Video gaming's most legendary creative mind, "Super Mario Bros." creator Shigeru Miyamoto, announced the first mobile adventure for the iconic plumber protagonist "Mario," dubbed as "Super Mario Run" in the iPhone 7's launch event, which will be available into the iPhone technology before the year ends.
Nintendo's designer, who created the iconic Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and Zelda series among many others, was even on hand to introduce the new game, appearing onstage before the iPhone spectators while "mimicking the act of playing one-handed while eating a hamburger," MacWorld reported.
According to TheVerge, Miyamoto's game has been carefully designed so that it's simple enough to attract a new audience of iPhone lovers, but not satisfying enough to supplant a console experience. Supplementing his idea of embracing mobile games, Miyamoto approaches "Super Mario Run" just like the success of "Pokemon Go," as the game integrates simple game play, particularly one-handed gameplay, shorter play time, and play in shorter bursts.
"Over the years in our own experiments on our own platforms, we had come up with some ideas for how to make Mario simple for people who don't play Mario games," Miyamoto stated in a sit-down interview with The Verge after the Apple event, with the help of a translator.
"One of the ideas we were working on we felt was too simple for a home console device, and ultimately that was the one we decided to bring to smartphones," he added.
As the mobile game name suggests, Mario runs automatically, and the player's primary interaction is to jump by tapping the screen. The longer a player presses on the iPhone's pressure-sensitive display, the higher Mario jumps.
This method of automating Mario's movement refocuses the gameplay around jumping and interacting with the environments, with dangerous events like direction-changing blocks and ceiling grips happening that will make it hard for players to navigate over lava and other hazards.
Miyamoto cited on The Verge how the highly-acclaimed augmented reality experience of Pokémon Go validated his smartphone-centric approach to "Super Mario Run," saying "Pokémon Go is obviously a game that uses your GPS and it's synced into the camera and Google Maps, so it's a piece of software that's really geared towards that mobile play experience."
Meanwhile, during the Apple event, Pokémon Go also appeared onstage to debut upcoming Apple Watch support for the blockbuster free-to-play game.