Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle: Nintendo interview of Davide Solliani
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was officially revealed at E3 2017, and it made quite the impression on both players and the press, despite the game being a rather unexpected cross-over you usually wouldn’t believe to be viable at all.
If you want to learn more about how the game came to be, from the very mouth of the developers, why not check out Nintendo’s interview of Davide Solliani (Creative Director)?
This interview goes over various topics, suc as how the project came to be in the first place, why he thought combining Mario and the Rabbids would work so well, how the pitch meetings with Nintendo went, his emotional reaction at the Ubisoft E3 2017 press conference (where the game was revealed), and a lot more.
Here’s an excerpt:
After we felt as a team that we had something solid, Ubisoft contacted Nintendo and said, “We want to propose the idea.” We were not expecting to meet Nintendo super soon, but the meeting was about three weeks later and we said, “Oh my God, it’s super early!”
We felt that we had to do something special for this pitch. We wanted to avoid any Powerpoint presentation or any design document that would have been boring and ineffective. So we said, “We should work like crazy and go there with a playable prototype.”
When I arrived in front of Miyamoto-san, who is the creator of the games I prefer the most, who inspired my whole career as a games designer, I felt split in two between the urgency to ask for an autograph and at the same time the responsibility to present the idea in the most professional way.
But he loved it! He said, “I’m impressed!” I was not expecting such a reaction. Then he asked me, “Where did you get the Mario and Luigi from, because they look identical to the Nintendo versions?” The truth is that we were so crazy, we wanted this game to happen so much, that even with only three weeks we recreated Mario and Luigi from scratch in order to bring the essence of those two characters to our prototype. I think that this was the moment where we convinced Nintendo of our passion and commitment.
Click here to check out the full interview!
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (Switch) comes out on August 29th in Europe and North America, and next year in Japan.
