Trivia / Luigi's Mansion

• Dummied Out: A lot of things were changed or dropped from earlier versions compared to the final product, including but but not limited to:
  • How images of Luigi were to follow the final new mansion to show his reaction to it (one with two peace signs while grinning, another with one, and a third with him sulking while holding a flower).
  • The Game Boy Horror constantly displaying a first-person view in the bottom right corner of the screen.
  • An unused piano version of Totaka's Song, to be played by Melody Pianissima.
  • A pink door with heart patterns for the Nursery and a blue door with star patgerns for the Twins' Room.
  • A spooky Eldritch Abomination looking model labelled "elh". No code exists for it as an entity, so its intended behavior is a mystery, but its particle effects suggest it was able to use fire and ice attacks against the player. It has no textures (and has no UV unwrapping, meaning the model as-is isn't capable of being textured at all), suggesting it would've been displayed visually via shader effects or particles.
  • A Toad with green spots on his cap and a corresponding dialogue portrait.
  • An unused model for Mario exists, which is stretched to fit Luigi's proportions, and has straps for the Poltergust on its arms. For years, this was believed to be the only remnants of a scrapped two-player mode, but it was discovered in 2020 that it still exists in the final game and can be reactivated with cheat codes - albeit in a very buggy and unfinished state.
• First Appearance: Of both Professor Elvin Gadd and King Boo.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original GameCube version was never re-released, and while copies of the game aren't rare, they tend to go for relatively high prices due to its Cult Classic status on first release. The 3DS port has it slightly better, but with its digital version no longer being available with the eShop's shutdown in 2023, prices for even that version are beginning to climb.
• Manual Misprint: Page 30 of the American instruction booklet shows E. Gadd speaking in Japanese.
• Meaningful Release Date: The 3DS remake came out in October, shortly before Halloween.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • Many rumors about the early, supposedly darker game are unsubstantiated, such as that the game was going to be T rated, and that the game was going to be a Timed Mission where Luigi had to save Mario before dawn or the mansion would vanish along with Mario. A timer for the Game Boy Horror is seen in some pre-release materials and Dummied Out in the game, but it was likely just for the playable demo at E3 2001 to stop people from hogging the game.
  • There is also the infamous Safari Ghost that wanted to kill Luigi and keep his head as a mount. He was supposedly cut for being "too scary". There's no proof such a character was ever in development. The legend is sourced from a caption in Nintendo Power, however the misleading quote came out after the game was already out in Japan.
  • The infamous beta "Game Over" screen in the demo version which shows Luigi as depressed that he didn't manage to save Mario and/or being possessed. This has been revealed by later findings to not having been a Game Over screen of the demo at all, but part of the E3 trailer of the game. It was never intended to be in the final product, and the circumstances of Luigi's state in said scene is left ambiguous.
• Preview Piggybacking: The game included a trailer for the first Pikmin game, accessed through the options screen.
• Referenced by...: In her first few scenes in Ghostbusters (2016), Holtzmann is wearing a green shirt and blue overalls.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was initially much harder. As seen in the trailer shown at E3, the Poltergust had an exhaust meter that would build up as the player continued sucking, which would overheat and damage Luigi if the player vacuumed for too long without letting it cool down. The map that's included on the Game Boy Horror originally didn't have the feature to find the right room to fit the right key in.
  • Also, rather than being split up into different areas, the entire mansion would be just one huge area.
  • Luigi's Mansion was also supposedly planned to be in stereoscopic 3D using an add-on for the GameCube, but both the add-on and the 3D feature of the game were dropped when Nintendo realized that the cost of the add-on would have exceeded that of the base console itself (the add-on was supposed to go into the smaller second serial port, which never got used and was dropped in a console revision). The idea of Luigi's Mansion in 3D was finally realized when both a sequel and a remake of the original were made for the Nintendo 3DS.
  • Some Dummied Out ending files in the game are three graphics that show Luigi depressed while holding a flower, smiling with one peace sign, or smiling with both peace signs. This meant the game was going to have an End-Game Results Screen, if not proper (or different) Multiple Endings.
  • A second version of Totaka's Song appeared as one of the songs Melody Pianissima could quiz you about. It and its related text is in fact still in the game and can be hacked back in.
  • There were going to be ghost enemies that would Jump Scare Luigi, briefly reducing him to crawling along the floor, and temporarily lowering his maximum health to 50. The concept was taken and nerfed for the Sneakers in Dark Moon.
  • An unused two-player mode exists within the code and can be re-enabled with cheat codes. However, it's quite buggy; the second character gets stuck trying to go through doors, and its ghost-catching mechanics are very buggy (including ghosts caught by them not actually counting towards lighting up rooms). An unused Mario model with the Poltergust's straps on its arms exists within the code, suggesting he might've been intended as the Player 2, but since he's stretched to fit Luigi's proportions and would've looked very off as a result, he could've also just been a placeholder. Two-player co-op would go on to be one of the 3DS remake's main selling points, featuring a new clone of Luigi named Gooigi.
  • At one point, there was going to be a portrait ghost in the Kitchen for Luigi to fight. In the final product, the Kitchen only has regular ghost enemies.
• Word of God: Given the number of Ghostbusters (1984) references throughout the games, many assumed that it was developed as a tribute to said movie. Shigeru Miyamoto, himself a fan of Ghostbusters, denied this in a 2013 interview with ABC, stating that the development team took care to ensure that people wouldn't assume it was a tribute in any way to Ghostbusters despite the Shout-Outs.

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