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'." .
