Mario Creator Shigeru Miyamoto On Super Nintendo World & Difference Between Creating Video Games and Theme Park Experiences

The first US Super Nintendo World theme park, the result of a partnership between Nintendo and Universal Parks & Resorts, has finally held its grand opening – last week, Shigeru Miyamoto, the game designer and creator of Mario, officially opened Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood, the second venue of Nintendo's theme park project.

Speaking to IGN shortly after the opening, Miyamoto, who had been heavily involved in designing and constructing the theme park, talked about the reasons for the company's ambitious plans to create such Nintendo-themed areas and discussed the difference between approaches to creating video games and theme park experiences.

Miyamoto shared that he had been discussing the idea of creating a Nintendo theme park with Nintendo's former president and CEO Satoru Iwata for over a decade.

According to him, the company has long understood the power of its characters and the potential to leverage them in various forms of media beyond video games. That is why Nintendo has been striving to make the most of the characters they own without just staying in the video game realm. To do so, they have been searching for the best venues and apparently, a theme park appeared to be one of them.

The game designer also said that he has been interested in theme parks for a long time and early in his career, he visited Disney World to observe what he believed was the most recent innovations in entertainment. However, at the time, his faith in Nintendo's capacity to mirror Disney's grand projects was wavering. 

"The business of creating or running a theme park is very big and very different from what Nintendo does, which is create and sell games,” Miyamoto said. "And I thought, 'It's going to be difficult; Nintendo's not going to be able to run a theme park business.'"

However, when Nintendo was able to partner with Universal to bring the idea of a theme park to life, Miyamoto was relieved and felt satisfied that the companies managed to build a relationship "where [they] can really have a collaborative partnership."

Additionally, Miyamoto spoke about the difference between creating video games and working on theme park experiences. According to him, one of the crucial aspects when developing a game is to make sure that players "recognize and understand quickly and easily how to play the game."

However, at the same time, games are built in a way so that players could experience them for days, weeks, or even months. "And so the creative aspect happens in creating the depth for that person… for the person to be able to play the game for a long time," Miyamoto explained.

Meanwhile, theme park rides are few-minute experiences, so, according to Miyamoto, the understanding of how to have fun should be nearly immediate. He also noted that a theme park is "an interactive experience and it doesn’t really need a story." "You go there and experience it, and in that way I’m glad the theme park turned out the way it did," he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, the game designer touched upon a widespread belief that he doesn't care much about video games' narrative and spoke about Nintendo's plans for Orlando and Singapore theme park locations. You can learn more about it by reading the original article here.