The VG Resource

So I'm sure many of us in the pixel art community are familiar with developer AlphaDream for their Mario & Luigi RPG series (among other lesser-known titles). News broke this morning that they're in dire straights and have filed for bankruptcy following an accumulation of debt.


Word going around is that they spent a monumental amount of resources developing Mario & Luigi: Dream Team for Nintendo 3DS, and when it fell flat in sales, Nintendo put the nails to them to become more profitable. While I can't say with any kind of authority, I imagine that's why the style never deviated on their 3DS releases, and why we got so many remakes near the end of their life.


My personal feelings are that while I don't care much for their 3DS output, they were still an incredibly talented studio. Regardless of my thoughts on the stylistic change from Bowser's Inside Story to Dream Team, you can see they poured an incredible amount of art into the transition, and their games always felt polished in terms of how they played. This wasn't some rag tag developer popping out games, they were unbelievably competent. It's a shame that employees will likely be spread to the winds now.

I thought it was a little odd that they stopped making Mario & Luigi games with new storylines. This is really sad news.

Hopefully Nintendo will be able to buy AlphaDream out of their bankruptcy (is that possible?) or at least hire the employees so they can keep their jobs.

Apparently Nintendo now owns the rights to the series. Hopefully they hire the ex-AD employees and nothing changes other than the series being fully under Nintendo's wing, maybe we can even see characters like Fawful show up in the other spinoffs like Mario Kart, as I feel it always should've been.

What's especially sickening though is some Paper Mario fans have been celebrating this news, thinking if M&L dies Paper Mario can come back. Now don't get me wrong I LOVE Paper Mario, have pushed notably hard for it to go back to the glory of the first 3 games and can't stand where that series is now. But to think this will have any effect on that, or to even hope it does, is frankly delusional and insensitive. The only basis that idea even has is the GameXplain interview with Risa Tabata where she was asked about returning to the RPG roots. But she had very little experience with Paper Mario and was really not the right person to answer those questions. She also promised a TTYD remake with enough demand but I sure don't see that, despite the demand very much being met. Point is, it's stupid to take what she said as word of god, as she was put on the spot. Paper Mario's situation has nothing to do with M&L, and killing off M&L won't magically bring back Paper Mario. And even if it did, it's insensitive to celebrate that.

I only hope 2 things in light of this: the AlphaDream team gets hired by Nintendo to continue working on the series, and Nintendo takes advantage of having the M&L characters as first party Mario characters.