Nintendo Degayed Iconic Gay Bowser Line in 'Super Mario 3D All-Stars'

If you were looking forward to hearing the iconic "So long, gay Bowser!" line in the recently released Switch title Super Mario 3D All-Stars, we've got some bad news for you: Nintendo has officially removed it from gameplay.

According to a report from Kotaku Australia, the weird but beloved bit of dialogue that iconic video game character Mario says when battling Bowser in 1996's Super Mario 64 (he's actually saying "King Bowser," but because of Mario's accent and what was surely some shoddy audio technology of the time, it sounds like "Gay Bowser," and queer Nintendo fans have been running with it ever since) has now been replaced in the 2020 Switch release. 

For reference, here's what "Gay Bowser" sounded like in Super Mario 64...

...and here's what they replaced it with in Super Mario 3D All-Stars. (A simple, bland "buh-bye!")

But why the removal, you ask? Kotaku also speculated that Super Mario 3D All-Stars is using the audio from the 1997 Japanese release of Super Mario 64 in order to be less region-specific (the Bowser character is known as King Koopa in Japan, so having Mario say "So long, gay Bowser!" doesn't make much sense for an international release).

While the omission was for good reason, it's still a bummer that a little fun tidbit of queer gaming history has been replaced, and LGBTQ+ fans of the Super Mario franchise still mourned the loss:

RIP Gay Bower. We knew thee well.