Apple held their annual iPhone announcement event on September 7th. They made all of the expected announcements and said all of the expected things. For the most part, it was uneventful to the point of being boring. Until they decided to trot out Shigero Miyamoto from Nintendo. That is when things started to get interesting.
He was there to help announce, and begin the hype campaign, for the first true Nintendo game for mobile: Super Mario Run.
Super Mario Run will be coming to iOS first later this year and is the first Mario game ever build from the ground up for mobile. There have been all sorts of (illegal) ways to get Mario games onto Android phones before, but this will truly be a first.
Run is designed to be played in portrait mode and with one hand only. Mario runs from left to right automatically and players control him by tapping to jump. Short taps on the screen will result in little hope and longer touches will result in a bigger jump.
Not Your Mama’s Endless Runner
That might sound like your average, run-of-the-mill endless runner, but it is actually quite different. The biggest reason is that the levels aren’t random. There are worlds and stages just like in a regular Mario game on a console. This opens up a lot of space for Nintendo to have people competing against their friends for high scores in specifically designed levels.
Nintendo also indicated that there will be a mode in the game where players will be able to spend virtual currency to build up their own Mushroom Kingdom. (My kids can’t wait for that part.)
You can go to the Super Mario Run page on the iOS App Store right now. This gives you the option to be notified when the game comes out sometime this December. Nintendo has confirmed that the game will have a free demo and then a premium price for the whole app (thus eliminating freemium nonsense), but they have not told us what the final price would be.
What do you think? Are you going to download this one? Sound off!
