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Super Mario Run is less than a week away from launching on iPhones and iPads, and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has been taking part in quite a number of recent interviews to talk a bit about the company’s new mobile endeavor.
In an interview with Buzzfeed, Miyamoto revealed that the upcoming Mario mobile game was, in part, inspired by watching speed runners. Nintendo employees noted that, with the D-pad continuously held down, gameplay boiled down to the player’s level of precision with their jumping, which is what Super Mario Run’s main design is built around.
Here’s an excerpt from the article describing the inspiration for Super Mario Run:
“According to Miyamoto, part of the inspiration for Super Mario Run’s auto-running came from a surprising source: ‘super players.’ Watching online videos of these gamers’ astounding speed runs and other feats of gaming skill, Nintendo employees noticed that the gamers never let up on the D-Pad. Mario always kept running, and all of the skill came down to the incredible precision of the jumping. What if, the Nintendo braintrust reasoned, all players could have that experience? Ironically, the most skilled Super Mario players in the world may be partially responsible for introducing Mario to thousands and thousands of first-time players.”
Additionally, Miyamoto reportedly also shared a bit about a time during which Nintendo considered adding GPS to the Nintendo 3DS with plans of making a game similar to Pokémon GO. This idea was ultimately scrapped, however, with Nintendo eventually deciding that it “made more sense to put the game on millions of devices that already had satellite location tracking.”
You can read the rest of the interview here.
Super Mario Run will release for iOS devices on December 15th, and will release for Android sometime in 2017.
