There has long been a fight between Nintendo and their fans over one particular character and whether he can be lent his own vehicle. No personality in video games has more disciples arguing that they deserve a game, and not getting their wish, than Waluigi. He's this total anomaly: he's appeared in 62 titles and yet hasn't become as much as a sidekick in a mainline Mario entry. He didn't even bag one of the 80 slots in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's roster. Wario's frog-legged brother has the unenviable honour of existing in no man's land between being famous enough to merit his own game and being obscure enough to fade into the background. And the Waluigi cheerleaders only seem to be getting more vocal. So, would a Waluigi game please the masses? Could it ever exist? And if so, why doesn't it already?
One thing that's weird about hearing so many people declare themselves a fan of this character is that I'm not sure there's much of a character there. And that would seem to be a barrier to him getting his moment in the limelight. Reflect on what we can tell about Waluigi from the media he appears in. We know he is villainous and that he's in cahoots with Wario. His animations in his later appearances suggest that he's a romantic, although without an object for his romance. And that's all we have to go on for the guy. Sports and racing are Waluigi's home genres: formats that sideline plot and characterisation, making him more of a symbol than a person.
A semi-comedic essay from The Empty Page argues that Waluigi is a postmodern non-character because he only exists in reference to others. If Waluigi is part-Luigi and part-Wario, then what bit of him is himself? His personality isn't even an amalgamation of those two characters as much as it is a combination of select parts from them. Waluigi might have Wario's underhandedness and Luigi's knack for going ignored, but where is Wario's greed or Luigi's cowardice? And the games describe his relationship with Wario as unclear.[2][3]
Even the inception of Waluigi feels empty. I'd bet that if you're reading this, you know that his first appearance was in Camelot Software's Mario Tennis, released in 2000. Doubles matches are a mainstay of tennis, yet Luigi and Wario, two of Mario's most memorable faces, lacked an adversary and a partner for this mode, respectively. Camelot invented Waluigi to fulfil both roles, and so, linked him more closely to this multiplayer format than any other game structure. Yet, Waluigi's existence also breaks the logic of Mario Tennis's casting.
The point of an ensemble game like a Sonic All-Stars Racing, or a Fortune Street, or a Mario Tennis, is that you get to control and compete against recognisable characters as you all play the same game. The selection menus of these titles are a whos-who from the core entries in their respective series. You see this in Mario Tennis as the software allows you to pick from Mushroom Kingdom regulars like Mario, Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Peach. Which makes Waluigi an odd fit: he is an original character in a best-of lineup.
It's like if Nintendo announced that the next character they're adding to Smash Bros. will be a little guy you'd never seen before called Birby, who is like Kirby but taller and distinguished by other traits that are never fully explained. That is Waluigi. Waluigi is Birby. And when he was born into Mario Tennis, it cemented him as an iconic and useful seat filler for the Mario side projects. This origin story explains how he could show up in more than 62 games and yet never find one of this own. Like Donkey Kong's history binds Donkey to the platformer genre, and Link's background places him squarely in the open-world action-adventure, Waluigi is married to sports and party titles. At this point, if he did appear in a central Mario game, that would be more of a spin-off than his appearances in spin-offs.
Because Waluigi's character is opaque, it also becomes unclear how you'd theme a game around him. Luigi's Mansion takes advantage of Luigi's fearfulness, Donkey Kong Country fits Donkey Kong's status as a beast of the jungle, but what would the Waluigi game be? I've heard plenty of followers of this Angry Agassi say they want a Waluigi vanity project, but there's no agreement about what that would entail. From Nintendo's perspective, you can see how the ambiguity of Waluigi would dissuade them from placing him in a starring role.
If you want an anti-hero or villain, there are more established and popular options like Bowser, Wario, or Bowser Jr. In some cases, more obscure characters like King Boo and Fawful are also appropriate. And while Nintendo designed every other character you see in their spin-offs with a mainline application in mind, there was never a plan for where Waluigi would live off the court. Maybe Nintendo also hasn't been very fond of the Mario family's distant cousin because they adopted him from Camelot; he is not their own blood.
Waluigi's debut as a Mario Tennis character describes why he's almost a blank slate and lets us suggest some hypotheticals for why Nintendo might pass over him when looking for new game ideas. However, there's no conclusive reason here that Waluigi can't get a title in his name. Okay, you'll never theme a game around the figure we know as Waluigi because his personality is undercooked. It also makes sense that the purple Pagliacci doesn't have much individuality because he's a pointer to Luigi and Wario. But I'm not satisfied leaving the explanation for why Waluigi exists at "Wario needed a doubles partner". Saying that Waluigi is a mash-up of Wario and Luigi stops well short of where it should because it doesn't elaborate on how we got Luigi or Wario. And when you start investigating those characters, you end up with a refreshing new perspective on Waluigi.
Like many early game characters, Luigi had a design highly constrained by the technology of the era. We can first see the Luigi we know in the 1983 Mario Bros. arcade game. At the time, software engineers didn't have the fancy illustration tools they do now, so implementing any character was an intensive process. Early game carts and circuit boards also offered only a thimble full of memory, meaning that you couldn't implement a wide gallery of characters. A solution to this problem came in computers' exceptional aptitude at replicating data. Engineers could copy existing character "sprites" but fill them in with different colours. These "palette swaps" created the impression of new entities. Such transformations were necessary when developing two-player games. The characters had to be distinguished so that neither player would confuse their avatar for the other's.
Therefore, when building Mario Bros. for arcade, the programmers took Mario, changed his red and blue clothes for green and black ones, and presto, Luigi was born. Mario got a colleague to clean out the sewers with in a way that conserved development resources and memory. Because different players of the same game generally perform similar tasks, it has often been appropriate, regardless of era, to create characters with similarities to justify their comparable behaviour. Or, flipped on its head, players can conclude that if two entities look the same, they will perform the same function in the game's systems. Mario and Luigi look like each other, which lets you know they can both run, jump, and kick enemies off the screen. The game explains their identical experience and movesets by saying that they are brothers.
Technical necessity and the logic of play shaped the design of characters like Luigi or Ms. Pacman, and the eruptive popularity of these mirror characters created a precedent for video games going forwards. It cast a cultural ripple, which meant that even once video games were computationally capable of distinguishing their characters, developers still had cultural and narrative reasons to make those characters similar. This held even in cases where there was no gameplay incentive for them to do so.
We can see this with Skarlet from Mortal Kombat. She exists in a lineage of palette swapped Mortal Kombat characters modelled on the same sprite. By Ultimate Mortal Kombat III, there existed three different female characters who were all colour variations of the same underlying image. Mileena, Kitana, and Jade were all pink, blue, and green versions of each other, respectively. Skarlet is their red counterpart. She doesn't have to borrow their design for gameplay reasons as she has a unique moveset. She also doesn't need to exist in their image for hardware reasons: she debuted in 2011, whereas Mileena and co. were all created no later than 1995. Memory and processing power in Skarlet's time was far more abundant. However, Skarlet appears as she does because she is matching a stylistic trend in Mortal Kombat that was established by the development realities of the early to mid-90s.
The same principle applies to Wario, who first appears in Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins for the Gameboy. Developed almost a decade after the original Mario Bros. and executing on a console that doesn't have to worry about colour, Super Mario Land 2 has a far upgraded potential for storing and drawing unique sprites. So, the developers didn't have to make the antagonist look anything like Mario. A number of unique antagonists had already appeared in Super Mario Bros. 2, seven years earlier.
Yet, the game's final boss is not a wholly original character. Like Skarlet, he is a skew of existing ones. Where Skarlet was an extension of older characters, Wario is a perversion of one. The development team piecing together Mario Land 2 resented creating a game starring someone else's protagonist rather than one of their own. They got their revenge by designing the game's villain as a parody or satire of Mario. Wario is like his do-gooder cousin but with all the wrong features exaggerated.
He has the overalls and name logo hat, but because Mario collects coins, the greedy Wario hoards gold. Where Mario has a finely-groomed moustache, Wario's is crooked and villainous. Where Mario has a soft, rotund figure, the developers of Mario Land 2 depict Wario as more decidedly fat.
Both Luigi and Wario also exist within a history of inverting and cloning characters which long predates video games. You can see the slightly-altered counterpart dynamic with characters such as Minnie Mouse (1928), The Hardy Boys (1927), or Hansel and Gretel (first published 1812). If you want to go ancient, think about Hinduism's Yama and Yami or the Greeks' Prometheus and Epimetheus.
For evil counterparts, look at Bizarro, the corrupt mirror of Superman, who first appeared in 1958. In the 1937 Dick Tracy films, the protagonist detective fought an evil twin version of himself warped by scientists. Dr. Jekyll and his twisted alter-ego, Mr. Hyde, first appeared in an 1886 novel. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw these shadow figures everywhere in mythology, and today we can see ancient examples like the Anti-Christ of Christianity or the Siddhe of Celtic religion. What is Wario but Bizzaro Mario, anti-Mario? If you need examples of characters created as satires of other people, think about Sterling Archer satirising James Bond (2009), Adenoid Hynkel standing in for Adolf Hitler (1940), or the countless characters in Orwell's Animal Farm that lampoon early 20th-century Russian political figures (1945).
We now have an explanation for the existence of Waluigi that goes beyond "Camelot needed someone to stand next to bad Mario and hold a racket". Waluigi exists within a historical context of people creating friendly, evil, and parodic counterparts for existing characters. This trend is especially pronounced in video games due to founding entries in the medium requiring and being able to copy existing elements for technical reasons. Once we associate Waluigi with a broader movement of replicating and subverting characters, his existence as a reference to others feels less of a hindrance.
Characters like Hynkel or Hyde are not compelling despite being reimaginings of other figures, but because of it. I can even think of an example of a mirror-mirror character like Waluigi captivating fans. In one version of the Spider-Man universe, the character Gwen Stacey fights crime under the alias of Spider-Woman. Another classic character of the same books is the Venom symbiote, a malevolent organism that takes over prey and uses them for its destructive ends. Venom usually appears as a muscle-bound, black variation of Spider-Man. In one plot arc, the Venom symbiote takes over Gwen Stacey, creating a composite character called Gwenom. This storyline was well-received by the Marvel audience.
Both the Mario series and Spider-Man took a beloved protagonist (Mario/Spider-Man), and gave them both a good guy counterpart (Luigi/Spider-Woman) and a bad guy spin-off (Wario/Venom). They then combined their good and bad guy clones into a new character (Waluigi/Gwenom). Of course, there's a difference between many of the successful mirror characters I've mentioned, like Gwenom, and Nintendo's most neglected boy, Waluigi. The former were painstakingly chiselled into refined narrative sculptures, and Waluigi is still mostly a lump of marble. But I think that to Waluigi's fans, the ambiguity is part of the point. Not only does it let us project our ideals of what Waluigi and his game would be onto them, but it also encourages us to celebrate Waluigi for the same reason we do Mario.
Do people worldwide love Mario because he is "well-written"? No. He is better-defined than Waluigi. For example, we know he eats mushrooms, is romantically linked to Princess Peach, is a hero of his kingdom, and is Luigi's brother. However, there is very little Mario dialogue or essential canon in existence. And that's not a handicap to Mario: the character's generality allows him to appeal to people across cultural and age boundaries. In addition, it permits Nintendo to retool him for their current purposes easily. It's the same broad appeal you see with Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. While Waluigi is not as well aesthetically defined as these icons, for his fans, he functions similarly. His thoughts, feelings, and personal history are left unstated, making him appeal even to people who have divergent ideas about the kind of characters they prefer.
I also believe that video games can attach us to characters without using plot or characterisation: an ability that fiction-based media like films and books don't have. The play aspect of games makes it possible to become familiarised with characters, go on journeys with them, and invest in their success or failures without the conveyer of a conventional story. If this were not true, there's no way that there would be a cult following behind this veteran of cartoon party titles. But my point is not that Waluigi is a "great" character, nor ready for a starring role, just because there is a precedent for good mirror characters. All this history proves is that he is not excluded from being compelling to an audience because he is a copy of a copy.
However, if we want a Waluigi fit to be a protagonist, some of the characters we've already discussed indicate how he could get there because they've undergone that growth. The Mortal Kombat characters we studied started as not much more than palette swaps but eventually grew to have intensely complicated histories and fully voiced speech across multiple scripts. Check out some of their entries in the Mortal Kombat Wiki to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Many other gaming characters from the 80s and early 90s, who started as not much more than a sprite and a few verbs, have seen similar upward trajectories of characterisation since, like the original Street Fighter combatants or the eponymous Mega-Man.
But perhaps the best evidence that Waluigi could be more than he is is right under our nose. Luigi was once less than Waluigi, a lime-flavoured Mario, but artists did the work to develop him. Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) gave us a Luigi physically distinguished from Mario. In Mario Kart 64 (1996), Charles Martinet began his in-game performances as Luigi, with a lower, more nasally voice than Mario's. And while I've talked about Luigi's jumpiness as an aspect of his demeanour, that didn't really exist until Luigi's Mansion (2001), while his annoyance at being overshadowed by his brother came in with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2003).
Other Mario alums also went through a process of ad-hoc characterisation. Peach wasn't as melodramatic before Super Princess Peach (2005). Toad wasn't known as an explorer before Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (2018). In Nintendo's popular characters, we can see that this idea that Waluigi needs to be a sharply defined character before he can get his own game is backwards. It's frequently appearing in the game, which creates a need for characterisation, not the other way around.
Nintendo, especially, tends to write characters and stories to behave however they need them to in the moment rather than establishing persistent characteristics and timelines. In one game, Mario is a doctor; in another, a fairy tale hero. On one adventure, Luigi is a scaredy-cat, but on another, just as brave as Mario. It's not all that unusual for the classic cartoon style that the series uses. Quoting Shigeru Miyamoto in a 2012 interview:
"If you're familiar with things like Popeye and some of the old comic characters, you would oftentimes see this cast of characters that takes on different roles depending on the comic or cartoon. They might be [a] businessman in one [cartoon] or a pirate in another. [...] So, to a certain degree, I look at our characters in a similar way and feel that they can take on different roles in different games. It's more like they're one big family, or maybe a troupe of actors".
Depending on your perspective, you may see the inconsistency of Mario's people and plots as choppy writing, or you may see it as a legitimate method for creating characters. Either way, it means that despite business and creative reasons that dissuade Nintendo from making a Waluigi game, they could if they wanted to. And if you think about it, every character, regardless of series or medium, is introduced in some original work. If you only dedicated fiction to a character once you decided that character was rich enough, no character would star in anything.
It's just worth remembering that if Nintendo does ever make the Waluigi game, that would be the point at which the Waluigi wave function collapses. The developer would have to make more definitive statements about who Waluigi is and what kind of adventures he would go on. That could constitute a fantasy becoming a reality or a disappointing clash between our idea of Waluigi and who Nintendo decide he is. Thanks for reading.
Notes
- Super Mario 256 Font by fsuarez913.
- Waluigi Trophy Text by HAL Laboratory (2001), Super Smash Bros. Melee.
- Waluigi Trophy Text by Sora Ltd. (2008), Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
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