Nintendo announced on Twitter that Charles Martinet, 67, would become a “Mario Ambassador,” rather than the iconic voice of the character.
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That headline scared me for a second! But wow. What a legacy! Such a great dude.
Please lord don’t let Crisp Rat be the new voice.
Fun fact: Martinet was also the voice of Paarthurnax, one of the dragons in Skyrim.
Also, I can’t believe that Nintendo’s own tweet about this announcement got one of the facts wrong. They wrote:
Charles Martinet has been the original voice of Mario in Nintendo games for a long time, as far back as Super Mario 64.
He was actually the voice of Mario before Mario 64. His first official Mario role was in Mario Teaches Typing, which came out two years before Mario 64.
Can he be replaced with anybody but Chris Pratt?
My vote’s on the dug up corpse of Lou Albano. Or, failing that,a the dug up corpse of Bob Hoskins.
I loved the Super Mario Bros show as a kid! That’s the real voice of Mario for me, not the Mario 64 voice!
I believe Super Mario Wonder has Mario voiced by a new actor, and I don’t think it’s Chris Pratt
wowie
I wonder if Nintendo is considering training an AI voice model based on Martinet’s recordings or something. Are they advanced enough yet to do convincing wahoos? I can’t imagine another voice for Mario.
You say this like it hasn’t already happened.
Has it? I guess I shouldn’t have phrased it as though they’re just now considering their options. They’ve obviously planned for this.
Are they advanced enough yet to do convincing wahoos?
Doubtful. Nintendo isn’t even advanced enough to host a single gameplay server for any of their top multiplayer games. Charging money for access to a P2P-networked game mode is not only an insult to the players, but honestly ought to be illegal, but that’s another rant for another day.
I love Nintendo, but they really seem to be afraid of technology.
I was talking about voice models, not Nintendo. Nintendo could make use of AI if they wanted to. And saying they aren’t advanced enough is plain wrong. Whoever makes those decisions just isn’t willing to spend their resources on proper online infrastructure.
Normally you’d be right. But Nintendo is just kinda bad at a lot of technology. Pokemon cheating, preventing hacks on their HW, bug bounty program, etc. To say nothing of their issues with older games being emulated etc.
From their track record id expect them to outsource to a vendor for the voice model. Then there is some minor problem that gets fans mad. The vendor fixes the problem but Nintendo decides that all attempts in the space are doomed and doesn’t touch ai voice for years and uses a stupidly over complicated solution in the interim.
I read the title wrong and missed the last word, phew.
So long, gay Bowser.
I think that’s why Mario sounded slightly different in the Mario Wonder trailer.
It sounds more like he was retired, not that he chose to.
