Nintendo isn’t revealing Mario’s new voice actor until Wonder comes out

theverge.com:

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

Nintendo’s going to let us figure out who the next voice of Mario is on our own. In an interview with IGN, Nintendo of America’s president, Doug Bowser, said that the company doesn’t plan on revealing Charles Martinet’s replacement until folks roll credits on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

“I think people have recognized this when they see Super Mario Bros. Wonder, they’ll hear a different voice,” Bowser told IGN. “And we’ll let that play out and that’ll be within the credits, and people will learn who the new person is at that point in time, but we don’t plan to make any announcement in advance of that.”

Last month, Nintendo announced that Martinet, the longtime voice of video games’ most iconic character, would be stepping back from the role to instead be what it’s calling a Mario Ambassador. Nintendo also said that a special message from Martinet and Shigeru Miyamoto would be forthcoming, hopefully to explain what a Mario Ambassador is and to reveal who’s taking over the reigns or… plunger, as it were. Last week, Nintendo put on a 15-minute presentation for Wonder, showing off more of the game due out on October 20th. Fans thought the presentation would be a good opportunity for the new voice reveal, but now, with this interview with Bowser, we know why it didn’t happen then.

Interestingly, it seems like Martinet doesn’t quite know what a Mario Ambassador is either. First reported by Nintendo Everything, in a recent Q&A panel at GalaxyCon 2023, Martinet said of the role, “I don’t know what that is yet.”

Over the years, there have been a couple of high-profile “divorces”