Luigi's Mansion turns 25 and it is still Nintendo's boldest launch gamble
The GameCube's debut title swapped jumping for vacuuming, and a quarter century later, the series has quietly become one of Nintendo's best properties.
Luigi's Mansion turns 25 years old on September 14, 2026. Nintendo released the ghost-hunting adventure as a launch title for the GameCube in Japan on that exact date. North American players got their hands on it two months later in November 2001.
I first played the game at a GameCube release party in Pontiac, Michigan. If you know anything about Pontiac, you know it is a strange place to hold a large video game launch event. The whole promotional circuit for the console was bizarre. Nintendo threw massive parties across the country. You can still find awkward photos on social media and Getty Images. These pictures show celebrities like Lil' Kim playing the purple cube in crowded New York clubs.
The game itself was an equally strange choice for a system launch. Mario fans expected a mainline 3D platformer to sell them on the new hardware. Instead, they got a scared plumber with a vacuum cleaner. But the gamble worked. The fixed camera angles and detailed rooms made it feel like playing inside a little diorama. It was entirely different from Super Mario 64. It was not the promised Mario 128.
A single haunted house
The 2001 original sold over 3.3 million copies. The structure is tight and focused: one continuous mansion divided into four areas. Luigi uses a flashlight to stun ghosts and the Poltergust 3000 vacuum to capture them, and the whole game is spent hunting keys, unlocking doors, and fighting boss ghosts. The main complaint at the time was the short length. You can roll the credits in just a few hours.
Five mansions on two screens
The series went dormant for over a decade. Nintendo eventually outsourced a sequel to Next Level Games. They released Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS in 2013.
Dark Moon is a perfect 3DS showcase. It was one of the first games I bought when I picked up my New 3DS XL. The diorama perspective translated beautifully to the stereoscopic 3D screen. Next Level Games changed the structure completely. Instead of one large house, you explore five distinct areas in Evershade Valley. The developers also broke the exploration into specific missions rather than open-ended roaming. This entry introduced a cooperative multiplayer mode that worked locally or online.
17 floors of hotel ghosts
The franchise moved to the Nintendo Switch with Luigi's Mansion 3. It launched on October 31, 2019. Releasing a spooky game on actual Halloween is a rare bit of perfect scheduling.
This third entry is the best in the series, a massive upgrade over the previous two games. Next Level Games ditched the mission structure and returned to open exploration, sending you through a towering hotel with 17 floors, each one built around a completely different theme. The developers also added Gooigi, an ectoplasmic clone that lets a second player drop in for local co-op during the main story. The game went on to sell over 14 million copies.
Nintendo took a massive risk in 2001, sidelining their biggest mascot to build a puzzle game around his cowardly brother. Twenty-five years later, that weird little launch title still gets a new entry every console generation. I just hope the next one doesn't take another decade to arrive.
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