The oddity of King Boo in Mario Kart Arcade GP DX

[Fawfulthegreat64]

I watched a video about the Mario Kart Arcade games recently and noticed an oddity that kind of sent me down a potential rabbit hole.

Mario Kart Arcade GP DX received DLC characters, but the ones past Baby Peach only ever came to the Japanese version. On the wiki, all mention and imagery of King Boo (one of said Japan-exclusive characters) uses the same design he typically has in spinoffs like Mario Kart. But in the video I just watched, King Boo has his Luigi's Mansion appearance (and the person even directly alludes to it as a "horrifying version" of him). The icon used is the one this design has in Tour, which was very curious because that means it could have potentially predated Tour.

At first I assumed the game must have updated his appearance some time after he was added, since in the footage shown (and the screenshot I took of it) there is no alt menu that appears for other characters with alts like Mario/Fire Mario. But after looking through dumps of the game files I was unable to find any evidence of his LM design whatsoever. The footage featuring the design also has English text, something that shouldn't be possible if he was only ever added to the Japanese version. This in turn led me to a fan translation mod that exists for the Japanese version, and the possibility that it also modified King Boo's textures and icons. The fact that the model doesn't feature his gem also made this seem more plausible. But when i downloaded that and looked through the files, I found nothing of the sort.

So now I'm back to square one. I have no idea if this King Boo design is an official inclusion or not, and I can find no discussion on the matter online which is odd since King Boo's design has been a point of debate in the fandom, with many (including myself) preferring his LM look and wishing it would make more appearances. I guess this game is just niche enough that nobody noticed this. If it IS an official inclusion, the official site for the game clearly never got the memo.

 

[Dr. Tempest Ghouligrab]

I watched a video about the Mario Kart Arcade games recently and noticed an oddity that kind of sent me down a potential rabbit hole.

Mario Kart Arcade GP DX received DLC characters, but the ones past Baby Peach only ever came to the Japanese version. On the wiki, all mention and imagery of King Boo (one of said Japan-exclusive characters) uses the same design he typically has in spinoffs like Mario Kart. But in the video I just watched, King Boo has his Luigi's Mansion appearance (and the person even directly alludes to it as a "horrifying version" of him). The icon used is the one this design has in Tour, which was very curious because that means it could have potentially predated Tour.

View attachment 58670

At first I assumed the game must have updated his appearance some time after he was added, since in the footage shown (and the screenshot I took of it) there is no alt menu that appears for other characters with alts like Mario/Fire Mario. But after looking through dumps of the game files I was unable to find any evidence of his LM design whatsoever. The footage featuring the design also has English text, something that shouldn't be possible if he was only ever added to the Japanese version. This in turn led me to a fan translation mod that exists for the Japanese version, and the possibility that it also modified King Boo's textures and icons. The fact that the model doesn't feature his gem also made this seem more plausible. But when i downloaded that and looked through the files, I found nothing of the sort.

So now I'm back to square one. I have no idea if this King Boo design is an official inclusion or not, and I can find no discussion on the matter online which is odd since King Boo's design has been a point of debate in the fandom, with many (including myself) preferring his LM look and wishing it would make more appearances. I guess this game is just niche enough that nobody noticed this. If it IS an official inclusion, the official site for the game clearly never got the memo.

I'm guessing this copy of the game was modified beyond the translation. The wiki has an image of King Boo in-game:

...and as you can see this is pretty blatantly just a retexture of the model that was already in the game. The crown is the biggest giveaway, but there's other oddities like the glow of his eyes clipping over the brow ridge and the texturing on the mouth looking a little off, IMO. So my guess is that someone wanted to mod the Luigi's Mansion design into the game and replacing King Boo's model was too difficult/impossible, so they had to settle for a texture swap.

If this was official, then that would mean Nintendo suddenly decided to prioritize King Boo's Luigi's Mansion design (which has never happened aside from the technicality of SSBU), quietly updated an old game to do it, hasn't prioritized it again since, and took the lowest-effort route possible creating a completely off-model version in the process. It just doesn't seem likely to me.