Nintendo is changing Mario ‘bad guy’ Foreman Spike’s name in Japan

Nintendo has been doing pretty well lately! The Super Mario Bros. movie became the highest-grossing video game film adaptation to date, and “Peaches” — the original song written and performed by Bowser voice actor Jack Black for the film — earned him his first-ever solo single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week. Fine! You know what’s not good? The original Japanese name for Mario and Luigi’s former boss who appears early in the film. So not good, in fact the company announced on Friday that they are going to change it.

In a tweet published on Nintendo’s official Twitter account (you can tell it’s official, thanks to the gold check mark), the company announced that the character of Spike, who originally first appeared in the 1984 video game Rescue Squad and whose original Japanese name was “Blackie” will be officially renamed Spike in all regions.

“The name of the character “Blackie” that appears in the family’s computer software”Rescue Squad“will be changed to ‘Spike’, which is the same as its name in Europe and the United States,” reads Twitter’s auto-generated English translation of the tweet. “In addition, the name in “The Super Mario Bros. movie‘ released on April 28, 2023 is also ‘Spike’. (Google translate also yielded this translation.)

Given the huge box office success of The Super Mario Bros. movie, it makes sense that Nintendo would want to be proactive about changing Spike’s downright insensitive name before it sparks a controversy. “Blackie” is an incredibly unfortunate name – for so many reasons – so it’s an unequivocally good call on Nintendo’s part to change it. Surely no one is going to complain in bad faith about how renaming poor ‘old Blackie’ is somehow an act of “erasing history” or how their childhood has somehow been retroactively “ruined” because of this common sense decision, right? Right!