If you were to list the many games that helped make the Nintendo Switch iconic in its first year of life back in 2017, you’d eventually get to the 3rd party collaboration called Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. This was the insane mashup of Mario from Nintendo and the Rabbids from Ubisoft. When the leaks of the game first came out, many, including us here at the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast, didn’t believe that the game was real. Then, at E3 2017, Shigeru Miyamoto took the stage during the Ubisoft event alongside the company’s CEO to help show just how grand the unique team-up was.
However, Leon Winkler, who was the former head of Ubisoft’s shows at the now-defunct E3, revealed that Nintendo felt a different path should be taken to make the game stand out. He told GameIndustry.biz:
“When I first pitched that idea with Nintendo, they were not sure and thought it should be more serious. And the idea of having that smoke machine when Miyamoto walked into the auditorium, with the lights in the background… they were like ‘I dunno’. But we said, ‘Just try it out, we’ll do it on site, if he gets enthusiastic about it, we’ll do it’. And on the day he was like ‘Yeah, this is cool’. Now we have two legends on stage, Miyamoto and Yves, and they have guns. So let’s create the picture of E3 with them back-to-back. That picture was everywhere when people were talking about E3 that year.”
He’s not wrong. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was one of many Nintendo titles taking the gaming world by storm that week (the other being Super Mario Odyssey thanks to “Jump Up, Superstar!”). So, yeah, let that be a lesson. You can go serious for some titles, but you need to let the fun fly with others!
