 Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Alpha Dream, the company responsible for the cult favourite Mario and Luigi series of role-playing games. While gone this studio will not be forgotten, they have left an indelible mark on the Super Mario franchise, and have been instrumental in defining the way we view many of the core characters from this series. Instead of focusing on the loss that we feel at this time, let's instead celebrate the life of Alpha Dream. Let us look back on how this very unusual studio came to be, all thanks to a friendship and then a falling out between Nintendo and Squaresoft. Before we can talk about Alpha Dream, we first have to talk about Super Mario RPG, arguably the proto-Mario and Luigi game. In the early 90s, Squaresoft, which had not yet fully absorbed its rival Enex, had a problem. Their games, particularly their Final Fantasy series, sold very well in Japan. Their long, nuanced, well-crafted, story-driven role-playing games were a labour of love, and domestic audiences appreciated this. Outside the country though, Squares games didn't fare quite as well. Perhaps there was a language barrier or a general challenge at getting foreign children to sit still and read dialogue? Maybe Squares' signature battle mechanics were simply too complicated for Westerners to wrap their heads around. For whatever reason, many Square games were simply not living up to their potential. It was costly to localise such long games into English and other European languages, so Square needed a big hit to help break into this market and develop a reputation. One attempt at doing so was Mystic Quest, a role-playing game that was envisioned as a very simple, dumbed-down version of Final Fantasy. This, alas, didn't exactly grab Western audiences' attentions the way that Square hoped it would. So what else could they do? They needed a cuddly, cute, eye-catching character that could drive the sales of their game. They decided that they needed Mario. Square and Nintendo had a fairly good working relationship at this point in time. When contacted about the chance of a collaboration, Mario Overseer Shigeru Miyamoto jumped at the chance. Then he saw what Square had actually envisioned. They imagined the game as a 50-50 hybrid of Mario and the Final Fantasy art style, and showed off a piece of concept art featuring Mario riding on a horse and wielding a sword. Shigeru was unimpressed. That's not right, he announced. Mario could use a hammer as a weapon, perhaps, but he would never use a sword. Bear in mind that we were still nearly a decade away from Super Smash Bros. at this point. It became clear to Square that if this collaboration was to work, Shigeru expected a Super Mario RPG to look and feel like a Mario game. Square's own signature design choices would need to be under the surface, instead. So the game was designed as a fun, silly, light-hearted affair, one that perfectly reflected the Super Mario aesthetic of the time. The directors for the game were a pair of Square employees who had previously worked as writers on Mystic Quest. Yoshihiro Maekawa and Shihiro Fujioka were relatively new to game design, although Shihiro had enjoyed a long career as a game composer already, having made music for such classics as Combat Simulator Battle Guerrilla and Earth Bound. No, not that Earth Bound, another one, from 1983. Yoshihiko and Shihiro, along with the other staff members from Square, poured their hearts and souls into Super Mario RPG, and the result was the breakout hit that the company had been hoping for. While it came right at the end of the SNES's lifespan, and was expensive to produce thanks to its costly cartridge hardware, the game ended up selling well enough in America to justify more Mario RPGs. It didn't sell particularly well in Europe, though. This is possibly something to do with the fact that it wasn't actually released on the continent. Square was still hesitant about localizing the game into a bunch of different languages, so they hedged their bets and just didn't bother trying. Flush with success after seeing the North American sales figures for Super Mario RPG, Nintendo and Square were eager to work together again. Then, seemingly overnight, their partnership fell apart. As Nintendo worked on their 64-bit follow-up to the SNES, rival Sony were pushing the PlayStation, a console that Nintendo had inadvertently helped to create when they reneged on a deal to release a disc-based game system. The PlayStation used discs which were very easy to develop for, and very cheap to print and sell. Nintendo's insistence on sticking with cartridges meant that its console was a lot less appealing to developers. So Square jumped ship. Their next Final Fantasy game took advantage of the PlayStation's unique disc-based features, and, as a result, Final Fantasy 7 ended up being the big, super-global smash hit that they'd been dreaming of. Not to be outdone, Nintendo partnered with intelligent systems to create Paper Mario. This game was made without the input of many of the developers who had worked on Super Mario RPG, and as such it had a flavor and a feeling that was very much its own. So where did Alpha Dream come into all of this? Tetsuo Mizuno, the former president of Square, left the company in 1998 amid a dramatic shake-up. At the end of his gardening leave in 2001, he formed a brand new company. This company would make classic role-playing games. It was staffed by many veterans of Square, such as Chihiro and Yoshihiko. It was destined for big things. That studio was called Alpha Star. They later changed the name to Alpha Dream. Alpha Dream's first game, we'll just call them Alpha Dream, it's easier. Koto Battle is a card game for the Game Boy that's not dissimilar to the Pokemon Trading card game. It won a claim domestically, but it was never released to foreign markets, again because localization is very, very expensive. After this came Tomato Adventure for the Game Boy Advance, which I wish we had got outside of Japan. Chihiro served as the director for both of these games. Then, in 2003, came Mario and Luigi Super Star Saga, directed by Yoshihiko. This perhaps more so than Paper Mario was the spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG. Alpha Dream's staff had worked on the first game and knew how Nintendo liked to do things. Shigeru Miyamoto served as a producer on the title. Essentially, the gang was all back together, and they were able to take the ideas they tinkered with in the first Mario role-playing game and expand them into something more. Luigi's inclusion in the game was particularly important during development. This was the first time the character had been included in a major role in a role-playing game, and as such, Alpha Dream had a lot of scope to flesh him out and develop his personality and relationships with others. To put things simply, they kicked him. Then, when he was down, they kicked him again. Luigi became something of a punching bag in this game, and met a commentary on the way that he was often viewed as little more than Green Mario in the main series games. It built upon his cowardice from Luigi's Mansion, which had been released two years prior, and really just ran with that as a theme. It was here that Luigi developed a persona of the earnest underdog. Not as popular or cool as Mario, always in his brother's shadow, but always just trying to do his best. Just between you and me, this makes Luigi far more relatable and interesting as a character, and it's probably why he's developed his own enthusiastic fanbase over the years. Together, Yoshihiko and Shihiro, along with the rest of the team at Alpha Dream, delivered an enjoyable role-playing game that went on to be one of the standout hits of the GBA's library. While many other handheld games of this era were simply ports of existing SNES games, Mario and Luigi's superstar saga is a wholly unique labor of love, which sparkles with wit and originality. The studio went on to make several other games that built upon this formula. Partners in Time, Bowser's Inside Story, Dream Team, plus a crossover with the Paper Mario series, Paper Jam. Some of these games were so good, Alpha Dream made them twice. Remakes of Superstar Saga and Bowser's Inside Story were among the last games to be released for the 3DS. So, as we say goodbye to this dedicated, creative, inventive studio, let us take a lesson from their triumphs and successes. The bittersweet moral of Alpha Dream's story is that there's more to success than financial gain. While the Mario and Luigi series was often popular, it was never very profitable for the amount of work that went into the games. These big, sprawling epics took a lot of resources and often launched on dying consoles when sales were at their lowest. Thus, the company has run out of steam and money. They have, however, left behind a legacy of engaging, enjoyable games that have left a genuine impression on the Mario universe as a whole. While it's sad that we won't be getting any more Mario and Luigi games from Alpha Dream, we can at least enjoy what has been left behind, and be grateful that we ever got such beautiful games in the first place. Maybe sometimes it's better to make the thing that you want to make, rather than worrying about what you should make. If that means losing money, fine. At least you'll be proud of what you have accomplished.