The future of the Super Mario series could be changed by Super Mario Run

Super Mario Run is going to put a Super Mario game in the hands and pockets of billions of smartphone owners next week. The majority of these people will probably have never played a Super Mario game before and that’s why Nintendo’s saying Super Mario Run has been made an ‘entry point’ to the series.

What happens after that though? Will all these new fans want to play another Super Mario Run type game or something else? Shigueru Miyamoto has said in a new interview that these new players could change where Mario goes next.

Super Mario Run is going to introduce millions of more people to the fun of Mario, and it’ll become the entry point for them and then the question becomes, once you’ve gone through that entry point, then what comes next? Is it a more traditional Mario experience? Is it something like the Mario Galaxy games? We’ll then have to look at what it is these new fans want from a Mario game, and we’ll continue to see Mario evolve in that way.

Miyamoto also touched on the new control scheme, which was inspired by what Nintendo did with the Wii and simplifying controls.

As we were doing those Wii experiments, we thought that that kind of approach would perhaps best be suited to iPhone. So that became the basis for Super Mario Run. Nintendo has been making Mario games for a long time, and the longer you continue to make a series, the more complex the gameplay becomes, and the harder it becomes for new players to be able to get into the series. We felt that by having this simple tap interaction to make Mario jump, we’d be able to make a game that the broadest audience of people could play.

It’s always been Nintendo’s strategy to grow its audience through their mobile games, Super Mario Run will be no different but he was shocked at just how well Pokémon Go ended bringing people back to their own games.

Certainly when we first embarked on our mobile strategy, a key element for us was the idea of bringing our characters and [intellectual property] to a much broader audience, but I think we were surprised by the impact that [Pokémon Go] has had in terms of bringing that audience back to our own games.

The rest of the interview with Miyamoto is now live on The Verge and also covers other mobile related content like Animal Crossing.