Why Super Mario Run is a great move for Nintendo

There have been so many leaks recently that every announcement is basically like knowing your gran is getting you socks for Christmas ahead of time, and thus perfecting the pantomime shocked/delighted face ahead of time – except, unlike with granny, very few of us care about Andrew House’s feelings, so when he revealed a slimmer PS4 model that Sony refused to confirm for weeks even as people posted full unboxing videos of it on youtube he was met mostly with silence. When things happen that are a genuine surprise it’s delightful. Shigeru Miyamoto coming on stage at the Apple Conference was a genuine surprise.

This move happening taken as a whole isn’t, because Nintendo has had this on the cards for a while now, and Miitomo tested the water with varying degrees of success. But Miyamoto being brought on stage by Tim Cook? Demoing a new Mario game? There wasn’t a whisper that was going to happen, not even in the opening of the the Apple event. Tim Cook spent almost ten minutes singing with Pharrell, for some reason, talking about Apple Music, and touting download numbers, before dropping an “I’m so happy to announce today”, a Mario clip, and then immediately introducing Shigeru bleedin’ Miyamoto like it wasn’t even a big deal. PlayStation’s event, where Mark Cerny delicately pronounced words like ‘luminosity’ in the world’s most unnecessary live ASMR performance, seemed boring in comparison, and they were revealing new console builds, not a mobile game.

The new game, Super Mario Run, is a side scrolling autorun game that you can play with one hand (cue Miyamoto miming holding a phone whilst riding a bus or taking a huge bite from an invisible burger, cementing his standing as ‘most amazing 63 year old game developer of all time’). The entire moveset is tapping the touchscreen to make Mario jump, with varying height. There’s a mode called ‘Toad Rally’ when you compete with another player for the highest score and the most number of Toads impressed.These Toads will then go and live in your Mushroom Kingdom, which you can customise with the coins you collect in levels.

This has had mixed responses. You can read comments on various sites reporting the news claiming that “nintendo is now dead to me”, that it will weaken the Nintendo brand, and that this marks the start of Nintendo going full third party. The Nintendo subreddit, however, remains quite positive, and I’m inclined to agree with them, particularly in light of the fact that Nintendo stock went soaring after the conference. While Sony and Microsoft are duking it out over the increasingly cramped and confused high-performance market, Nintendo is quietly adding a new block to its foundation.

Smartphone games now represent a huge chunk of the handheld gaming market, and sliding into that is a good move. Even better, Nintendo is treating this as an entirely distinct platform to be developed for. It doesn’t seem like Nintendo is trying to tempt people away from smartphones to its consoles, but that it’s taking advantage of a consumer audience that already exists. From Nintendo’s earliest announcement about mobile gaming, when Iwata was still at the helm, it was very clear there was an intelligent approach. They had no plans, Iwata said, to port existing games onto mobile touch screens: “If we cannot provide our consumers with the best possible play experiences, it would just ruin the value of Nintendo’s IP.” Super Mario Run bears this out. Boiling down the controls to one touch, one jump, for example, might seem too simplistic for Mario, but using a full touchscreen control system would be bad. Those systems are so dreadful you might as well be playing wearing oven gloves – but like, really poor ones, like the one Loot Crate gave away that melts and burns you – and Nintendo knows this, because Nintendo is good at making games. Instead of trying to make controls that will work for a precise platforming game, they’ve made a platforming game that will work well with simple controls.

This is a Mario game designed to be the best it could possibly be for a smartphone. Nintendo bringing Mario to iOS is going to raise the bar not just for other autorunners, but for every other game on mobile. It’s not a freemium app, it’s a high quality game with a flat price. Everything that could have weakened the brand Nintendo has not done. Rather than mobile gaming weakening Nintendo, this feels very much like Nintendo strengthening mobile gaming, and getting a pail underneath a cash cow that’ll help them continue with bigger ball-busting passion-projects like Breath of the Wild. Watch out for the takes on whether this means mobile counts as ‘real gaming’, though. Those are going to be wild.