LEGO Super Mario – 4 jaar in ontwikkeling, geen connectie met Nintendo Switch

LEGO Super Mario – 4 jaar in ontwikkeling, geen connectie met Nintendo Switch

Nintendo en LEGO hebben een gloednieuwe reeks LEGO-sets onthuld, gebaseerd op de Super Mario-franchise.

In een interview met The Brothers Brick sprak Digital Design Lead voor LEGO Super Mario Jonathan Bennink over de oorsprong van het project en het unieke concept ervan.

LEGO Super Mario – Interview hoogtepunten

I’ve been working on this project for four years, but about a half a year before that, leaders from both LEGO and Nintendo met up to talk about what we could do together and where our core competencies lie. We decided early on that we wanted to leverage what both parties are good at.

For LEGO, that’s of course the brick, being creative and using your imagination. For Nintendo, it is seamless interactivity and innovation. We wanted to make sure that when LEGO and Nintendo come together, those two big brands with lots of fans, that we do it justice.

About half a year into the project we made this first prototype of an interactive Mario figure. I hope one day we get to share this with the world because I think it would be quite interesting for people to know where it came from and how it evolved. But it was basically just a tiny little brick, maybe four modules high with a screen and speakers that we put a cap on and paint red. Once we put the cap on, we were all like, “Yeah, that’s Mario!” and we instantly fell in love with him as an interactive LEGO character.

But we didn’t know exactly what to do with him and how to make the most of the functionality. For that, we worked with Nintendo and play-tested with kids for quite a few iterations until we solidified the idea of building levels.

Essentially, you can’t go wrong building levels but certain combinations and tricks will make the level better and get more coins from it. Building levels was probably the biggest revelation of the project because that is really where the core LEGO play comes in. Everything is happening in the bricks, and it’s about coming up with ideas for levels and building anything that you want with the technology and interactivity that Nintendo is known for infused in it from the beginning.

Het ziet er goed uit, maar ze hadden in 4 jaar zoveel meer kunnen doen.

Geen console verbinding

Fans hadden oorspronkelijk gedacht dat de sets een of andere vorm van Nintendo Switch-connectiviteit zouden hebben, Bennink bevestigde dat dit helaas niet het geval zou zijn.

I unfortunately can’t talk about the battery or updates, though we’ll be releasing that information in the future. I also can’t tell you what it connects to, but I can tell you that it doesn’t connect to the Nintendo Switch.

It doesn’t connect to the Nintendo hardware platforms. This is because we wanted to keep the experiences very separate. LEGO Mario is not a video game. Kids are basically role-playing a video game with the sets by building levels, but it doesn’t go into a Nintendo game, for instance. So there’s a very clear separation between those, but I can’t comment on anything that it can connect to just yet.

Jammer, maar zou het een groot verschil hebben gemaakt … we denken van niet.

Andere series

Is LEGO van plan om andere lijnen te maken op basis van verschillende Nintendo IP’s?

Again, I can’t go into any specifics here, but I can say that we haven’t worked for four years to release just one wave of products. We hope to have a long and fruitful relationship with Nintendo and their IPs, and we are really looking forward to working with them on a longer-term. They have a lot of very exciting IPs that we might do or might not do.

Dus ja, dat is zo ongeveer bevestigd.

LEGO Super Mario is gepland om later dit jaar in 2020 te lanceren.