Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge — Attraction in West Hollywood

Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge is an augmented reality dark ride that is based on the Mario Kart franchise, primarily on the Mario Kart 8 video game. In the Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge queue, you'll tour Bowser’s iconic castle where you pass through the hall of medallions and trophies to the prized Golden Cup, and get an eye on his plan to defeat Team Mario as you prepare to face off on the track!

The ride's exterior and queue are modeled after Bowser's Castle. The queue gradually reveals that the ride's plot involves "Team Bowser" (Bowser and the Koopalings) challenging "Team Mario" (Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Toad, and Yoshi) to the "Universal Cup".

Guests are given the augmented reality's visors and enter the first pre-show room, which features Lakitu and Mii characters showing how to put on and adjust the visor. Guests then enter the second pre-show room, filled with replicas of Mii outfits from Mario Kart 8. Here, Lakitu explains the ride vehicles and the shooting gallery-esque gameplay. The four-person vehicles (modeled after "karts" from Mario Kart 8) follow a set path on a rail track. Guests attach the AR visors to the AR lenses in the vehicles, to view the Mario characters racing alongside them. Guests rotate their AR-wearing heads around to aim their Koopa Shell ammo, and press a button on their steering wheel to fire the shells at characters within the augmented reality. Guests accumulate points during the ride by successfully hitting the "Team Bowser" characters with their shells. If all four riders turn their wheels in unison at certain turns, they'll "drift" into the turn, earning more points.

After leaving the boarding station, the ride vehicles turn into a corner where guests can practice aiming and firing in the augmented reality before heading to the starting line. The ride then takes guests through a variety of locations from Mario Kart 8 based on previous Mario Kart installments, including: N64 Royal Raceway, GBA Mario Circuit, 3DS Piranha Plant Slide, Dolphin Shoals, Twisted Mansion, Cloud top Cruise, Wii Grumble Volcano, and Rainbow Road. If the riders collectively earn 100 points, the ride ends with "Team Mario" winning the race.

Currently, this ride has become the main attraction among all the rides at Universal Studios Hollywood. This groundbreaking ride has already drawn everyone's attention for its cutting-edge technology, intricate theming, detailed sets, and special effects. However, the wait time for this ride is extremely long, especially on weekends. This ride has also faced criticism for its slow pace, which feels out of place given its high-speed racing theme, as well as for the AR lenses that provide a limited view of...

What this ride needs augmenting is not the virtual reality but rather all the batching and queuing which makes the line wait 2-3 hours. They need to stop assigning riders at the kart boarding area and instead group them well in advance in the zone where you get your visors. Riders should be sorted as odd or even numbered groups in the Lakitu room to make groupings easier to figure out. What slows down the ride is the workers figuring out how many people to put in the karts right at the boarding area. This is Japanese Lean concept of external setup. Also, when I was there the staff didn’t care sending out karts with empty seats. This just increases wait times for the people in line. This ride is a mess from the time they let you into the chamber where you wait over 5 minutes seeing Lakitu and the Mario Kart Network explain how the ride works, steering, aiming, shooting. It’s just poor planning to cover up the next mess where everyone rushes to get their headpiece and converges down a three lane stairwell before getting to the loading area for a kart. Did the ride designers think Super Mario fans would behave and file in a single line down the stairs??? Once on the ride the VR works great but you don’t feel like you’re ever in control especially the steering which doesn’t control the kart since there are three others ‘driving.’ The buttons placed atop the steering wheel that you push to shoot the shells will give you repetitive stress injury on your thumbs after several minutes. I think our ride malfunctioned for a little bit and it stopped for over 20 seconds between sets. Rainbow Road is where the VR experience is really excellent. Sound system in the kart is amazing and the wind effects when flying by the clouds is really good. Overall the ride designers put in a lot of effort to produce the lights and sounds for the ride experience but the line management was not well thought out. In spite of it all my kid loved it so I suppose that’s the most...

We were so excited for this attraction and it was a disappointment. After paying good money for fast track and not having this ride included is a bit annoying. 80 min que ended up being 3 hours by the time we got off. We knew being a weekend it would be busy but this was just insane. The queuing area isn’t too bad, the theming by the end of it is entertaining but it feels never ending. We waited in two different rooms just for a small intro to the instructions. Everyone is pushing and rushing to collect the hard hat when we were all lined up I don’t understand why we couldn’t have watched the instructions lining up, it’s not like we had 140 mins spare. Once you grab the hard hats you line back up for another 5-10 mins then finally into the car of 4 . The vr glasses then clip into the hard hat and we felt too distracted as the glasses weren’t big enough to focus just on the game. We loved the transformers 3d glasses as you were focused . We understand you are combining the ride and vr together but you just find yourself confused throughout the whole ride. It’s disappointing at the end when you feel like you don’t understand anything. The design of the karts and the actual ride is spot on, a lot of money perfecting that, but just some things are missing. It’s not a good Vr ride and not a good ride by itself, so not sure what they were aiming for .

The overall Nintendo world is impressive when you first walk in but it is very small and most of the interactions you need a power up band, the toadstool cafe is booking only and you need to go early to do that, even in the afternoon the line up was out the door and around the corner even though they booked they still waiting...