Last month, AARP – yes, the one for old people – made waves at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas with a holographic AI Mario that was comically un-Mario-like. The generative nightmare sounded like a Soviet footsoldier and mostly seemed interested in recommending that people shop at Target. What unofficial AI Mario’s many critics did not seem to be aware of, however, is that there was already an official AI Mario, created and employed by Nintendo. For the past many months, it has lived in Manhattan’s Nintendo Store, and… it also mostly sucks, but in a different way.
After learning about the Nintendo Store’s chatty AI Mario late last year via the eternally reliable sources of esoterica that are TikTok and Chris Person, I finally got around to putting him through his paces this week. AI Mario’s installment, a replica of the Mushroom Kingdom with Peach’s castle in the background, is a screen that takes up a whole wall’s worth of space on the store’s second floor. If you stand in front of it, Mario moves to follow you – even if you try to flee to either side, which is kind of unnerving. You need only say, “Hi, Mario!” to get him to engage with you. After that, he will barely let you get a word in edgewise.
I went into this experiment with a whole list of questions, as well as a longer-term plan to convince AI Mario that he was a horse. But seconds after I said hello, Mario began peppering me with questions. What was my favorite Mario game? Had I played Mario Odyssey? What was my favorite color of Yoshi? Who did I main in Mario Kart? Had I ever pet a Yoshi? Sometimes he would react to my specific answers, but other times he would either pretend to understand (“Oh… that’s my favorite too”) or express confusion and then quickly change the subject. He would regularly repeat that he was only there to talk about Mario games and the Mushroom Kingdom before saying seemingly contradictory things like, “Speaking of video games, what’s your favorite food?” (In a twist that’s much funnier on paper than it is in reality, he would only recognize answers to that specific question if they involved pizza or pasta.)
When I asked a Nintendo Store employee what was powering AI Mario, they replied, “We tell everyone it’s a person, but it’s actually AI.” But I feel like calling it AI is kind of a stretch. It’s clearly not running on generative AI. Questions and responses are canned and seem pre-recorded, which allows Mario’s digital simulacrum to look, move, and sound like the character should, but severely limits what he can actually say. I’m sure that’s the way Nintendo likes it; after all, I can’t imagine a company notoriously preoccupied with its squeaky-clean image would love for its mascot to, for example, engage in a long-form conversation about 9/11 a few miles from where 9/11 took place.
That’s not to say this thing is incapable of weirdness, however. Its dialogue trees, though planted in shallow soil, boast some bizarre branches. This Mario – unlike most other iterations of Mario – loves to talk about his mom, aka his “Mama Mia.” If you bite on his question about your favorite food, he’ll eventually wrap around to a childhood story about how the revered Mama Mia would convince Mario and Luigi to eat their vegetables by saying, “Eat your salad. Don’t forget Mr Green!” Mario also explained to me that his system of nomenclature is consistent across generations: Mom is Mama Mia, grandma is Grandmama Mia, great grandma is Great Grandmama Mia, and so on. Further inquiries about Mario’s mom led to him inviting me over for dinner in the Mushroom Kingdom to try out his mom’s special recipe for “the best spaghetti-meatball.” When asked about the character Little Mac from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Mario erroneously thought I was referring to mac and cheese, the food, and began to extol the virtues of his mom’s secret macaroni recipe.
Nintendo’s AI Mario also has numerous recurring quirks, like a tendency to make a high-pitched meowing sound on a regular basis, seemingly in reference to Cat Suit Mario from Super Mario 3D World. If you engage him on this subject, you can even get a voice cameo from Luigi, who will – at Mario’s request – demonstrate his own meow from off-screen. Speaking of Luigi-related reactions, if you tell Mario you have played as Luigi in various Mario games but not as Mario himself, AI Mario will reply, “Oh no” and begin to weep.
It was difficult to get Mario to reply to most questions – even ones that seemed well within his ballpark, like a question about whether he’d visited Luigi’s Mansion after he first namedropped the location – but mentions of other Nintendo characters would sometimes get him going. For example:
- He thinks Pikachu is “cute.” They apparently “go back a long way.”
- Wario is “a bad guy” who “always gets a lump of coal for Christmas from Santa Claus.”
- Peach, he believes, is better than anybody else at video games.
- Donkey Kong is a “big guy” who “says ‘ooo ooo ooo’ a lot.”
- Everybody needs a friend like Toad: “When he dares you to jump into a painting, you’re gonna do it because you trust each other and he’s your friend.”
- Yoshi "likes a-apples and he likes a-peaches, and if you don't like something, he likes it anyway."
- Mario’s favorite thing about Kirby is that he goes very fast in his pink cart in Mario Kart. I found this response strange, because Kirby is not in Mario Kart.
- “If you have a party, you always want to invite Link, because you say, ‘Hey Link, would you please carve the turkey,’ and then he brings out his sword and [Mario’s head suddenly tilts way too far back, nearly disconnecting from his body before slamming forward in a violent motion] YAH chop chop chop chop. Just like that, the whole turkey’s all carved up and everything.”
- If you mention Bowser, Mario will go on a long diatribe implying that Peach thinks Bowser is handsome, and thus, Mario needs to make himself more handsome to compensate. Meanwhile, he will not answer questions about Peach’s present location, which does not bode well for the state of their relationship.
- In most cases Mario will not acknowledge non-Nintendo characters, but he makes an exception for Sonic The Hedgehog, going so far as to say that Sonic is cool and all, but “I think I run a bit faster, jump a bit higher.” A bold claim!
- AI Mario will not acknowledge Waluigi, no matter how many times and different ways you ask.
Most people at the Nintendo Store who were not me – determined to plumb the depths of AI Mario’s mind for the sake of a blog – got bored and walked away after a minute or two, and I can understand why: Even when it’s firing on all cylinders, this is basically a Mario smalltalk simulator. On top of that, Mario as a conversationalist is remarkably self centered; he only seems interested in your experiences with his brand, almost like he’s an elaborate advertisement taking up a store wall or something. If I approached him while crying – for example, following a breakup, or because I’d just remembered 9/11 – he probably wouldn’t even notice.
