Hotel Mario

Development

The reason Nintendo licensed their Mario characters to Phillips Interactive was because Phillips and Nintendo were co-creating a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The contract between them allowed Phillips to create games with the Mario and Zelda characters. Although Nintendo never released a CD-ROM add-on for SNES, they did have the legal contract with Phillips, so Phillips was able to create three Zelda-based games and one Mario-based game.