Miyamoto on how Super Mario Run came to be, 3D Mario unlikely for mobile, more
The Verge is the latest outlet with an interview focused on Super Mario Run. The site spoke with Shigeru Miyamoto, who unveiled the mobile game yesterday. Miyamoto talked about how Super Mario Run came to be, whether we’ll see a Mario game on mobile in which you have full control, and more.
Head past the break for a roundup of Miyamoto’s comments. You can read The Verge’s full piece here.
On how Super Mario Run started…
“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. 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.”
– Miyamoto hopes people are “going to want to play a much more in-depth and a more challenging Mario experience … it’s going to increase the population of people interested in coming to our platforms, which is of course is our main focus.”
On making the gameplay simple…
“So, the idea was, How do we make that component of the gameplay simpler? And so that’s where we’ve been focusing our energy — giving people the ability to just focus on the jumping.”
On how the success of Pokemon GO is validation of this smartphone-centric approach…
“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. So, similarly with Mario, what we’re looking at is simple game play, one-handed gameplay; shorter play time, playing in shorter bursts; and then really bringing the joy of Mario to that much larger audience.”
On a Mario game that could give players full control on mobile…
“When you start to talk about the 3D Mario games particularly, where you’re running around in a space and exploring and things like that, I think something like that is still difficult to achieve on a smart device. So for those types of games we’ll continue to focus our attention on our own platforms.”
On whether the inspiration for the game came from his real life experiences…
“It’s a little bit less of my own experience and more of me witnessing other people. A perfect example is my wife. When I give her video games or game systems, she doesn’t play a whole lot. But I watch her on her smartphone, and she does a lot of those types of things on her smartphone.”
