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Miyamoto on Super Mario Run's dev team, how it differs from other mobile runners
This comes from a TIME interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...
TIME: Is this one of the mobile games [Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima] told us would be arriving later in 2016? Which of your teams developed it?
Miyamoto: Yes, this is one of the titles Mr. Kimishima had referenced. We don’t know if there will end up being all five of them, but this is one of the ones that we’ve been working on.
The team that’s developing Super Mario Run is actually mostly comprised of the original Super Mario development team. So [Takashia] Tezuka-san is the developer and I’m the producer. We’ve brought together the developers at Nintendo who know the side-scrolling Mario games best, to work with them to develop the best side-scrolling Mario game for a mobile device.
TIME: When I asked [late Nintendo CEO Satoru] Iwata back in early 2015 about Nintendo’s smartphone plans, he said “that being ‘unique’ or ‘unprecedented’ was appreciated far more than being ‘better’ than the others.” How are you working to differentiate Super Mario Run from existing mobile runners?
Miyamoto: That’s true. So the basic premise this time was, we started by wanting to make a Mario game that you play one-handed. And if you think about Mario games up until now, generally Mario games are very simple and anyone can play them. But as you get deeper into the mechanics it gets more challenging. For some people, they have a hard time running, using the ‘B’ button to dash, or jumping while trying to run and dash at the same time. So the approach we took was, “How can we take that essence of the simplicity of Mario and bring it to mobile devices?” And that meant thinking about a game that would run automatically, on its own, but where there’s still the challenge of jumping and things like that, that are uniquely Mario.
We’ve also prepared the battle mode, as you saw, and this is really geared toward people who just have a few minutes to play. It’s a short mode you can play very quickly. And the other thing is we’re bringing in a number of elements that add skill and technique. As you get better at those skills and techniques, you’ll have a lot of motivation to compete for high scores and things like that.