Mario Kart Producer Working On Nintendo’s Smartphone Games

Nintendo and smartphone game developer DeNA are teaming up to bring smartphone games, and we’re can expect to see five titles from them by March 2017. Sankei reports additional details shared by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

As previously reported, Nintendo and DeNA are splitting the workload up on the smartphone games that the two companies will release together. Nintendo will handle  the planning and designing for the games, while DeNA will take care of server development, daily operations, and user analysis.

While we still don’t know about what kind of titles we can expect to see from the two companies in the near future, Iwata revealed that he selected the Mario Kart series’ producer to be in charge of the development of one or more of these titles.

“With this, people should know how serious we are [about putting effort into our smartphone titles],” said Iwata.

Iwata only mentioned the “producer” of the Mario Kart series and didn’t provide a name, so we can’t say who exactly, but it seems likely that he’s referring to Hideki Konno, who was the producer for Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 7, and has been involved with the series since its early days.

Something else to keep in mind is that most of Nintendo’s senior developers are used to working on multiple titles at once, so the producer Iwata is referring to here isn’t working exclusively on smartphone games.

Iwata previously stated that smartphone games have a “notorious” reputation for overcharging consumers or being inappropriate for children due to their monetization schemes, so Nintendo will make an effort to avoid such practices.