According to a developer that worked on Mario Strikers Charged, there was some consideration for having Link in Mario Strikers Charged.
As a Mario game, Strikers Charged expectedly stuck with characters associated with that franchise. However, there was the possibility of bringing in that famous character from The Legend of Zelda.
That tidbit was shared today by Did You Know Gaming. The outlet spoken with a former Next Level Games staffer who revealed that Link was very much under consideration for the GameCube title.
Did You Know Gaming offered up the following quote:
“We didn’t expect that we’d get to work on some of the IPs that we did. So even working on Mario Strikers was a big win for us. And then Punch-Out was a big win for us. It wasn’t out of the question that we would actually work on a Zelda game, and I do recall that [Next Level] were kind of throwing around the idea of having Link as a character in [Mario Strikers Charged] early on. It was always kind of on the table, or at least for us it was.”
So why didn’t the team move forward with Link? It ultimately comes down to a lack of enthusiasm on Nintendo’s part. Despite not explicitly shutting down the idea, the company was noncommittal, which is more of a polite way of saying no in Japan.