Nintendo was hesitant on the E3 reveal for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle with Miyamoto

Many would say that the official announcement of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle will go down as one of the best E3 reveals. There was a lot of skepticism going into the show (and early leaks didn’t help), but Ubisoft quickly eased concerns about these two franchises coming together.

Ubisoft started out its Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle E3 segment by bringing Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto to the stage as a surprise appearance, who talked a bit about the game. He also had some fun with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot – the two wielded Blasters and put a lighthearted spin on the announcement. That was a good moment, but it was actually something Nintendo was hesitant to do, feeling it should be “more serious” according to Leon Winkler, who’s been running Ubisoft’s E3 shows.

Winkler said the following about the Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle E3 reveal while speaking with GamesIndustry:

“When I first pitched that idea with Nintendo, they were not sure and thought it should be more serious. 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’. Now we have two legends on stage, Miyamoto and Yves, and they have guns. So let’s create the picture of E3 with them back-to-back. That picture was everywhere when people were talking about E3 that year.”

Something else that made the announcement special was when the camera panned to creative director Davide Soliani, who was in tears. Winkler stated:

“That’s the cool thing about events; you can show the human side of the work that we do. I could see in rehearsals that Davide was getting emotional, and I thought ‘Maybe we should get a camera moment ready for that’. Because it is important. It humanizes us as an industry. It’s Davide, who has been a Nintendo fan since he was a kid, and now his idol is on stage giving him props… I would cry, too.”

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was one of the earlier games released on Switch, and went on to be played by 10 million people. It was followed up with Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, which came out in 2022.