In our last story about Marionette, we gave you the lowdown on the game, some of the PGC staff's ideas on what it might be, and an invitation to contribute your own theories. Thanks to everyone who responded...some of you got very creative!

A few people mentioned a Dreamcast game called Marionette Company, which was actually very similar to the obscure early N64 title, Wonder Project J2. Both of these games involved text-based conversation with a female robot, who wants to become human through intellectual stimulation. Or something. Anyway, neither game got very good reviews or sales, and neither was ever released outside of Japan. While some people might be interested in seeing the Marionette Company series come to GameCube, it's not terribly likely...though also not out of the question. The reality is that the Dreamcast version was a very niche Japanese simulation game that didn't even perform well in the quirky Japanese market. Not to say that it won't happen, but right now we're inclined to think that "Marionette" is a separate entity.

Now for your ideas! We can't put up all the forum posts, but here are some that laid out intriguing possibilities or just caught our eye...

HardCoreGamer: “Mario Volleyball. "Net" as in volleyball net. Mario Golf rocked..Mario Tennis rocked..why not volleyball?”

Yes indeed, Camelot's Mario sports games have proven to be very good sellers, and it's likely that they'll continue the series with other sports. Volleyball may not be the most universally popular sport to choose, but it does hold many possibilities for multiplayer, and it would appeal to both male and female gamers. Who says that "Mario-Net" has to involve the Internet?

EvilDead: “I think it's the Nintendo version of the Dreamkey. Just the disc to go online.”

That's very possible. "Mario-Net" could also just be the tentative and/or codename for Nintendo's entire online network, like SegaNet before it.

Kronick: “I am not sure exactly, but I remember something similar to Marionette in Mario RPG.”

Yep, and others were quick to follow up on this train of thought...

S3K: “Mario RPG did have a marionette character called Geno, he was put in the game to help Mario accomplish his mission of restoring the Star Road. COULD THIS BE IT???? It reminds me of the whole RARE / Saberwulf thing going on, could nintendo have something like this up their sleeves???”

Wow! Probably just a coincidence, but the fact that Mario RPG had a marionette who opened up the Star Road works amazingly well with some of these other theories.

YoungCyrus: “I think it's just some new game. Just because it sounds like something you want to here doesn't necessarily mean it's new. Like you'd think Pikmin was gonna be Pokemon...”

Yes, it's absolutely possible that Marionette is something new and completely unexpected. But while we wait to find out the truth, there's no harm in speculating. We can really only go so far with a name and Perrin Kaplan's odd quote...unless we use our imaginations and try to relate it to things we're already familiar with. To sum it up, "Marionette = Something Totally New and Different" may be the safest answer, but it's not as much fun. ;-)

LC: “When Nintendo posted the game on their site, it was spelled "Mairionette". The actual spelling of the word (when referring to a puppet) is 'Marionette'."

Yeah, we did notice the misspelling when we first saw the game listed. However, beyond this acknoledgement, I don't think it's worth discussing. Typos are not uncommon in company documents prior to E3, as everyone has tons of stuff to do and very little time to do it in. I'm sure if you look back at PGC's coverage immediately after the press conference, you'll find errors there too. Is it possible that the "Mairionette" spelling was NOT a typo? Yes, of course, but I've yet to see any sort of plausible explanation for spelling it that way. Considering that the game's being listed at NOA's website was likely an error anyway (surmisable because it was posted and then removed), the odd spelling was probably just a typo.

Bloober: “I think it should be a dancing game, like Dance Dance Revalution, where the characters are puppets, and you would (obviously) control them. There would be all sorts of groovy Mario tunes to dance to!”

Even better, how about if the puppets are puppets of famous Nintendo characters? It'd be like Smash Bros, but you "fight" West Side Story-style.

Finally, our own Billy Berghammer hopped into the thread to share his thoughts:

Billy says: “Actually...I'm down with Justin's original idea. The puppet. If you analyze the controller you would understand this a little more. Obviously a puppet is controlled by strings. With the controller you could easily control the strings. Maybe pushing a button would pull a string...”

Interesting stuff! Controlling a marionette puppet would definitely require some innovative control scheming. Luckily, the GameCube controller is chock full of features that could yield interesting solutions for such a game.

Whew! Thanks again to everyone for their fantastic ideas. If any of these people said something that you'd like to expand on, or if you just got the creative spark and have a totally new theory, share it in this news item's very own forum thread!