Waluigi Mario Strikers Art
Image: Nintendo

Everyone has their signature footie celebration, right? Running to the corner flag, whipping your shirt off, doing a little dance — whatever floats your boat. That remains true for the Mario universe, and for the Mario Strikers series, retaining that was important for developer Next Level Games when creating the franchise.

Of course, there's one very famous goal celebration, and of course it's Waluigi's. Hey, we love him too, and his signature, ahem, crotch chop lit Waluigi fans' world on fire. As part of GameXplain's interview with Mike Inglehart — director of Super Mario Strikers — the former Next Level Games developer was asked how this celebration snuck its way in; and the answer is way simpler than you think!

"The crotch shot, you just didn’t expect it to get through, but you know, nobody batted an eye so we didn’t kind of bring it up because we wanted it to be in there and sure enough it landed the way we expected to. I’m not sure if it will be in the threequel but I’m really interested to see if it’s still there. I hope it’s still there."

We hope it's still there, too — it has become part of Waluigi's identity at this point! But the fact that no one at Nintendo even brought it up is a little surprising, but perhaps Nintendo saw that Next Level Games understood the character.

It certainly sounds like Inglehart at least did. Earlier in the chat, he almost goes into a full analysis of Waluigi's — and his brother Wario's — psyche and characteristics. Is this the Wario and Waluigi lore some of you are chain-chomping at the bit for?:

"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. Waluigi, we kind of depicted him as being – yeah, he’s a bit, I don’t know, a bit edgier than Wario. Wario’s kind of on-the-nose in terms of a bad guy, and Waluigi, we just wanted to explore him a bit more. He’s actually kind of mean to his sidekicks too. They’re both mean to their sidekicks but Wario’s about self-loathing and Waluigi is about blame, and everybody else has done something wrong."

You heard it from Mike Inglehart here first, folks — Waluigi is the edgier one, and he's also the one to blame others before blaming himself. Wario struggling with self-loathing also makes him just that bit more relatable. Perhaps a potential future Wario Land could explore that a bit more?

We wonder what else the full interview, when it's eventually published, will bring about as we wait for Mario Strikers: Battle League to (hopefully) score a knock-out penalty this summer. But what we do know from these small snippets is that the series could've been a platforming one at some point.

So, Waluigi fans, what do you make of this news on the crotch chop? Are you hoping we get to see it again on the Switch? Let us know in the comments!

[source youtube.com, via nintendoeverything.com]