Super Mario Land 3D Event in Time Square

Mario’s new adventure on the 3DS was celebrated last saturday here in New York City in the middle of busy Time Square. Thousands of people took a peek in Mario’s world in real life with awe and excitement. It truly was a great place to celebrate cause it’s seen by thousands of people within a short period of time. Here’s a few pictures I took of the event.

The booth where you can play Super Mario 3D Land. Later, the people who had the 3DS’ would go around the line and let people play the game briefly.

The Jumbotron from ABC Studios had these all day. You could tweet and have your message posted on the jumbotron.

The Super Mario 3D Land Pizza truck parked in front of Toys R Us. You had to tweet to get a free pizza.

There were dozens of people dressed up as Mario at the event. They made their in a little later after I took these shots. Before we went in, they stood around in front of us (looking bored). A lot of these have no clue what the fuck was going on and so does the employees in white overalls. It’s as if they were briefed the day at the event. What a mess.

Hundreds of Tanuki Tails and Ears were given upon their entrance. They sell closer to $100 on eBay.

Here’s what it looked like. It was nice overall. Some of the props looked so realistic like the bulletbill and the goomba. Some of the props, like the brick blocks were measured a little too tall from the platform. It’s almost as if they ran out of time building all of this. The trampoline-like platform below makes these noises when you step on them which was a neat touch. The warp pipe slide also made that warp sound once you got to the bottom of it – it was great!

I’m pretty sure some of you have seen blogs of this event on the internet. What you probably didn’t see or read was the amount of people there was lined up to get in to this small space (see the picture on the left. bonus points if you can find where the line starts). Think of this event as a pretty badass roller coaster at the theme park you’re at and there’s hundreds of people lined up for it. It was so packed, we didn’t even see where the entrance to this thing was until 3 fucking hours later when it was our time to go in. Tanuki tail and ears were given at the event for free to those who got in. Unfortunately, we didn’t get one because they had just enforced the wrist band number idea they had 3 hours after the event first began. At this point, my wife have had enough of their bullshit and let it all out at the woman who stopped us going in. They also decided to give away the mustaches (you can see my son wearing it on one of the pics above) to the people in line.

The problem was the way they handled the line. It’s as if their ideas of getting it together were 1 or 2 hours short. Maybe 2 hours before the event was done that the line situation started to come together (or so we thought). IT WAS A CLUSTERFUCK. A few exchange of words between parents who are upset, some of which have been there for nearly 4 hours, was definitely seen and heard at this event. One of the people I was talking to in the line woke up at 6:30 am, drove 2 hours to this event, waited nearly 4 hours in line just to get in! The guy was so upset, he didn’t even want to purchase the game anymore which was available a day earlier at Toys R Us. I was told later on that the Tanuki tail and ears were also available at Toys R Us but with a purchase of the game itself. But they too had a 200+ line inside.. In conclusion, if Nintendo was reading this or whoever was the marketing firm in charge of this event, please, stay away from each other or at least have a better idea on how to handle people. To date, this was probably the worse event I’ve ever been to. I’d rather sit in a PTA meeting than be at an event like this in the future. I think next time, I’ll stick to Nintendo World Store events.