Those who meme about Waluigi on the internet (Walumemers, if you will) have long held Waluigi’s victory crotch chop celebration from the first two Mario Strikers games in high regard, the ultimate display of the character’s perversion and crassness. Many over the years have wondered how such a raunchy animation got into the game, and now, in the same GameXplain interview where he talked about soccer platforming, former Next Level Games dev and director Mike Inglehart has opened up about it.
“The inspiration for that came from quite frankly like the shape – even though it’s a ‘V’, we thought it was a representation of part of the ‘W’, so that’s sort of his way of connecting into his first initial,” said Inglehart. Apparently the team imagined Waluigi as a bit “edgier” than Wario, who was more of a classic cartoon villain, Waluigi is more aberrant — both attack their sidekicks when things aren’t going well, but “Wario’s about self-loathing and Waluigi is about blame, and everybody else has done something wrong.” Inglehart and co. didn’t actually expect the chop to get through, but nobody at Nintendo said anything about it, so NLG just didn’t bring it up. And lo and behold, it now lives in infamy. He hopes it makes it into Battle League.
The key takeaway here is that game devs have been thinking hard about the depths of Waluigi’s psyche for far longer than internet memelords and conspiracy theorists. While we still wait for a proper Waluigi video game, Mario Strikers: Battle League releases June 10th.
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Written by Amelia Fruzzetti
A writer and Nintendo fan based in Seattle, Washington. When not working for NinWire, she can be found eating pasta, writing stories, and wondering about when Mother 3 is finally going to get an official localization.
