Miyamoto Talks The Origins Of Super Mario Run And The Importance Of Consoles To Nintendo

Super Mario Run, Nintendo’s first Mario game for smartphones, was revealed about two weeks ago during an Apple event. Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the creative forces behind the upcoming mobile game, recently sat down for an interview with Yahoo, in which he discussed the origins of the game, the importance of consoles to Nintendo, the release for Android, and his wish to bring Mario to a larger audience.

First off, when asked about the origins of Super Mario Run, Miyamoto replied with the following:

“It started when we were working on Miitomo (Nintendo’s social game for iOS and Android), or before that when Mr. [Satoru] Iwata (Nintendo’s late CEO) was still with the company. Apple invited him to have a conversation about how the two companies could work together and they started working on ‘Miitomo’ and then this opportunity came up.”

However, this latest interest in smartphone games doesn’t mean Nintendo will be shifting away from consoles anytime soon, with Miyamoto adding the following comment:

“At Nintendo, we still put a lot of importance of sitting down and playing face to face.”

Next, he commented on the reason for prioritizing the iPhone over Android devices:

“One of the reasons we focused on iPhone first was the stability of the platform and being able to get the level of response that we want out of the games. And that’s not to say that Android devices don’t have the same level of responsiveness. But because there are so many Android devices, trying to engineer the game to work across them all requires quite a lot of time.”

Lastly, Miyamoto discussed his hope to reach a larger audience with the availability of a Mario game on smart devices:

“I feel very lucky, because there are a lot of people in Japan making characters and games that become popular in Japan. So I feel fortunate to be able to bring Mario to an audience around the world. And now with the reach of smart devices, we can bring Mario to an entire generation of kids, and hopefully be able to recapture those older players who played when they were younger and remind them how much fun it is to play a Nintendo game.”

To read the full interview, you can go here.

Super Mario Run will release in December this year for iOS, and sometime in 2017 for Android.