Hotel Mario - Fast Facts

The following are a bunch of miscellaneous facts relating to Hotel Mario that are not noteworthy enough to get their own page. Consider this page (as well as its siblings) a crash course of useless CD-i Nintendo information!

Fact Links:

Early Game Blurb -- From Hotel to Hotel -- Little Plumbers -- Nintendo's Involvement In This Title -- The Outsourcing -- Reuse and Recycle -- Why Hotels?

Early Game Blurb

Packaged with early CD-i titles was a catalog that contained a list of released and upcoming titles for the system. This catalog was updated a few times, and appears to have stopped being used around 1993 or 1994. A specific late 1992 catalog (packaged with Laser Lords and likely several other titles) had early (and mistake-filled) plot descriptions for four of the CD-i Nintendo titles. This includes The Faces of Evil, The Wand of Gamelon, Hotel Mario, and Super Mario's Wacky Worlds - unfortunately, none of the other titles got a mention.
This is the blurb for Hotel Mario:

Rather close to the final game's plotline... apart from the mention of Yoshi being kidnapped instead of Princess Toadstool. Yoshi doesn't appear in Hotel Mario at all, not even in the v0.09 prototype. This blurb must've been written very early in development... or the writer just messed up. It's an equal possiblity.

From Hotel to Hotel

Both Hotel Mario and Luigi's Mansion 3 share a staff member - Jeffrey Zoern, who was the art director of the former game and the lead technical character artist of the latter. It's (possibly) a huge coincidence that the same person worked on two Mario games that are set in hotels.

Little Plumbers

This is one of the weirdest facts regarding the CD-i Nintendo games, and that's saying something. The main theme for Hotel Mario is based on a polka medley that Max Steiner composed for the 1933 film Little Women. No, I am not joking, and no, Max Steiner wasn't credited.

Here are the two songs for easy comparison:

Nintendo's Involvement In This Title

A fact often stated about the CD-i Nintendo games is that Nintendo themselves had little to no involvement in their creation, and that the developers were more or less given free reign to do weird things with the franchises. There also happen to be interviews with people who worked on the four released titles (plus an unreleased one), with at least one of the questions focusing on Nintendo's involvement. So I wonder... for this game, how true is that statement?

For Hotel Mario: We have this interview with the game's executive producer and designer, Stephen Radosh. In it, he states that he had to get approval from Nintendo on a lot of things they were doing, and were specifically making sure that it looked like it belonged to the series. He also states that Nintendo were publically neutral about Hotel Mario, though (internally) they were apparently satisfied with how it turned out.

Seems like a lot of involvement for a company that was allegedly uninvolved with these titles...

The Outsourcing

It is frequently assumed - often by people with little knowledge about the CD-i Nintendo games - that the cutscenes of Hotel Mario were done by Animation Magic. This can be easily disproven by taking a look at the credits, which lists three people (Terry O'Brien, Kathy Swain, and Bonita Versh) as the animators. None of them worked for Animation Magic, and there's no mention of Animation Magic anywhere in the game. However, the three people weren't working for Philips Fantasy Factory.

Rather, they were employees of Ocatillo Pictures, a Los Angeles-based video production studio. This can be confirmed by their credits page, which also lists them as being involved in another CD-i title, Max Magic. That game had Terry (and perhaps Kathy?) work on model-making and animation.

It's unknown why Fantasy Factory didn't credit Ocatillo Pictures alongside its three employees. Maybe the company hadn't been formed yet, or maybe Fantasy Factory was being weird with proper crediting again.

Reuse and Recycle

Animation is hard work, and it often leads to shortcuts such as reusing frames in one scene for another. The CD-i Nintendo games were made on a budget and time limit, so it comes as no surprise that they recycle frames between cutscenes. Let's learn about some examples, shall we?

(Instances of frame reuse in the same cutscene and shortened/identical cutscene variants will not be counted. We're reusing frames across 2+ different cutscenes here.)

For Hotel Mario:

• This game loves to reuse this one bit of animation of the two Mario brothers walking up to something:

• It also loves to reuse another bit of animation of just Mario walking up to something:

• As well as this closeup of Mario:

Why Hotels?

So... why did Philips Fantasy Factory chose a hotel theme for their Mario game? It seems like a totally random choice. Well, the reason is that, according to this interview with Hotel Mario executive producer and designer Stephen Radosh, he had a concept for a video game that took place in a hotel with various stages and decided to incorporate it into Fantasy Factory's Mario project. It's a bit of an out-there choice, but it works well enough. (And, after Luigi's Mansion 3, it's not that out-there anymore.)