Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto explains how he made Mushroom Kingdom real

Super Nintendo World is opening Friday at Universal Studios Hollywood. This new attraction to the park will be a truly unique experience. It brings Nintendo’s colorful worlds to life, allowing visitors to move through the space — speckled with Thwomps, stacks of Goombas, spinning Koopa shells, and other iconic characters — as if they were Mario and his friends. The experience of walking around the land, taping coins, and enjoying the attraction felt like returning to childhood.

It is also an unprecedented addition to Universal Studios — and to the makeup of amusement parks more broadly, which have historically focused on translating films to attractions and physical spaces. Nintendo is no stranger in innovation. They have created many of the best, most loved, and longest-lasting video games and characters. This park represents a tribute to that legacy and offers a brand new environment for fans.

Shigeru MYAMATO, a former game designer, played an integral part in creating the park. Miyamoto’s creative vision has long been at the heart of Nintendo, as the creator of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and more. Miyamoto’s unique approach to game designing helped to define the boundaries of what is possible within the industry. Miyamoto is considered to be the pioneer of modern game design by prioritizing art over player experience.

Miyamoto seemed to be reducing his participation in contemporary Nintendo games after spending four decades creating video games. Shinya Takahashi said that although this appeared to be true, it was because Miyamoto was focusing all of his efforts on Super Nintendo World. Director and senior managing executive officer at Nintendo, Takahashi’s own producer credits span decades, covering some of Nintendo’s most famous franchises, like Brain Age, Kirby, and Pikmin.

Polygon spoke with Miyamoto and Takahashi, via interpreters, about the experience of bringing Mario’s world to life in a theme park, and what the future holds for Nintendo.

Bringing Mario’s world to life

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Miyamoto & Takahashi spent years creating and producing Mario games online. Now, they had to think about how to make the virtual world into real life. Others were simpler and more obvious, such as allowing people to touch a coin block. However, designing the park required embracing uncertainty.

“There’s a little bit of uncertainty about what’s going to be at the end of this: Is this going to be something that is worth all this effort?” Takahashi said. “When we were able to actually interact with, say, the question block for the first time and actually hit it — and get that feeling, and the coin sound, knowing that we were able to create something that does bring that interactivity to life — that was where we had that first sense of, It will all work out in our favor..”

“When I think of parks, I would think of an actual park in your neighborhood,” Miyamoto said. “Maybe there’s a fountain and you walk around barefoot in it, or there’s a hill and you just roll down. That’s what I imagined. Although I would love to have that available here, there’s safety concerns to take into consideration. So while we guarantee safety, we provided ways of interacting with the park, like the question block that you can hit to get points.”

Photo: Nicole Clark/Polygon

Unusual elements were a major challenge, as is designing them. According to Miyamoto, this is something that the team continues to work on. And it’s something that they iterated on, since the original Super Nintendo World park first opened at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka in 2020.

“In reality, we ended up building a big building, as you can see, and I wanted to climb it. But there’s experiences that happen in real life that don’t happen in video games,” Miyamoto said. “For example, in Mario when you’re going into, say, a dungeon, in the game it’s just a scene switch. But in real life, there is a transition phase that you have to go through.” This is also how Miyamoto describes the Warp Pipe’s role in helping visitors move into a new space. It is “an entryway or transition phase from the daily life into the Mushroom Kingdom.”

It is evident in all aspects of the park. The familiar sound effects that play as you walk through Warp Pipe’s entrance transport you immediately. The space becomes saturated with detail and color as you step out. It’s like being inside a fishbowl, with buildings and set pieces multiple stories high all around, and characters in constant motion. There is visual information everywhere you turn. After guiding Mario through digital adventures for many years, I found myself spending a lot of my time in the middle.

“In the game world there’s Yoshi and Koopa Troopas, they’re always moving, so we wanted to make sure that they were always moving in real life as well,” Miyamoto said. “There’s concerns like ‘Is it actually going to be convincing? Is it actually going to turn out the way we want it to?’ And after seeing all of these elements come through, and actually having them all together in one place and seeing them function, I had this moment where the landscape I’m seeing really links up with my game experience that I’ve had in the past. The elements were perfectly matched and synced. And realizing all of the elements have come together to make this possible — [it] was a moment.”

In other parts of Universal Studios Hollywood there isn’t that same kind of mirage, or sense that you’re inside an entirely new universe. You’re clearly in an amusement park, enjoying various attractions and staged moments with movie characters. Super Nintendo World is a place where the illusion never ends. Hidden hallways beckon guests in — often these passages are tucked by the exits of larger attractions in order to foster exploration. This section even has seating that looks like a bunch of mushrooms in the shadow of bigger mushrooms.

Photo: Nicole Clark/Polygon

The Toadstool Cafe offers adorable, themed food such as a Mario Burger. or question block tiramisu, is filled with “windows” that show Toads hard at work in the kitchens or frolicking outdoors in Toad Village. You will be welcomed by Chef Toad upon entering the park. A Minion-themed soda straw and cup can be purchased in the Illumination area of the park. Super Nintendo World’s Toads are the ones preparing your meals.

“Another example, of course, is Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge. This is an experience you can’t have just on a video game console,” Takahashi said. “Through the use of AR and other technologies, we are able to leverage our own experiences to create something, again, that moves beyond the experience you would have in just the game.”

And though the park is designed to be welcoming to newcomers, it’s also full of Easter eggs that longtime fans can discover.

“There was discussion about adding other IPs in there, like Splatoon. But instead of having our focus scattered, we thought it would be easier to start with something focused,” Miyamoto said. “That’s why we ended up starting with Mario. There might also be other IPs scattered around the globe due to this backdrop. So I encourage you to take a look.”

Family-friendly place to play together

Photo: Nicole Clark/Polygon

Super Nintendo World is also designed to promote collaboration between first-timers as well as seasoned gamers. You can’t walk for more than a few feet without hearing an interactive element.

“As long as you make an experience that’s relatable and fun for fans to engage in, naturally kids will be able to have fun with that,” Miyamoto said. “When you go to other parks you might see the kids playing and then the parents are just kind of resting on the side. And that’s something that you observe there that you may not observe here.”

Super Nintendo World was designed as a game. Bowser has stolen Princess Peach’s Golden Mushroom, and it’s up to visitors to win it back by playing a series of three minigames, called “activities,” and a final boss battle. A Power-Up Band can be purchased by visitors, which keeps track of their progress and counts the coins they have received from Coin Blocks. Most of these “activities” are much easier to do with at least one partner — a Piranha Plant activity requires turning off multiple clocks, and I ended up making some new friends in order to beat it. It’s easy to imagine how a family would do this activity together, and how a child might see someone else play and feel encouraged to join in.

“For Nintendo, the idea of games is something that brings the family together in the living room to interact, as mentioned, like a connective tissue. And when we’re talking about games, it really just happens in the living room,” Miyamoto said. “This entire space can be used to do just that.”

Photo by NBCUniversal

This is, ultimately, an extension of Nintendo’s core ethos, as a company dedicated to creating experiences that are family-friendly — and even more than that, bridging generational gaps by making something not just entertaining for children and adults, but a way for those groups to play together.

“We have those small children coming in who don’t know Mario, who haven’t played the games yet,” Takahashi said. “And then as we move up through these kids to their grandparents or their great-grandparents, Mario and Nintendo World, and Mario himself as a character in the franchise, can be that connective tissue that runs through those generations. That’s something I think we can look forward to achieving with this theme park.”

Future of Nintendo

Nintendo’s reputation has been built over time for creating new play experiences, many times through the promotion of new gaming technologies. The Nintendo Entertainment System’s extensive game catalog and the Wii’s era, when motion controls became mainstream, are just two examples. Another leap was the Nintendo Switch, which allowed people to enjoy games either on televisions or handheld consoles that are well-suited for gaming anywhere.

Takahashi, Miyamoto, and Takahashi make sure that Nintendo is not a company with cutting-edge technology but one that maximizes user convenience. Play is only as enjoyable as the technology that goes with it.

“We, as a company, want to take the tech that’s available to us, and implement it in games in a way that is easy to use and easy to understand,” Takahashi said.

“I think we’re always looking for unique uses of technology,” Miyamoto said. “How we use that in a unique way, and then distill that into a product, is what I feel Nintendo is adept at. Mario, when it was first created, was very popular. We thought it was because it was fun. So we decided that Mario would evolve along with new technology. For every kind of hardware, we’ve had a new Mario, and in the same vein with the theme park, we have AR technology and Mario Kart that’s blended together to create this harmony of the actual physical backdrops that are in the physical space and the changing virtual backdrop that’s in front of the screen. And I think that’s something that has really made this experience a great one. Going back to Mario, for any future technology that comes out, we’ll assess whether that’s best suited for Mario and continue to evolve.”

Super Nintendo World is just the latest example of Mario’s — and Nintendo’s — evolution, a combination of innovation, technology, and pure fun. It’s Mario on his greatest adventure yet: real life.