Super Mario Run was the biggest surprise of the Apple Event announcing the new iPhone 7 and the public face of this announcement was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, legendary video game designer and current Nintendo Creative Fellow.
Miyamoto sat down with Yahoo shortly after the reveal of Super Mario Run to talk all things Nintendo and why it took so long to bring Mario to mobile devices. It’s actually been in development for quite some time, as Miyamoto revealed.
“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,” Miyamoto said. “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.”
The initial success of Miitomo and the way Pokémon Go became a cultural phenomenon (although the game wasn’t developed by Nintendo) led many to believe that Nintendo would be shifting to mobile games, especially with the announcement of Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing mobile games before the reveal of Super Mario Run.
However, Miyamoto continued to reiterate how important hardware is to Nintendo.
“At Nintendo, we still put a lot of importance of sitting down and playing face to face,” Miyamoto said.
As for the ever elusive Android release date for Super Mario Run, Miyamoto couldn’t say when the mobile game will appear in the Google Play Store but at least gave an explanation.
“Certainly smart devices have their unique benefits: a persistent network connection and an individual account. And so we are looking at smart devices as an option going forward and we have more games in development for smart devices, said Miyamoto.“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.”
Miyamoto added that Nintendo has a very good relationship with Google and will continue to work with the tech giant.
Super Mario Run is set to release on iOS devices in December.
So what do you think of Miyamoto’s comments? When do you think Super Mario Run will come to Android? Sound off in the comments section below.
