Super Nintendo World is officially open at Universal Studios Hollywood, where fans of the Mario franchise can go visit Peach's Castle, get some food at Toadstool Cafe, check out the AR experience of Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge, and more. All of this was made possible through a collaboration between Nintendo and Universal Studios.
During a recent visit to Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood, Game ZXC was able to speak with Shigeru Miyamoto and Shinya Takahashi as part of a group interview. One of the questions we asked was what it was like collaborating with Universal on such an important project.
Miyamoto and Takahashi had nothing but praise for Universal and called the collaboration "unique." One benefit of working with Universal, according to Miyamoto, was that the company has a proven history of keeping the original intent of the creator in mind. At the same time, Miyamoto and Nintendo as a whole have a lot of experience with the "concept of interactivity." Working with Universal, keeping that original intent in mind, and making it thoroughly interactive were all possible thanks to this collaboration. The result, Miyamoto explains, is that,
I think this collaboration is something you won't see anywhere else. I think that's also something you can experience as you engage with the park.
Takahashi also added that Miyamoto was not involved, heavily anyway, in some video game software development at Nintendo for a few years because of how hard he was working with Universal. The fruits of that labor are the grand openings of Super Nintendo Worlds across the world. There was a lot of good back and forth, with Takahashi calling it a "true collaboration."
There was direction from Mr. Miyamoto going to the Universal creative team, and the Universal creative team was coming back with ideas of their own. I think we saw a really unique collaboration process between the two.
As a result of all this, Universal and Nintendo were able to realize their goals with "minimal compromise," according to Miyamoto. Super Nintendo World is a passion project on all sides, simply because of how many people working on it loved Mario, and that's realized in the amount of detail put into the theme park. As Super Nintendo World as a whole began to take shape, there were some concerns about what it would be like to take these iconic Mario characters from a video game and put them into the real world, but luckily, it all worked out pretty easily. "It shows our design from way back in the day was actually pretty good," said Miyamoto.
Super Nintendo World Hollywood is open now.