SAN FRANCISCO—Any question about Nintendo's bullishness with smartphone gaming evaporated on Wednesday with the announcement of Super Mario Run for iOS. The auto-running Super Mario game—and first Mario game for smartphones—will launch in time for "holiday 2016," and it was announced by none other than Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto at Apple's major September press event. [Update: A Nintendo promotional video now pegs the game's release window to "December 2016." That video, which shows off how the game works, has been embedded below.]

After demonstrating the game, Miyamoto told the crowd that the game will launch "at a set price so you won't have to worry about continuing to pay." Pricing was not announced just yet. Apple's Tim Cook confirmed that the game will launch first on iOS.

"We want as many people as possible to enjoy playing as Mario," Miyamoto told the San Francisco event crowd through a translator. "They'll be doing it first on iOS in a new game called Super Mario Run."









Miyamoto described the game as the first Mario game anyone can play one-handed, because in the game, Super Mario endlessly runs to the right on a smartphone screen held in portrait orientation. Simply tap the screen to jump (and hold down on the screen for bigger jumps), and tap while in mid-air to enable Mario's "spin-float" move. The aesthetic and sound direction largely resemble the New Super Mario Bros. 2.5D visual style, and a brief gameplay demonstration showed off levels in which players collect coins and occasionally wall-jump leftward as a way to move in the opposite direction.

A "Toad Rally" mode will allow players to take on friends and strangers in a "ghost" challenge mode, in which players compete on the same level to gather the most coins and pull off tricky jumps to "impress Toads" and win individual challenges. We'll have to wait until later for more hard information on the game; in addition to a lack of price and release date information, Nintendo has yet to reveal how many levels or how much content we should expect in the game.