Benjamin Bogard / BuzzFeed News

Next Thursday, Nintendo will release Super Mario Run for the iPhone and iPad. It's the first time in the 35-year life of the iconic plumber that gamers will be able to control Mario on a smart device. To get a sense of how big and weird and wild a deal that is, here's a short thought experiment: What if you could only watch Disney movies on special televisions made by Disney? As in, what if every time you wanted to see Mickey, or Minnie, or Goofy, or Simba, you had to turn off the TV you use to watch almost everything else, and turn on your Disney TV, which costs as much as your regular one? (And by the way, you have to replace your Disney TV with a new one, like, every four or five years.) Who would keep buying such devices? Sure, there'd be an audience: families with kids, and fanatics, and a core group of nostalgics. But what about the average consumer, the one with fond memories of Fantasia and limited disposable income? For Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company that is still synonymous for much of the world with videogames, which it helped popularize three decades ago, this has always been the case. Emulators and the odd exception notwithstanding, consumers could not play the most beloved game series in history — Super Mario Bros. — without a Nintendo device. That changes next week, when Super Mario Run releases to hundreds of millions of iOS devices, just in time for the holidays. It's a defining moment for the House of Mario, and by extension for Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario (and Zelda, and Donkey Kong, and Star Fox) who is often called the Walt Disney of videogames. BuzzFeed News sat down on Tuesday with Miyamoto — who holds the charmingly modest title of "Creative Fellow" at Nintendo — to talk about the new game. At 64, Miyamoto still has the hair of a hobbit and the smile of a scamp, and as he waited for the reporter to be briefed on Super Mario Run, he passed the time by noodling on his acoustic guitar.





So how does the father of Mario feel on the eve of what is, strangely, a kind of coming out party for the most famous character in gaming? "I’m very excited to be able to bring Mario to people who haven’t had a chance to play Mario games," Miyamoto told BuzzFeed News. "And to reconnect with people who haven't played for a long time."

About that long time: Yes, Nintendo heard the clamoring for Mario games on mobile devices. "For more than 10 years, people would often ask, 'Why can’t you put your games on cell phones?'" Miyamoto said. "We often felt that with cell phones we couldn’t get the same level of gameplay response that we could from our own devices. Over the last two to three years we’ve been looking at what’s the right experience for a Mario game on our devices versus on an iPhone."

In Super Mario Run, which he produced, Miyamoto thinks they've found it. Though the game looks like a very polished, very well-rendered version of the Marios many of us grew up playing, there's a major difference. Mario runs without any help from the user. There's only one input: Tap to jump, and hold the tap to jump higher. (In the classic Mario games, players pressed a directional button to make the round, mustachioed Italian trundle forward.)

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