The classic video game Super Mario Brothers is reborn as a theme park—it’s called Super Nintendo World, and it’s at Universal Studios in Japan and Hollywood
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 555. In movies, if they ever have to read an American telephone number out loud, they usually read a phone number that includes 555. That’s because this combination was reserved for directory assistance—no person would have a 555 number. Back before the internet, you would call 555-1212 and you’d get a phone operator who could look up a phone number for you. I bet some of you didn’t even know that existed.
Anyway in movies, when they needed a phone number in the script, they would use a 555 number, so that they wouldn’t accidentally use a real person’s phone number in a movie. That could get annoying.
Anyway, this is lesson number 555, and that means JR has uploaded today’s full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/555.
Coming up on today’s Plain English: Did you play Super Mario Brothers as a kid? If so, you might feel like a kid again if you go to Universal Studios in Japan or Hollywood. That’s because Nintendo has teamed up with Universal to create Super Nintendo World, a part of Universal Studios theme parks. A video game that’s almost forty years old is now a theme park—and people love it. So on today’s lesson, we’ll reflect back on the video game and also talk about how Nintendo and Universal adapted it to a theme park.
The expression today is “team up” and we have a song of the week. Let’s get going.
Super Mario Brothers reborn as a theme park
In 1983, a Japanese company released an arcade game called Mario Brothers. It featured two plumbers—Mario, dressed in red, and Luigi, dressed in green. Together, they patrol the sewers of New York, killing strange creatures that live below ground.
An arcade game is video game on a specific machine. You’ve probably been to arcades, which have lots and lots of these machines—each machine with just one game on it. That, believe it or not, is how Mario Brothers started.
But just a few years later, Nintendo released a video game console that attached to a television. They called it the “Family Computer” in Japan, or simply the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. And when they released the console in the North America, they had just 17 games available.
One of them was a re-imagined version of Mario Brothers—this was called Super Mario Brothers. And it would go on to become the best-selling Nintendo video game and one of the most widely-recognized video games in all of history. It also inspired several follow-up games, including Mario Kart, a racing game with the same characters.
In the console version of Super Mario Brothers, Mario and Luigi are in the Mushroom Kingdom, where they are trying to save Princess Toadstool from the enemy Bowser. Mario and Luigi are controlled by the game players. They can kill enemies, achieve coins, jump around, and even double in size.
This was an early example of a side-scrolling game. In a side-scrolling game, the players stay at the center the screen, while the background scrolls from right-to-left, simulating the character’s movement in a two-dimensional world. It also was an early example of a game with multiple levels, with each level increasing in difficulty.
Since then, video games have improved considerably, and Mario Brothers is no longer the cultural hit it once was. But the game is getting a new life. That’s because Nintendo and Universal Studios are opening Mario Brothers theme parks around the world. The first one opened in Japan in 2021; Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood opened last month. And new versions are planned for Orlando and Singapore.
You enter the park through a huge green pipe—just like in the video game. Visitors say the park’s design is spot-on: the bright colors really make you feel like you’re in the Mushroom Kingdom. The park features rides, character meet and greets, and game-inspired food. The biggest ride is Mario Kart, created after the video game by the same name.
This is a theme park about a video game. And what’s interesting is that the theme park visit is gamified. In other words, visitors get to act like game players, accumulating points and unlocking rewards for activities in the park.
By using the smartphone app and wristband, visitors can collect coins and win points—just like players in a game. You can get points by going on rides, meeting the characters, playing mini-games, and collecting coins and keys sprinkled throughout the park. Leaderboards on the app show which visitors are collecting the most points. If you come back to the park, you can keep accumulating points. The park also includes Mario-themed slot machines and other small games and challenges.
Visitors on the Mario Kart ride put on special virtual reality glasses and get to play along and earn points as the ride advances. At the end of the ride, visitors can see how they did in comparison with the others on the ride at the same time.
When I first heard that Nintendo and Universal Studios were teaming up to create a Mario Brothers theme park, my first reaction was: “Why?” Yes, Mario Brothers, and later Mario Kart, were huge video games in their time—but their time was many years ago. Mario Kart was released in 1992; that’s thirty years ago.
But reading about it now, I think it makes a lot of sense. First, the design is brilliant for kids. The mushrooms, the castles, the pipes, the bright colors, the vividness of the whole world—it’s made for kids. And the original game designers also designed the parks. Second, many of game elements—collecting coins, for example, reaching a palace, things like that—these are things you can simulate with kids in a park.
And that’s really the innovation: when you go to the park, you get to “play” the game. Unlike other parks, where you just wander around, you can use the wristband to get points, compete with others, break your own record—just like a player in the game.
The attraction is called Super Nintendo World and it’s included in a ticket to Universal Studios Japan and Universal Studios Hollywood.
Play the original game
You can play the original Super Mario Brothers—the 1985 version—in a browser. The site is supermario-game.com, I’ll link to it in the transcript. You can play it on your keyboard, and the game is right there in your web browser. It takes me back. I remembered it all. And I had to stop playing for fear that I’d break to keys on my keyboard from hitting them so hard.
I wasn’t allowed to have a Nintendo—I think I may have mentioned this before—but other kids in my neighborhood had it, so I’d play at their houses. I wasn’t any good. But it was addictive and it was fun. And I can still hear the music, too.
Learn English the way it’s really spoken
