Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [75]
There have been rides based on Song of the South, on Wind in the Willows, on Murder, She Wrote, and on Swamp Thing. In Minnesota, the Trix Rabbit and the Lucky Charms leprechaun have their own theme park. Dolly Parton has her own, Dollywood. But no Super Mario Park. What gives? Nintendo’s stable of characters seems custom made for a massive amusement park, with themed regions based on game series. A 3-D show where pipes squirt water at you. Princess Peach’s pretty castle. The high-tech Sector Z for Star Fox, Metroid, and F-Zero. Kirby the toddler zone, with lots of soft bouncy foam. Hyrule for older kids, with Zelda roller coasters and a Link dungeon-crawl ride. A Pokémon petting zoo.
That these are easily dreamed ideas is exactly why they haven’t been implemented, Kokatu.com reports. Nintendo’s specialty isn’t in big Disney-style entertainments, and no one has yet approached them with a dynamic new idea that wouldn’t just palette-swap a Disney park with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo learned its lesson from educational games, and PC games, and movies, and Internet services, all the way back to rice and love hotels. Stick with what you do best.
Nintendo might also recall SegaWorld. In 1996, right around the time Sega was in talks with Bandai about a possible merger, Sega opened up SegaWorld London, an indoor amusement park/arcade/gift shop selling Sega swag. In Canada, a series of Sega City Playdiums followed. A year later it premiered Sega World Sydney, right in the shopping mecca Darling Harbor. Its building was a giant red cube with an enormous glass pyramid reaching up out of it. It was billed as Australia’s DisneyWorld. Sega’s plan was to build hype for four years, then steal the show when the 2000 Summer Olympics came to town.
But not even Disney could open up EuroDisney without years of poor attendance. Not even Spielberg could make GameWorks work as anything other than, ultimately, Chuck E. Cheese with beer. The Sega World Sydney rides weren’t based on Sonic or Sega’s other game heroes, like Shinobi or Virtua Fighter. They were just unbranded rides, with the Sega brand promising a speedy, “rad,” interactive style that wasn’t delivered. The only thing truly Sega was Sonic Live in Sydney, a children’s stage show based on the popular Sonic cartoon.
The park lost money four years straight, even after the hundredplus games were all turned free-play. (That might have cost Sega more in lost quarters than it gained them in attendance.) Sega World Sydney held on until the Olympics, but not even that attendance boost helped. Nintendo stole Sega’s thunder on the cheap by having a Pokémon World Championship at Sydney University, paralleling the Olympics. The entire Darling Harbor economy (IMAX theater, restaurants, trendy shops) plunged like a high-diver following the Olympics. Sega World Sydney closed for good two months after the Olympics concluded. The stunning cube-and-pyramid architecture became a furniture warehouse, then was demolished in 2008.
Nintendo did try out a traveling Pokémon Park for a few months starting in 2005, which drew more than four million visitors. The closest Mario has gotten to a permanent home, though, is in block form. A Lego version of a certain plumber wearing blue overalls and a red shirt is on display at California’s Legoland, quite appropriate enough for a character who was first constructed from square pixels. This plumber, though, is carrying an accessory we’ve never seen in any Mario games in all his years of adventure through pipes: a toilet.
Recently, students at New York University’s “Big Games” class—who previously made a live-action Pac-Man through the streets of midtown called Pac-Manhattan—came up with the Nintendo Amusement Park. It