Slim Bankshot's Improbable Career

The portrait ghosts of Luigi’s Mansion are the game’s meat and potatoes, each providing a personality married to a gameplay twist. It’s amusing just how quickly the developers go off-track from what seems like a pretty standard set of mansion-dwellers: the first area contains only a nuclear family unit, the second adds in a butler..? And then it’s off to the races with in-house fortune tellers, polar explorers, life-size toy soldiers, and whatever Jarvis is.

Maybe the ghost of a Foo?

A few more family members pop up here and there, with Nana, Uncle Grimmly, the twin brothers, and a family dog, but by the time you’ve reached good old Vincent Van Gore, the mansion’s roster seems more like a troupe of carnival performers than an old-money family. E. Gadd claims in the instruction booklet that he’s collected the ghosts from around the world – but why does the Boo-made mansion seemingly have portraiture of some of them from when they were alive?

The questions raised by these ghosts and their descriptions can be added to the already-long list of ghost-related mysteries in the Mario-verse. Bogmire isn’t the ghost of someone who died, yet he rises from a gravestone. Neville and Lydia were both alive at one point, yet Chauncey was born as a ghost. The descriptions are all fun and games, clearly not in line with any sort of common sense. And here we find Slim Bankshot, resident undead pool shark.

Despite his chosen sport, he has a pretty bad habit of jumping balls off the table.

Slim’s description says that he’s a legend in the world of competitive pool, yet he never played a living soul. Uh, what? Not only does this mean he hasn’t played a living person in pool as a ghost, but it also means he didn’t play any pool with other living players when he was alive, either. So, to properly overthink this, let's examine the possibilities:

1. Slim was once a living pool player, and only played pool-loving ghosts (of which there must be vanishingly few). Then, he died and continued playing. 

2. Slim never played pool in life but picked it up in the afterlife. He then became famous (?) among living pool players -- perhaps materializing over dusty pool hall tables in the middle of the night.

The first is kind of fun -- maybe Slim got in over his head on one particular game with a legend and became a ghost. This is actually very nearly the plot of the Twilight Zone episode "A Game of Pool."

The second is weirder, but kind of charming. It's nice to think you can pick up new hobbies in the afterlife.

SPIRIT: Fun fact: his Japanese name “Paul Long” is possibly a reference to Paul Newman’s pool-playing title character in The Hustler.