purely at the shapes of the objects, as we will examine the colors separately. Here are the commonalities between the scenes:
-The near background of the scenes is a field with a flat ground, trees with a mostly bare trunk that splits into three branches at the bottom of the foliage, and a simplistic fence made of posts with a pointy top, and horizontal segments between them.
-The far background of the scenes is a view of a forest stretching out into the distance, with the horizon being occupied by mountains with gentle slopes that are shaded simplistically on one side.
-The sky is a flat color with no gradients, and the clouds are small, separate simplistic shapes.
-The foliage of the trees is shaped roughly like a cone, and the way the leaves are stylized is with overlapping circular shapes.
-Every element of the No Solicitors background is present in the Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga background: the tree, the fence, the very short grass near the fence, the distant forest, the distanct mountains, and the small clouds. Even the flowers, although they are not visible in the comparison image, could be a direct reference. Take a look at the left side of the scene, showing the actual house:

While there are no flowers growing on the grass, there are flowers in decorative baskets around the entrance. And if you look very closely:

There is one flower in the basket that is a near exact match for the one in WarioWare Gold, being a simple yellow circle that is rendered as a 2x2 pixel yellow square with an outline. Of course this may be a coincidence, but a person who was deliberately copying the background may very well have picked this flower type specifically because it was already present in the background in a different context.

Now, on to the colors. Here are comparisons between the color palettes of various objects in the image, with the Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga ones being on the left, and the WarioWare Gold ones being on the right:

Note that this does not include the white color of the fences and the clouds as those are identical. Also note that the distant forest in No Solicitors appears to be using the palette of the distant lake from Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, and not its forest. 

Still, I hope this comparison in particular shows just how astronomically unlikely it is for this to be anything but a deliberate reference - some of the colors are nearly visually identical and may in fact have been color-dropped from a screenshot of the original game with slightly different color calibration. 

Now that we have established that this is with near certainty a reference to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, let us examine what this means. 

The most likely reason why this background was referenced is because of what location it depicts: Mario and Luigi's house. The designer likely wanted to draw a parallel between Wario's house and the Mario Bros.' house; perhaps even to suggest that they live close to each other (even though they are said to live in the Mushroom Kingdom and he is said to live in Diamond City - there is no actual official statement on how far Diamond City is from the Mushroom Kingdom, and it may in fact be very close). 

I think you may know why this reference is such a big deal that I am writing this article, however: it is not because one game referenced another - that happens very frequently in the Mario series. It is because Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is not in what I will call "the pool of common Mario series references".

The only games that have referenced Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga in any capacity can be split into three groups:
-games in the Mario & Luigi series, for obvious reasons;
-games in the Super Smash Bros. series, as those simply aggregate content from across all Nintendo games, and their degree of "reference" to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is limited to including official art from the game, i.e. extremely nominal (this also counts Nintendo Badge Arcade for the same reason);
-and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

However, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door's reference to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga were not intended by the developers, and only added in by the localization team at Nintendo Treehouse. There are two: a bottle of Chuckola Cola, and Bowser calling himself a "Shadow Thief", referencing Popple; however, in the original Japanese, the Chuckola Cola in the Mario & Luigi series and the one in the Paper Mario series are two different drinks with different names, and Bowser does not call himself the Shadow Thief. As such, the actual developers did not actually reference anything; which is in stark contrast to what we have here in WarioWare Gold.

In fact, we can state that WarioWare Gold is the only game outside the Mario & Luigi series that references Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga with new content, rather than just reusing preexisting content, which is extremely notable.

Now, here is the big question: who is responsible?

The Mario & Luigi series was developed by AlphaDream before its closure in 2019. The WarioWare series is being developed by Intelligent Systems in collaboration with Nintendo and TOSE, with no overlap with AlphaDream. I took it upon myself to very closely cross-reference the credits of the two games to see if anyone who had previously worked at AlphaDream had switched over to any other company and worked on WarioWare Gold.

Unfortunately, despite an exhaustive search, I found that no pertinent staff member (anyone outside voice actors, localization teams, and high-level producers) is shared between the two games. However, I did not give up just yet. Just one year prior to WarioWare Gold, a remake of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, called Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions, was released for the Nintendo 3DS. Of course, the area in question was completely redesigned in that version:

Still, obviously the staff of a remake would have been intimately familiar with the source game given how their entire job was playing it and reconstructing it from scratch. As such, I cross-referenced the remake staff with the staff of WarioWare Gold, and found a match:

Tsuyoshi Watanabe is listed as a Character Supervisor on Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions, and under the Special Thanks section in WarioWare Gold.

Of course, a Character Supervisor is not usually expected to deal with backgrounds, and "Special Thanks" is a frustratingly vague credit that could be used for literally anything imaginable from "moral support" to major creative decisions. So, I decided to look at other games Tsuyoshi Watanabe was credited in:

Tsuyoshi Watanabe is listed as a character supervisor in many games, such as New Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Princess Peach, Dr. Mario Online RX, Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, and many more. He is also listed as a Graphics Supervisor in Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, Mario Party 8, Mario Superstar Baseball etc., including most games in the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series (but not the original release of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga). As the only visible link between Mario & Luigi and WarioWare: Gold, he could be the one responsible, although I highly doubt it. It appears to me that his role is to supervise correct usage of Nintendo-approved models and graphics, and given how Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga seems to mostly exist only in its own series, it is unlikely he would have suggested referencing it.

Another possible explanation is TOSE. TOSE Software Co. is a company that helped develop WarioWare Gold and is mostly known for being credited in Super Princess Peach, the Game & Watch Gallery series, and later Paper Mario games, as well as the Legendary Starfy series. However, note that I said "being credited". TOSE is very peculiar about denying being credited in most of its games, preferring to only assist some "publicly facing" team and not actually take any credit, leaving their full involvement completely unknown. They are believed to have contributed to over 1000 games, many of them Nintendo games, but it is impossible to find out which and to what extent due to their strong secrecy.

It is possible that a former employee of AlphaDream switched to working for TOSE and put in the Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga reference without asking anyone for permission or being credited; and due to it being so obscure, no one caught it. While this is complete speculation and is neither based on anything but the most circumstancial facts, nor is ever likely to be resolved, it is what I personally believe to be the most likely explanation. Please let me know if you have theories of your own!

Finally, there is the matter of who first discovered this reference. I am very saddened to say that although I have noticed the reference in 2019 while watching gameplay, I merely set it aside in my folder as I believed I would not be able to prove it to my readers and the post would be regarded as speculation. I believed I was the only one who noticed until I found that only a few months ago, a post was made on Spriter's Resource by a user named ChillyRoll (also a Twitch user) pointing this out. As I have no way of proving that I noticed it earlier, I understand that you may not believe me, and instead think that I simply took that user's observation. I hope that even if you do not believe I discovered it, the long-form view at the similarities had made this article worth reading; in addition, the other discoverer has been credited.

Thank you very much for reading.