Mario + Rabbids lead developer Davide Soliani is leaving Ubisoft after 25 years.
Soliani spent 11 years working on the two Mario + Rabbids games, released on Switch in 2017 and 2022 in conjunction with Nintendo. The developer is yet to reveal what he’ll be working on next, beyond embarking on “a new adventure”.
“Hi all folks. After 25 years, 11 of which beautifully spent working with Nintendo on Mario+Rabbids along the company of our incredible community of players, I have decided to leave Ubisoft to embark on a new adventure,” he wrote on social media site X. “I can’t say more now. Thanks a lot for everything, truly.”
Soliani posted his statement alongside the iconic image of himself captured at the Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle reveal at Ubisoft’s 2017 E3 presentation (above video), in which Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto praised his work. The very sweet moment became a bit of a meme afterwards as Ubisoft Crying Man – and a year later Eurogamer Editor-in-Chief Tom Phillips interviewed Soliani about his work.
We even included it in our most memorable E3 moments obituary.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle received a positive response and became the best-selling third-party game on Switch at the time. It was quickly followed up by a sequel, Sparks of Hope.
However, Ubisoft later admitted the sequel underperformed by comparison, with CEO Yves Guillemot acknowledging the company “should have waited” for the next Nintendo console.
“We had already released a Mario Rabbids game [on Switch], so by doing another we had two similar experiences on one machine. On Nintendo, games like this never die. There are 25 Mario games on Switch,” said Guillemot.
“Nintendo [has advised] that it’s better to do one iteration on each machine. We were a bit too early, we should have waited for [the next console].”
Sparks of Hope has since received multiple DLCs, including the return of Ubisoft icon Rayman.
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