If you think about iconic E3 Nintendo moments, a few announcements might pop to mind — Shigeru Miyamoto with the Master Sword and Hylian Shield, those Jim Henson puppets, the fully choreographed fight between Iwata and Reggie for Smash Bros. — but we also think of Ubisoft and the reveal of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.
Yes, the game had been leaked weeks in advance of its official E3 announcement, but this show had it all. Miyamoto was there. He had a replica gun from the game. He walked out of a corridor filled with dry ice. What more could you want? Well, as it turns out, Nintendo wanted less.
In a new GamesIndustry.biz feature on the legacy of the showcase, the man behind Ubisoft's E3 showings, Leon Winkler, confessed that Nintendo was initially unsure about the showmanship of the Mario + Rabbids reveal, instead thinking that "it should be more serious".
According to Winkler, the Big N took some convincing and it all came down to how enthusiastically Miyamoto reacted to the plans on the day, as he explains in the following excerpt from GamesIndustry.biz:
"When I first pitched that idea with Nintendo, they were not sure and thought it should be more serious," Winkler says. "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'."
And thank goodness he could see the coolness of it all because that Miyamoto/Yves Guillemot back-to-back photo is a beauty. It also produced one of the more tender moments of the showcase, where praise from Miyamoto and audience applause left the game's creative director, Davide Soliani, in tears.
The GamesIndustry.biz feature also contains some insight into how much of a celebrity Miyamoto was at the yearly showcase, with Nintendo's former VP of marketing and corporate affairs, Perrin Kaplan, confessing that their "biggest challenge" every year was getting him from the entrance to the Nintendo booth without being late:
"We loved people saying hi, or doing autographs, but getting him through that daily was really tough.
Really early on, he would still wonder why all these people wanted to talk to him. I had to tell him, 'Your games inspired them. You're an original, man'."
For more insight into the rise and fall of E3, we'd recommend checking out Chris Dring's full feature on GamesIndustry.biz.
With E3's official cancellation last year, these high-profile showings feel like a thing of the past for Nintendo now. Sure, Summer Game Fest captures some of that spirit for certain studios (not Nintendo, mind), but there was nothing like E3, eh?