Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto on working with Apple to create Super Mario Run

Shigeru Miyamoto, in an interview with glixel:

Glixel: What’s it been like working with Apple? How did the partnership for Super Mario Run come about? They’re supporting it a lot more than they usually do with individual games.

Miyamoto: The timing was really fortunate for both of us. On the Nintendo side we’d been talking a lot about going into the mobile space but we hadn’t decided that we were going to make a Mario game for smartphones. As we were talking about what we were going to create we started asking ourselves about what a Mario game would need to be. So we were experimenting with some things and we came up with the base idea, and that’s what we eventually showed to Apple.

Part of the reason we took it to Apple was that in order for us to have the performance we wanted we needed some development support to ensure that the game would run the way we expected. Because Nintendo is always trying to do something unique we also wanted to try and do something different on the business side too. We really didn’t want to do something in the free to play space, but in order to make sure we had the opportunity to do what we wanted [offer a taste of the game for free, and charge $9.99 to unlock the whole thing], we had to talk to the people who are actually running the shop. Naturally the people on the App Store initially told us that the free-to-play approach is a good one, but I’ve always had this image that Apple and Nintendo have very similar philosophies. As we started working together, I found that to be true and they became very welcoming of trying something new.

If you are a gaming fan, take a few minutes to read the interview.

Shigeru Miyamoto is an incredibly influential part of modern gaming’s history. The Super Mario and Zelda franchises are his creations.

The game Super Mario Run carries that DNA, that gaming delight, over to the iPhone. And somehow it does that in a game that only requires a single finger to play.