Today, we’re announcing the availability of Microsoft Azure from our new cloud datacenter regions in Norway, marking a major milestone as the first global cloud provider to deliver enterprise-grade services in the country. These new regions demonstrate our ongoing investment to help enable digital transformation and advance intelligent cloud and intelligent edge computing technologies across both commercial and public sectors.

DNB, Equinor, Lånekassen, and Posten are just a few of the customers and partners leveraging our cloud services to accelerate innovation and increase computing resources. This new offering of Microsoft Azure delivers scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud services to Norwegian companies and organizations while meeting data residency, security, and compliance needs.

Our President, Brad Smith, recently visited Norway to celebrate this important launch and to discuss how vital trust is for those we serve, not only to help bring forth innovation but to ensure our customers are protected.

“Our customers have entrusted us to protect, operate, and develop our platform in a way that keeps their data private and secure. This is an immense responsibility that we can’t just claim, but a responsibility that we must earn every single day.” – Brad Smith, President, Microsoft

Accelerating digital transformation in Norway

As we further our expansion commitment, we consider the demand for locally delivered cloud services and the opportunity for digital transformation in the market. Azure enables our customers and partners to increase their utilization of public cloud services and accelerate investments into private and hybrid cloud solutions. Norwegian organizations can now embrace these benefits to further innovation and build digital businesses at scale. Below are just a few of the customers and partners embracing Microsoft Azure in Norway.

The Norwegian banking industry is recognized for its rapid technology adoption, digitalizing the services that build the best products for customers. As Norway’s largest financial services group, DNB Group is a major operator in several industries, for which they also have a Nordic or international strategy. With Microsoft Azure, DNB will be able to migrate to the cloud in accordance with Norwegian data handling regulations to modernize, gain operational efficiency, and secure the best experience for its customers.

“The possibility of data residency was a decisive factor in choosing Microsoft’s datacenter regions. Now we are looking forward to using the cloud to modernize and achieve efficiency and agility in order to ensure the best experience for our customers.” – Alf Otterstad, Executive Vice President, Group IT, DNB

Equinor, a broad energy company developing oil, gas, wind, and solar energy in more than 30 countries worldwide, has chosen Microsoft Azure to enable its digital transformation journey through a seven-year consumption and development agreement. With this strategic partnership, anchored in cloud-enabled innovation, and by moving its whole system portfolio to Azure, Equinor is aiming to achieve a more cost-efficient, safer, and more reliable operation. Equinor will utilize a variety of cloud services like machine learning and advanced analytics to improve performance, decrease costs, and increase safety. Through the partnership with Microsoft and leveraging capabilities within Azure, Equinor seeks to be a leader in the transformation of the energy industry worldwide and a growing force in renewables.

“Equinor’s ambition is to become a global digital leader within our industry. We have a long history of innovation and technology development. The strategic partnership will, through cloud services, involve development of the next-generation IT workplace, extended business application platforms, and mixed-reality solutions.” – Åshild Hanne Larsen, CIO and SVP, Corporate IT Equinor

Lånekassen, the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund, has over 1.1 million customers, composed of former and current students. By moving to Azure, it seeks to develop new and transformative citizen services, based on cognitive and analytical technologies. Lånekassen’s purpose is to make education possible, and to provide the Norwegian workforce with relevant competences. It aims to strengthen student funding as well as maintain and increase the already high level of automatized customer services and application processes.

“It has been a priority for Lånekassen to focus on how we can utilize new technology to deliver an even better service for our students and manage our student financing schemes even more efficiently. As we move our core solutions into the cloud, it will give us increased opportunities to innovate. We have already had great success with using machine learning, and we are now looking forward to optimizing our operations further.” – Nina Schanke Funnemark, CEO, Lånekassen

Posten Norge AS has chosen to use the Microsoft Azure platform to meet ever-changing market demands by modernizing some of its existing applications estate and creating new services for its customers and partners. Posten’s next-generation logistics system will provide its workforce with new digital toolsets to deliver even better customer experiences.

“Posten’s vision is to make everyday life simpler and the world smaller. With this vision, we aim to simplify and increase the value of trade and communication for people and businesses in the Nordic region. With the opening of Norwegian datacenter regions, we hope to accelerate and fuel our vision further.” – Arne Erik Berntzen, CIO, Posten AS

Bringing the complete cloud to Norway

The new cloud regions in Norway connect with Microsoft’s 54 regions via our global network, one of the largest and most innovative on the planet, spanning more than 130,000 miles of terrestrial fiber and subsea cable systems to deliver services to customers. Microsoft brings the global cloud closer to home for Norwegian organizations and citizens through our transatlantic system Marea, the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic.

The new cloud regions in Norway are targeted to expand in 2020 with Office 365, one of the world’s leading cloud-based productivity solutions, and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the next generation of intelligent business applications and tools.

Learn more about the new cloud services in Norway and the availability of Azure regions and services across the globe.

Making sure no parcel is missed

Delivering over 40 million shipments every year, Romania’s preferred courier company Urgent Cargus is taking it one step further. With its system managing between 110,000 – 150,000 shipments at any given time and a fleet of over 2,600 courier vehicles, Urgent Cargus found itself handling millions of different requests. In such a large operation, with an even larger volume of orders to fulfill, the company needed a way to predict how much data processing and storage was required to deliver on its commitment to customers.

“We operate in an unpredictable industry. Depending on the season or festivity, we often find ourselves needing to handle a very high volume of deliveries throughout the year,” said Chief Information Officer, Marian Pletea at Urgent Cargus. “There can be as many as more than one million new requests every 24 hours, which makes it impossible to predict what data storage resource we require.”

“We also wanted to mitigate the risk of system downtime. Without the right availability, we don’t ship parcels at the right rate, nor receive the customers’ bookings, which could lead to serious business blockages.”

To address this issue, Urgent Cargus moved its customer job booking application onto the cloud and adopted a Platform-as-a-Service approach – purchasing additional resources when and if they need it. A move that gives a self-service option to customers, from booking to invoicing, as well as minimizing the risk of downtime in the event of an unpredictable peak.

According to Marian: “We recognize AI as a transformative technology, which is why we’re testing it to automate certain services to make our customers’ lives easier. This will also free-up our employees to tackle more.”

Data driving cross-border deliveries

With parcels placed into the system, sorted and distributed, companies like Budapest-headquartered Waberer’s International specialize in delivering goods and supplies over long-distances across Europe – getting packages to their destination as quickly as possible. Racking up nearly 500 million kilometres of road travel each year, the company meets demanding customer requirement with a fleet of over 4,300 modern vehicles and its bespoke logistics warehouse.

Needing to move away from hand-written notes and paper-based spreadsheets, Waberer’s International digitized its scheduling processes to better account for every journey and the over 1,000 transactions they process each day. With the help of AI, the company developed a planning platform called WIPE. WIPE uses complex algorithms to allocate drivers, load and journey schedules in the most efficient way. It’s a one-stop-shop for Waberer’s International to oversee all of their logistical operations in one place. This automated process means the business can track deliveries at all times and decide where and when resources are best placed.

In addition to driving efficiencies in resourcing and deliveries, the company has also been able to improve bottom-line performance. Thanks to the automated truck scheduling function, Waberer’s International achieved a better than an industry-average loaded ratio of 92%.

With an ever-increasing and demanding customer base, and some retailers promising same-day delivery, there’s no doubt that postal services and logistics companies face many challenges.

By digitizing processes and gleaning predictive insights with technology like the cloud and AI, these examples show how data-driven decisions make processes more efficient and customers more satisfied. Perhaps AI should be top of everyone’s wish list this year!

It started with data. Data showed customers were experiencing difficulties onboarding to Azure, not knowing how to get started, with murky understanding of all the tools and services available to them. Ayesha Ghaffar, a data scientist who analyzed these and many other customer onboarding experiences, saw an opportunity to improve the existing process. She put together a proposal of a new way to acclimate customers to Azure. Ayesha began meeting with a few product teams about her idea and everyone felt it was worthwhile to pursue – but what she found was resources were thin and other commitments took priority. “I just wanted to make this idea a reality, but I was a data scientist and I didn’t know how on my own. I needed help to make this happen.” The answer came in the 2017 company-wide Hackathon. “A week before the Hackathon started, I thought, ‘I’m just going to write an email and put it out there. This is the problem, this is how we can solve it, and this is the impact.’ I sent it to everyone.”

Soon, employees from around the world – designers, user researchers, developers, program managers – wanted to join her Hackathon project. They found a common passion for the customer experience. Peilin Nee shared her experience as part of the hack team. “Designing with empathy begins with yourself. This was my first time working with 15 others coming from different disciplines who have never met before. What amazed me is how we put aside our differences and work towards our shared dream – provide new Azure users a better getting-started experience and ultimately increase trial users’ adoption rate. And, we did just that in two and a half days.”

For their hack project, called Azure Launchpad, they created an extension in the Azure Portal that served as a hub for key getting started resources and personal recommendations for customers to achieve their cloud goals. Their efforts were noticed by the head of the Azure Portal product, Leon Welicki who was able to secure a Portal developer, Asher Garland, to continue to work on the project. While Ayesha was still a data scientist, she worked with Asher on a private preview version of Quickstart Center for the Ignite 2017 conference.

After the positive feedback they received from the private preview released for the conference, they were invited to present their work to Scott Guthrie who later mentioned it in one of his employee meetings. Because Ayesha moonlit as a product manager for the hack project, the Portal team eventually hired her to work on it full time as the PM in November 2017.

At Build 2018, Azure Quickstart Center shipped in public preview and became available to all customers through the Azure Portal. In 2019, Azure Quickstart Center partnered with the FastTrack team and Azure Docs to introduce Azure setup guides in the Quickstart Center to help customers deal with more complex scenarios like governance and migration based on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.

“The Cloud Adoption Framework provides the One Microsoft voice for cloud adoption. Azure Quickstart Center has made that voice actionable by injecting pointed and relevant guidance into the customer experience. The user now has prescriptive instructions at the point of execution. Together, these assets create a seamless integration of strategy and tactical execution,” shared Brian Blanchard, Sr. Director, Cloud Adoption Framework.

The Hackathon helped the team get feedback and continues to be a way to showcase the value of their ideas and projects. For Ayesha, “Hackathon is one of my favorite things at Microsoft – it helped me land a job as a PM, get visibility on the solution, and I learned how to solve customer problems in depth.” For the 2019 Hackathon, Ayesha and team (along with FastTrack team) iterated on features they could add that customers have said they wanted. “The goal is to democratize knowledge and put it in these custom guides. Our superpower is enabling our customers and partners to find their own superpowers. Cloud can be complicated, we want to enable customers and partners to simplify it for their organizations by creating their own custom guides for their users.”

Over the past few years, we’ve seen hackers and modders create some pretty impressive pieces of hardware based on existing classic systems. Portable N64s, GameCubes and even Wii Us have come and gone, each one trying to turn a beloved platform into something subtly different.

This latest venture is one of the most eye-catching yet, but we’re not entirely sure if we like it or hate it. A talented modder has used the shell of a Super Famicom (SNES to you and me) and turned it into a portable console, complete with controls and screen.

The Super Famicom pad is fused into the middle of the machine, just below the screen. The carts slot into the top of the unit. It looks a bit like a Frankenstein’s monster, but in console form.

While it’s also not going to win any awards for portability, you’ve got to take your hat off to the people who do these crazy things.

Thanks to Sam Dyer for the tip!

For the past five years, Sony has ruled the roost in the UK hardware sales charts. The PS4 is the territory’s undisputed champion with millions of consoles safely installed in millions of living rooms. However, it would seem that Nintendo’s recent robust performance is going to change things up a little.

Retail data obtained by GamesIndustry.biz indicates that Switch hardware sales have risen more than 30% over the past week thanks to the arrival of Pokémon Sword and Shield – which has just jumped to number one in the UK charts and has enjoyed the biggest system-exclusive launch of the year.

Hardware sales had spiked more than 75% the week prior to Sword and Shield’s release, and almost 90,000 Switch systems have been sold in the UK in November so far. While you might assume that the recently-released Switch Lite model is the reason for the jump, it is actually the original variant which is accounting for most of those sales.

All of this has contributed to Switch becoming the best-selling console in the UK this year so far, ahead of Sony’s PlayStation 4. Retailers have told GamesIndustry.biz that a host of promotions are helping Switch fly off the shelves and that more offers will become available over the Black Friday period.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Burbank, California​

Insomniac Games is searching for its next Lead Level Designer. This should be someone who’ll lead the Level Design team in the operation of designing, developing, and polishing game levels including level geometry, enemy encounters, puzzles, and unique gameplay. The individual in this position works closely with the project Leads, Design Director, Game Director, and/or Creative Director to help ensure game levels have cutting edge features, are creatively entertaining, and well balanced. This role will schedule team through the pre-production, production, and polish phases.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Works to make high level direction from the Creative Director a reality, and work with the other project leads to meet these goals
• Works with Game Director and/or Design Director to establish concrete plan/s to accomplish the design goals of the project
• Leading the team to craft unique geometry that allows for level composition to form memorable experiences.
• Communicates level design goals for the project to team members and ensure they are understood
• Manages design team and mentor individual designers, establishing goals for individuals and holding them accountable
• Works with the Director of Design and/or Design Director to establish design processes; carry out implementation of those processes across the design team
• Works with project management to schedule design planning and implementation
• Performs reviews of game levels and provide feedback to the team
• Works closely with all departments to investigate solutions that best fit with the products goals, and ultimate goals of the game
• Ensures all design and implementation deliverables are up to Insomniac’s high standards of quality
• Checks development progress against milestone deliverables and, if necessary, correct course
• Identifies design gaps and work with the design team to find solutions
• Other duties may be assigned

Supervisory Responsibilities: Directly supervises design team. Carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with the organization’s policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; appraising performance; rewarding and disciplining employees; addressing complaints and resolving problems, in conjunction with the Director of Design.

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) from a four-year college or university; seven to ten years related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Completed work on several published game titles.
• Advanced knowledge and experience with level editing tools and scripting (Unreal Engine, Unity, or similar editors).
• Intermediate knowledge of Maya or other major 3D modeling program.
• Adobe Illustrator experience and Photoshop skills are a plus.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.

Other Skills:

• Awareness of emerging trends that inform modern game design. Ability to analyze these mechanics and apply them to current game designs if appropriate
• Intimate knowledge of how games work and what makes them fun.
• Mechanics and level design experience.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven ability to work within a team environment

If this is the opportunity that you have been looking for, we’d like to hear from you.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is a considerable refinement of the 15-inch model’s design, but how does it compare against its smaller stablemate, the 13-inch MacBook Pro? AppleInsider takes a closer look.

The 16-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros

Those in the market for a new powerful and portable Mac currently have two options available —the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro and the newly unveiled 16-inch Macbook Pro. Let’s talk about the differences.

Design

Each machine is primarily based on the 2016 unibody design with only minor tweaks since the original unveiling. Closed, they look almost identical to one another —other than the obvious size difference.

Comparing the sizes of the 16-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros

The 13-inch model is far more portable than the 16-inch, coming in at more than a pound lighter, slightly shorter, more than two inches narrower, and more than an inch shallower. If portability is most important, there is a clear choice here —though the MacBook Air remains lighter and smaller than either of them.

When opened, you can see more of the differences and similarities.

Both machines have the Touch Bar sitting above their respective keyboards. The 16-inch MacBook Pro has larger speaker grills sitting to either side of said keyboard.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro keyboard arrow keys (left) compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro version

Speaking of the keyboards, there are a variety of differences here. The 16-inch has the new independent physical escape key and Touch ID sensor whereas the 13-inch has both incorporated into the Touch Bar. The 16-inch also has a more defined inverted “T” design for the arrow keys.

Different mechanisms are also used —the 13-inch still relies on the possibly-flawed butterfly design and the new 16-inch has an updated scissor-switch design Apple has called the Magic Keyboard.

16-inch MacBook Pro display

Looking at the displays, the 16-inch model has noticeably smaller bezels around the screen versus the slightly aged look of the 13-inch which has chunkier bezels.

13-inch MacBook Pro display

Of course, the displays are also different sizes —13.2 inches versus 16 inches —but have very similar pixel densities —227 versus 226 PPI.

Pros do have an option on the larger model to specify their refresh rate, something new to the MacBook Pro feature set.

Other standout features for the 16-inch include vastly better speakers and a new set of incredible microphones.

Specs

The 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro

Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro starts with a 1.4GHz quad-core 8th-gen Intel i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 8GB 2133MHz RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with a 2.6GHz 6-core 9th-gen Intel i7 processor, AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage.

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro editing with Logic Pro X

The former can be maxed out with 2.8GHz 8th-gen Intel i7 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655, 16GB RAM, and 2TB SSD storage. The latter goes all the way up to a 2.4GHz 8-core 9th-gen Intel i9 processor, 64GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and 8TB of SSD storage.

Price and recommendations

While there are often ongoing sales, the base model 13-inch generally starts at $1,299 and the base 16-inch starts at $2,399. If you max out either option, the 13-inch can cost as much as $3,099 and the 16-inch goes all the way up to $6,099.

MacBook Pro

Needless to say, maxing out the 16-inch machine yields far more performance than the 13-inch ever could achieve.

The 13-inch is still no slouch, and there are decent upgrades available in the more compact body. But, as it is a fresh addition to the lineup, the 16-inch is exceptionally capable. If you want the most power, the best choice is the 16-inch model.

If you do lean towards the 13-inch unit, we may recommend holding off until early 2020 before picking one up. The machine was updated earlier in 2019 and rumors point to an early-to-mid 2020 update with improved performance and an updated keyboard mechanism to match the 16-inch.

Save money on both options

Apple resellers are accepting orders for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with a variety of incentives. Expercom is knocking up to $438 off select new configurations with coupon code appleinsider, while Adorama is taking up to $250 off retail models with promo code APINSIDER (prices start at just $2,199 with code). Details can be found in this 16-inch MacBook Pro deal roundup.

Meanwhile, at B&H, shoppers can save $100 on the retail systems and select between no interest financing when paid in full within 12 months with the B&H Financing Card or a sales tax refund in eligible states with its Payboo Credit Card. The latter can save many shoppers anywhere from $200 to $500 on average.

Amazon is also offering instant discounts on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, matching B&H with prices as low as $2,299.

Those looking for the best deal on a 13-inch MacBook Pro can find prices as low as $1,199 and savings of up to $200 off.

Be sure to check out the AppleInsider 16-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide and the 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide for the latest deals and product availability on Apple’s current hardware.

Hello KubeCon and welcome to San Diego! It’s fantastic to have the chance to get some warm California sun, as well as the warmth of the broader Kubernetes community. From the very first community meeting, through the first KubeCon and on to today, it’s been truly amazing to have been able to watch and help the Kubernetes community grow. As KubeCon arrives, I’m excited to note how we are continuing to innovate and empower cloud-native developers on Kubernetes anywhere.

In the spirit of innovation, I’m thrilled to announce our new open source effort to enable trusted execution environments for Kubernetes. Trusted execution environments or “enclaves” are a hardware-backed secure execution environment that can ensure processes and their memory are secure while they execute. Today, we’re enabling trusted computing on Kubernetes anywhere via the Open Enclave SDK.

We’re also releasing a resource plugin that makes Encrypted Page Cache RAM a resource that the Kubernetes scheduler can use to make scheduling decisions. The number of enclaves on a CPU is limited, and this plugin ensures that Pods that need enclaves will be guaranteed to land on a node with an enclave available. This scheduler support is critical to running trusted compute environments in cloud-native applications via Pods.

Beyond these innovations for secure computing, I’m incredibly proud of the work that the Helm community has done to build and release Helm 3.0 last week. The vast majority of workloads deployed to Kubernetes are deployed via Helm, and Helm 3 is the next step in this journey. Over the past few years, the Helm team has carefully listened to user feedback about what was working and where changes were needed.

Of the many fixes and improvements, the most popular is probably the removal of Tiller from the cluster, making Charts more Kubernetes native and more secure by default. Speaking of security, the recent glowing independent security review of the Helm code base shows how dedicated and careful the Helm community has been in building a tool that is not just incredibly useful, but also secure as well. Many congratulations to the Helm community on this important milestone.

Just like the Helm team, in Azure, our open source work begins by listening to our customers. In particular, our customers in IoT and telecommunications. This feedback led us to understand how important it was for Kubernetes to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the same Pods in Kubernetes. Major kudos are due to Kal Henidak for his dedicated and tireless work in engineering both the code and design changes necessary to support multiple addresses per Pod. As you might imagine this change required careful work and coordination across the entire Kubernetes code base and community. Kal’s hard work in collaboration with the SIG-Networking community is being recognized with a shared keynote with Tim Hockin. Plan on attending the keynote to learn more about IPv4 and IPv6 in Kubernetes!

Finally, by combining both open source community and innovation we have a remarkable collection of open source projects reaching important milestones at KubeCon. The newly announced Buck (Brigade Universal Controller for Kubernetes) project shows how Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB) with Brigade radically simplify the development of new operators. The Kubernetes-based Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) has shown incredible community interest. It’s a great collaboration between Azure Functions, Red Hat, and others. Here at KubeCon, the KEDA community is hitting the 1.0 milestone and is stable and ready for production use. I also want to congratulate the Cloud Events community on their recent 1.0 release and I’m excited that Azure Event Grid has correspondingly added support for the 1.0 version of Cloud Events. Cloud Events is a CNCF project for an open and portable API for event-driven programming and it’s awesome that it is available in a managed environment in Azure.

Of course, containers and DevOps are a year-round focus for my teams beyond KubeCon. We’ve been busy this fall.

In the four weeks since we launched the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) project, we have seen strong interest from the community and have been listening to the many stories of how people are using Dapr in their projects, including modernizing Java code, building games, and integrating with IoT solutions. The breadth across different industries is amazing to see. The interest in the Dapr runtime repo has grown beyond our expectations. It’s been awesome to see the community come together and continue the momentum. We are excited to announce the release of Dapr v0.2.0, focusing on community-driven components, fixes across the Dapr runtime and CLI, updates to documentation, samples, and the addition of an end-to-end testing framework. You can find out more about the v0.2.0 release at the Dapr repo.

Just building distributed systems isn’t enough, you need to be able to observe how they are running in production, and the CNCF Prometheus project has emerged as a de-facto standard for exposing metrics on all sorts of servers. But it’s still easier to integrate with cloud-based monitoring rather than run your own metrics server. To enable this, Azure Monitor for containers can scrape the metrics exposed from Prometheus end-points so you can quickly gather failure rates, response per secs, and latency. From Log Analytics, you can easily run a Kusto Query Language (KQL) query and create your custom dashboard in the Azure portal dashboard. For many customers using Grafana to support their dashboard requirements, you can visualize the container and Prometheus metrics in a Grafana dashboard. Azure monitoring combines the best of open technology with the reliability of a cloud service.

In the last few years, KubeCon has grown from a single-track to many tracks and thousands of people. For me personally, and the community in general, it’s been an incredible journey. I’m excited to see people in San Diego – please stop by the Azure booth and say hello!

Luigi has long since moved on from being a palette-swapped second player to a fully-fledged hero in his own right – heck, he even has his own series of video games these days – but he sadly isn’t a playable choice in Super Mario Odyssey, the most recent mainline Mario title.

However, while he merely plays a bit part in the Switch exclusive, he very nearly sported a ‘drastically’ different look.

Speaking in The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, character art lead Sho Murata said:

Luigi hosts the Balloon World minigame. We wanted players to feel welcome in this minigame, so we gave him a cheerful and casual attitude, like a performer passing out balloons on the street. We wanted to make it seem like he came directly from the Mushroom Kingdom, so in contrast to the sticker-laden Odyssey, his satchel sports only stickers from the Mushroom Kingdom. One of the stickers is actually out of circulation…

We considered a drastic costume change for Luigi at first, but we ultimately went with a simple look, since it would work well against the background of this game’s world. I wonder… including the Luigi green, did you notice his balloons are the same colors as Super Famicom controller buttons? To the many fans who were looking to his appearance in the game, know that the designer in charge put a lot of effort into Luigi’s development.

Do you think Luigi would have looked right with a completely different costume, or are you glad that the designers ultimately decided to stick with tradition? Post a comment to share your thoughts.

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