Nintendo’s biggest release this April isn’t a video game. It’s "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" debuting this Wednesday.

Why it matters: After decades of operating with a fervent focus on making acclaimed video games, Nintendo is now testing its potential as a cross-medium entertainment powerhouse.

• It’s a heady expansion for what is arguably the most successful video game company of all time, one worth more than $45 billion.
• And it’s been a long time coming.

Driving the news: Buzz from the Mario movie’s premiere Saturday has been positive, though reviews have yet to run.

• The animated feature, which features Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario, was co-financed by Nintendo and Universal and co-produced by Nintendo and "Despicable Me" studio Illumination.
• The game and animation companies worked so closely together that, in 2021, Nintendo added Illumination chief Chris Meledandri to its board of directors, the only member from outside the company’s native Japan.
• The Mario movie follows another uncharacteristic push from Nintendo — into theme parks with the opening of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood in February.

Between the lines: Despite its popularity, Nintendo has resisted going the route of Disney or DC Comics to transport its world-famous characters into TV or movies.

• Since the 1980s and the early era of Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda, Nintendo merchandised its characters for dolls, apparel, even breakfast cereal, but its unpopular 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was an outlier and perhaps a cautionary tale.
• In 2015, however, months before his death and while Nintendo struggled to promote its disappointing Wii U console, then-Nintendo of America president Satoru Iwata said the company needed to be more “proactive” in extending its intellectual property beyond games.
• A year later, Iwata’s successor announced Nintendo’s plans to make a movie, and the Mario film project with Illumination was revealed in early 2018.

The big picture: Nintendo is usually a trendsetter within gaming, thanks to daringly innovative devices like the Wii and Switch, but its movie move drops it midstream into the fast-flowing trend of games-turned-movies-and-shows.

• Old Nintendo rival Sega broke that spell with a pair of "Sonic the Hedgehog" movies, the first in 2020, which have earned $700 million at the box office worldwide.
• Sony’s PlayStation division also hit big with 2022’s live-action "Uncharted" and again with this year’s HBO smash adaptation of "The Last of Us" (which, as with the Mario movie, was billed as a joint creative effort of game people with TV/movie folks).
• Even Apple TV+ just debuted a Cold War thriller that’s based on the licensing of the Russian game Tetris, which also heavily features actors playing Nintendo execs.
• The turnaround comes from several factors: creators with reverence for the source material, the attachment of big stars to some projects and deft choices about how much of a game to adapt to a non-game project.

What’s next: Nintendo hasn’t announced more movies, but Mario actor Pratt has teased that the film ends with a clue as to what may come next.

• As Iwata told a Nintendo investor in 2015: “You might be unsatisfied with our pace of IP utilization, but we ask for your understanding.”

E3 is off again, though industry players will still attempt to make mid-June a promotional spectacle for corporate video games.

Driving the news: The Entertainment Software Association and events company ReedPop announced E3’s cancellation Thursday, after news broke on IGN.

• “We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn’t have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer an obstacle they couldn’t overcome," Kyle Marsden-Kish, ReedPop's global vice president of gaming, said in a statement.
• Nintendo, Sega and Ubisoft — all big traditional E3 exhibitors — had already announced they’d skip this year’s show.

Be smart: The cancellation of E3 does not mean the cancellation of everything the industry and public associate with E3.

• Still happening: Promotional showcase events for Xbox (June 11), Ubisoft (June 12) and possibly other big publishers, now clustering around Summer Game Fest (June 8), a combo promotional stage show and smaller-scale, hands-on play space with some upcoming games.
• No longer happening: The multiday trade show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where game publishers pay for massive booths, attendees play hands-on builds of upcoming games and press and retail buyers meet with company leaders.

🎮 The National Labor Relations Board has found merit in two of three claims levied against Activision Blizzard last August, one which alleged the surveillance of Blizzard employees who walked out over the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. A third charge, involving cutting off a Slack chat channel, had been withdrawn.

• The Communication Workers of America, which filed the charges, celebrated the decision, while Activision Blizzard has declined a settlement, saying the presence of staffers at a worker walkout was for security and interactions with the press.

⚠️ New training software for Javelin anti-tank missiles will run on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, the Military Times reports.

💰 CD Projekt RED reported a net profit of 347 million PLN ($81 million) for 2022 as it rebounds from the calamitous late 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077. But the company has had to restart development of Project Sirius, an upcoming Witcher game, forcing 43 million PLN ($10 million) in impairment charges.

⚔️ Vampire Survivors, the catchy indie game about surviving hordes of swarming enemies, beat out Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarök and others to win Best Game at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards.

☹️ Naughty Dog has acknowledged the glitchy technical performance of the PC release of The Last of Us Pt.1, which was ported from PlayStation by Iron Galaxy. Major patches are in the works, the studio says.

😲 Sega released a real, free Sonic spinoff game on April Fool’s Day. Its title: The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I recently used an AI chatbot to help me interview winners of the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards.

• Interviewees picked a word, then ChatGPT wrote a question for them using their word.
• Nine interviews total; first three ran last week, middle three are below.

Fourth developer(s): Sony PlayStation’s Michael Kent and Jodie Kupsco, after winning Best Audio for God of War Ragnarök.

• Their word: “banana.”
• The AI-generated question: "Sound design in God of War Ragnarök is known for its attention to detail and immersive experience. Can you walk us through your creative process when developing audio for specific gameplay elements, such as combat or environmental sounds? And on a fun note, did you use any unusual objects or sounds — like a banana or any other unconventional items — in the creation of the game's audio effects?"
• Kent’s answer: “When Kratos or Atreus does a big finisher move, like a kill move, it's really gory and visceral. So we had a bunch of vegetables and a bunch of different fruits and stuff and totally destroyed them for the game. And that's what you're hearing when you're pulling apart a Draugr or whatever.” But … were any of those bananas? “It was celery, cabbages, things like that.”

Fifth developer(s): Half Mermaid’s Sam Barlow, Natalie Watson and Connor Carson, after winning Best Narrative for Immortality.

• Their word: “first-person shooters.”
• The AI-generated question: "Immortality is a departure from your previous work in the first-person shooters genre. What inspired you to shift your focus to a more narrative-driven game, and what were some of the unique challenges you faced when creating a game that prioritizes storytelling over traditional first-person shooter mechanics?
• Barlow’s answer: “Totally honestly, we ran out of bullets, so we were forced to pivot outside of the first-person shooter genre.”
• Note: The joke here is that Half Mermaid never made first-person shooters, so ChatGPT’s question, egged on by the developers' prompt, is nonsensical. Observed Barlow: “I think that says everything you need to know about ChatGPT.”

Sixth developer: BlueTwelve Studio’s Swann Martin-Raget after winning Best Debut for Stray.

• His word: “cat.”
• The AI-generated question: "Stray places the player in the role of a cat navigating a futuristic cityscape. Can you tell us about the process of designing the game from a feline perspective, and what challenges arose when trying to create a game that both accurately portrays cat behavior while also being enjoyable and engaging for players?"
• His answer: “That’s a very good question, Chat GPT, thank you for asking. It's extremely challenging, because we have a middle ground between level design and level art that is really hard to find for us." He explained that in many city-based games, artists can place pipes or air conditioning units outside buildings as simple decorative elements, but that in Stray, players see such objects and are tempted to interact with them. “So we had to do a lot of iterations to make sure that we reached a visual quality that we wanted, but it was also, from a cat perspective, fun to play around and move around without getting lost.”

Takeaways so far: Chat GPT is sometimes confidently wrong.