According to a developer who worked on every game in the Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games franchise, the reason there’s no appearance for the joint Nintendo and Sega venture during the 2024 Paris Olympics is because, well, the whole series is dead and gone. A rumor backed up by Eurogamer reporting that the International Olympic Committee could have ended its partnership with the publishers.
Lee Cocker, who worked on “visual elements and gameplay” on multiple Mario & Sonic titles, first broke the eerie silence following the two characters’ no-show at this year’s games. He said on X, “For the people that are asking, there will be no [Mario & Sonic] for @Paris2024,” adding that the franchise apparently finished with 2020’s Tokyo edition. “I know,” Cocker adds, “because I worked on all the games in the franchise.”
Then more recently, Eurogamer is reporting that the IOC “walked away from its partnership with Nintendo and Sega,” in order to, the site claims, “explore deals with new partners, NFTs and esports.”
And they aren’t kidding about the NFTs. A partnership with nWay offers a desperately embarrassing attempt to cash in on 2021’s favorite grift, which suggests Mario and Sonic are likely pleased to be keeping their hands clean.
There has been a sports-meet-party-game Mario & Sonic every four-ish years since (confusingly) 2007, along with 2009 and 2013’s Winter Olympic Games equivalents. The series often nonsensically released the year before the games took place, sometimes eight months before the games started, which always seemed like the weirdest marketing decision imaginable. A total of six games came out over the last 17 years, but it seems that there shall be no more.
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Perhaps the most obvious reason why was that absolutely no one noticed when one didn’t come out last year, with even Kotaku only realizing how odd it was that a 2024 edition hadn’t been released come the start of the French games. None of the games in the series ever blew people away, with even the Wii-based Beijing original only garnering a Metascore of 67. By all reports they sold well, but it was always something of an anticlimax that the first time we saw this ultimate gaming crossover between two of the biggest characters in the industry, it was for a bunch of sporting minigames.
However, as Cocker says, it remains a shame to see a long-running franchise come to an end, especially given “breakdancing as a playable event—how cool would that be?” It sure would have been quite the thing.
We’ve reached out to Sega to see if we can get a confirmation that the franchise is over.
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