This is Nintendo’s first foray into film since the ill-starred Super Mario Brothers movie of 1993, in which Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo skulked around a dank metropolis that bore no obvious resemblance to the Mushroom Kingdom of Miyamoto’s game. He remembers the episode with a wry smile: “Our American subsidiary was giving away a lot of our licences, and we had them stop doing that,” he grins. “But I thought after that, ‘I want to be involved with how this happens in future.’ And this particular time is a good time for me to be involved.”