Shigeru Miyamoto, the designer of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend Of Zelda, took to the stage yesterday to share news of his new game, in association with Apple, Super Mario Run. But in the iOS video game, Mario is constantly moving and his movements on the gameplay depend on the players’ tapping motion. The Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem mobile games are now scheduled to launch by March 2017, the end of Nintendo’s financial year.
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“We have created Super Mario Run to be ideal for playing on your iPhone”, said Miyamoto, who first devised the Mario character more than 35 years ago. More details will be disclosed at a later date. For a bigger screen experience the game is also optimised for iPad. He also explained the reason behind it, according to him smartphones are not powerful enough to achieve full 3D Mario games. Miyamoto cited the success of Pokémon Go as validation of this smartphone-centric approach. For this reason, the game app could surpass the 500 million downloads of Pokemon GO and even predicted to reach 1 billion right after its release in December. Could Mario truly be so popular that an entire 1/7th of the planet will play his game? The first Nintendo and DeNA partnership game was Miitomo, which launched earlier in the year, but failed to gain much traction due to its social-focused features that lacked much in the way of a main gameplay hook.
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“The App Store has made so many things better in our lives – the way we communicate, the way we work and the way we have fun”, said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. Nintendo has not released information when the Super Mario game will be available in Google Play Store for Android users. This convinced Nintendo to finally put its most famous IPs on mobile devices, and helped them decide to make Super Mario Run a one-time-only paid game, so parents don’t have to worry about their kids spending large amounts of money on in-game ephemera.
