The Legend of Zelda's Link and Super Mario Odyssey's Mario are among the two most iconic characters Nintendo has ever created. The blonde-haired Hyrulian hero and the Italian plumber have had their fair share of run-ins over years in games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Mario Kart 8. However, with Dall-E, fans of the two icons can quite literally create their own crossover event by fusing them together.
Dall-E is an AI photo generator that generates images with any prompt fed into it. Though the art Dall-E creates is often accurate to the prompts it is given, the results tend to be blurry and surreal to the point they are simultaneously disturbing and hilarious. This has enabled video game fans to create hellish images of their favorite characters that the AI's namesake Salvador Dali could have only dreamed of painting, such as Animal Crossing's Tom Nook as Darth Vader.
However, Dall-E's creations do not need to be shocking to the eyes: they can be iconic. Link and Mario are two of the most famous characters in video game history, and the series they come from stand as giants in the industry. Fusing them together by making Link Mario in Dall-E would thus create the first image to be erected in the Sistine Chapel of video games.
Dall-E's Link & Mario Fusion Is Difficult To Comprehend
Perhaps the iconography contained in the two Nintendo characters was too much for the AI to instill into one subject. The portraits of the Link-Mario hybrid that Dall-E generated lean toward the abstract as if to say a more realistic-looking image would fail to capture the grandeur of this fusion. The image to the left even uses a Picasso-like approach by flattening the fusion's face on a two-dimensional plane, almost as if its referencing Mario's design in Paper Mario. On the other hand, the image to the right appears to use a collage-like style in which it clipped individual components of other images like eyes, a mouth, and clothes, and then put them together.
To dive deeper into Dall-E's creations, the AI approached the fusion by taking examples of both Link and Mario throughout their respective series. In the image on the left, the Hero of Time's iconic green clothes and stubby limbs suggest Dall-E favored the Link from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. However, the image on the left paints a different picture, as the background is clearly inspired by the Hyrulian landscapes of Breath of the Wild. What's more, the body's shape is clearly Mario's, but the torso appears to be an attempt to capture Link's blue tunic. But the face is perhaps the most notable part. The eyes and mouth do not look as if they come from either of Mario's or Link's pasts. The mystery behind them and mouth's gentle smirk are as alluring as Mona Lisa's smile. And just like that smile, they are perhaps better left a mystery. To bring together The Legend of Zelda's Link, who has defeated his universe's manifestation of evil and power on multiple occasions, with Mario, the plumber who immediately starts breakdancing upon saving his wife, would be too much to try to actually comprehend.