LEGO and Nintendo are bringing Super Mario to life with Bluetooth-powered sets and figures

These sets let you create you own Super Mario levels and collect coins with a Mario LEGO figure

LEGO and Nintendo are bringing Super Mario to life with Bluetooth-powered sets and figures 1

LEGO, in collaboration with Nintendo, is introducing a new way to play with its iconic bricks, and it’s bringing this fun innovative experience to fans later this year through LEGO Super Mario.

Neither a video game nor a traditional LEGO brick-based set, LEGO Super Mario is a new product line that allows builders to create their own Super Mario levels using LEGO versions of warp pipes, moving platforms, question blocks, pits of lava, and even baddies like Goombas, Piranha Plants, Bloopers, Koopalings, and Bowser. To achieve a video game-like play experience, some of these LEGO pieces have Bluetooth sensors in them.

After building a level, players can now run through them to collect coins with a Bluetooth-powered Mario LEGO figure, which has a built-in speaker that can play iconic sound effects from the video game, as well as tiny LCD displays that show Mario’s different facial expressions and provide visual feedback on the character’s progression in the game, including the number of coins he has collected and the remaining time he has to complete the level.

LEGO Super Mario

While LEGO and Nintendo have yet to release specific details about the set, it seems to work by having the Mario figure stand on LEGO pieces that have Bluetooth sensors in them. For instance, when Mario jumps on a Goomba or lands on the brick where the flagpole is erected, the sensor tells Mario to make the appropriate sound effect.

“Mario has a color sensor that can read colored Lego bricks and he also gets coins from the action bricks that you can see in the video,” Jonathan Bennick, design manager at LEGO Creative Play Lab, told Metro. “So there’s an action brick in the start pipe, one on the Goomba, one on the rotating platform, or there’s the question mark block that gives you random power-ups.”

LEGO Super Mario has no exact release date and pricing details yet, but Bennick said that they are rolling out more information as well as different challenges, enemies, and sets that go with the new product line in the coming months.

And since LEGO and Nintendo have been working on LEGO Super Mario for over four years now, Bennick said that the partnership between the two companies may likely extend to other projects in the future. “Right now, we’re focused on LEGO Super Mario but at the same time we’re definitely looking forward to collaborating with them on a longer term,” he said. “We’ve spent four years developing this, so only having a line of products for half a year or so wouldn’t make too much sense!”

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