Dark Horse’s Super Mario Encyclopedia Allegedly “Borrows” From Super Mario Wiki

Hoo boy.

Been waiting three long years to get your hands on Dark Horse’s localization of the Super Mario Encyclopedia: The Official Guide to the First 30 Years? Believe it or not, there’s been some unexpected drama about it: upon its release today, the Super Mario Wiki’s Twitter account’s been claiming the encyclopedia lifts name straight from their wiki. Check out the relevant tweets below:

For example, the guide's Super Mario Sunshine section names one of the enemy "Stoarin Stu'". This was a completely conjectural name made by the editor who created the enemy's wiki page (as the enemy is not named in he game proper) and was not based on any official sources. pic.twitter.com/6ghMEyeN65

— Super Mario Wiki (@SMWikiOfficial) October 23, 2018

Another example is the Super Mario Land 2 section. Notice the completely inconsistent mix of plain English names and messy translitterations from Japanese? This is because the names were copied from the wiki's pages pic.twitter.com/WyX6l7fGzv

— Super Mario Wiki (@SMWikiOfficial) October 23, 2018

Spot the outlier! Even better, "Kuromame" isn't even the name of that thing in the Japanese script of the encyclopedia (it's "keronpa ball") pic.twitter.com/2eGGqrNSFw

— Super Mario Wiki (@SMWikiOfficial) October 23, 2018

Everyone's favourite English name, Lumacomète pic.twitter.com/6p6xbtaVxg

— Super Mario Wiki (@SMWikiOfficial) October 23, 2018

As noted in this tweet, the Super Mario Wiki transliterates names that were never officially localized into English; as seen above, this was the case for many of Super Mario Land 2‘s enemies, so the wiki took liberty with their names. Meanwhile, names like “Lumacomète” are indeed official, but they’re taken from other languages that officially published their names; in other words, the American localizations never granted them names.

So, uh, what does this mean? Upon first glance, one would assume Dark Horse didn’t fully collaborate with Nintendo of America regarding these characters’ names and simply lifted them from fan wikis under the assumption “Lumacomète” and “Dokanto” were their official English names. While this would display incredible carelessness and a lack of professionalism on Dark Horse’s part, one of the translators asserts this isn’t necessarily the case. According to Zack Davission, while he did reference the wiki to confirm certain names, “Nintendo folks” were indeed involved with the editing process, so uh, Lumacomète may be the screechy Luma’s American name after all.

While Dark Horse has yet to officially comment on this story, we’ll leave the verdict to you readers. Do you think they borrowed a little too much from the Super Mario Wiki, or is this just a bunch of hoopla? Let us know in the comments below!