Super Nintendo World will open in spring with Super Mario Kart and Yoshi rides

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Super Nintendo World, AKA that Mario theme park, gets new details

(Image credit: Universal Parks & Resorts/Nintendo)

The first Super Nintendo World park is opening in spring, and you'd better bring your racing spirit because it's opening up with a Super Mario Kart ride. The theme park will arrive first as a new section of Universal Studios Japan in spring 2020 before coming to all other Universal Studios parks in the years ahead - except for the one in Beijing, Universal Parks & Resorts chairmain Tom Williams explained in an interview at a recent business conference (via Seeking Alpha).

"We are going to open up next spring. It's a whole new separate area of the park," Williams said. "It's got food. It's got merchandise. The first phase will have two rides, a Super Mario Kart Ride and as well as Yoshi's Adventures. Yoshi is one of the other Nintendo characters [Editor's note: thank you for clearing that up, Tom]. There will be two rides. The whole land is interactive. And you are going to have a wristband that's got the big red Mario symbol on it."

According to Williams, you'll be able to use that wristband (which apparently uses magnets to let you snap it onto your wrist, slap-bracelet style) all throughout Super Nintendo World. It will keep your score as you play various games throughout the park, and he also teased that it 'interfaces with your game console', which sounds cool, though you probably shouldn't bring your Switch with you on the rides.

Nintendo Switch has built-in RFID technology, most frequently used with Amiibo, so it will probably use that to link up with the wrist band. The surprising part is that there may be some kind of take-home experience that fans can enjoy even when they're not at the park. We'll keep an eye out to see if Nintendo makes an announcement of its own about that ahead of Super Nintendo World's grand opening.

You don't need to book a trip to Japan to play through our list of the best Nintendo Switch games.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.