I'd arrived to see a wide collection of Nintendo Super Mario merch, clothing, and toys, but I was transfixed by the morphable image of Super Mario's face on a nearby iPad screen.
Hello Mario, which arrives in the US on February 19 in the App Store and Google Play (and will be available in Japan after a few months), is a free and oddly engaging app that doesn't do much, but somehow perfectly conveys the ethos of Mario's antic personality.
Many of the toys Nintendo and its partners showed were aimed at young children, including toddlers. There were Fisher-Price toys like a Little People set that recreates Mario's platform gaming interface, with a collection of Little People Super Mario characters, green plastic pipes, and physical buttons to activate familiar game sounds (hunt for the original Super Mario music Easter Egg), and another based on Super Mario 3's Treasure Ship, complete with a launchable catapult.
There were adorable Super Mario baby and toddler onesies and bath toys that my kids would've loved. They're adults now, though, perhaps they'd still get a kick out of them.
Still, it was the app, which will also be available to run on the Nintendo Switch 2, that captivated me.
Hello Mario starts with just Mario's face against a blue background, but you can grab any part of Mario's face and pull and stretch it. One finger might stretch his iconic mustache to extremes, and two fingers can pull his face this way and that, playfully distorting his well-known visage.
At one point, we put a finger on his face and started spinning his head around like a top. When we released our finger, Mario's head bounced around the screen: the more we bounced, the more points we collected, and suddenly, we were collecting gold coins.
You can tap the screen to reveal a simple interface and, for instance, access familiar game elements like a green pipe, Blooper (Mario's squid-like enemy), or Toad. We grabbed Toad, moved him about the screen while Mario's eyes tracked him, and then dropped him on Mario's nose to super-size Mario.
It's not a complex app, but it will clearly entertain young children. To that end, Hello Mario even has built-in screentime control features. When it's time to take a screen break, Maro will automatically cover his face and stop interacting. Mario won't play again until you close and reopen the app.
I found that I could not stop pushing, pulling, and playing with the fungible Mario; perhaps I need that screen control.
All of this, the apps, toys (pricing was not announced yet), the clothing, and even a nifty board book are all timed to arrive just ahead of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, set to hit theaters on April 1, 2026. I wonder if it'll be as much fun as this app.
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