How Universal’s Super Nintendo World is the play-focused land for our times
A credit list into the hundreds — likely thousands — helped bring Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World to life. And the details show it.
After walking through an over-sized green warp pipe — and hearing the threepronged digital zaps familiar to generations of “Super Mario Bros.” players — we’re in a brightly-colored fantasy world that immediately feels interactive. Laid out like an obstacle course, with creatures, characters, moving platforms and mushrooms beckoning us to explore, everywhere we look we’re greeted with an inviting but loud contrast.
Plants chomp, a thumping, angry-faced block hovers and slams over a cave, and familiar-but-odd critters wander above us while our eyes adjust to an appealing clash of wintry-like and desert environments. We’re surrounded by brash digital colors, and yet Super Nintendo World feels made of this earth, as watercolorlike hills grace the entrance and sketch-like animations comprise some of the visuals.
As weird as all this may seem to those unfamiliar with the Mushroom Kingdom, the namesake land of the “Super Mario. Bros.’ games, it’s all presented in luminous, cheery tones that signal a sense of comfort. It’s larger-than-life mushrooms rather than trees that dot the center of the area, but they glisten and have a rubbery, bouncy sheen that beckons us closer and invites us to touch.
And for all the architecture, technology, engineering and landscape design behind Super Nintendo World, it’s all rooted in the mind of one person: master game designer Shigeru Miyamoto.
This physical, real-world space that guests can now visit had its basis in the 8-bit games of the early ‘80s, where pixel limitations meant Miyamoto and the team at Nintendo sought recognizable but off-kilter images to denote a sense of scale and fantasy. And Miyamoto’s own time in nature as a child played a part, too.
“Looking back at my childhood experiences, the times I was running around, the times I was climbing things and went into dark areas — that was kind of trying to create the connection between my real-life experiences with the 8-bit world,” said Miyamoto via a translator. “So creating a dark space, or something you could climb to, those are the experiences we were trying to create within the limitations to make a game. Fast forward to where we are now, those limitations are no longer there. What were limitations are just real.”
True-life inspiration became a fantasy, interactive world, which has now come full circle to exist as a physical space, one housing an elaborate “Mario Kart”-inspired attraction, a triumphant creation where the tactile and the imaginary, built sets and the animated world, all spring to life on a track-driven ride that blurs the boundaries between game and reality. “Super Nintendo World” is not only the most game-focused theme park land in existence, but a love letter to the medium that has, over the last 40 years, gradually come to dominate our lives and pop culture.
Nintendo’s own video game console the Switch has sold more than 122 million units, making it third-best selling console ever, and Super Nintendo World arrives weeks before a new “Super Mario Bros.” film and at a time when HBO’s “The Last of Us” is the most popular series on television.
But more than that, games and game-like trappings have gradually infiltrated many aspects of our lives. Romances start by swiping right on apps, friendships are maintained by “hearting” photos and posts — the giving of digital points to one another — and the tech world’s latest fascination is virtual chatbots that have the ability to toy with our emotions. Play takes many forms, and today it defines us.