Nintendo releases ‘Super Mario Run’ for iOS devices
What happens when one of the best-selling games in history comes to the most popular category of electronic devices in the world? A mustachioed plumber in overalls is revealing the answer.
After nearly a decade of doing its best to ignore the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets, Nintendo has finally brought a game based on its beloved character Mario to mobile devices.
People have been able to play Mario games on portable devices made by Nintendo since the early 1980s, but “Super Mario Run” represents the first time Nintendo has put out an installment for devices made by another company — in this case, iPhones and iPads from Apple.
The character is so famous that Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, appeared at the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this year dressed as Mario to promote the next Summer Games in Japan.
Releasing Mario on phones and tablets was once an unthinkable move for a quirky company that had for years insisted that making both game software and the hardware it ran on was essential to its magic.
A vast majority of mobile games are free, but some provide players with opportunities to pay for useful items inside a game or for access to new challenges.
[...] it is hard to understate the passion players feel for Nintendo games, sustained by an almost bottomless well of nostalgia for the company’s products from the 1980s and 1990s.
Mitch Lasky, a venture capitalist with Benchmark and a longtime investor in games companies, said the success of “Pokémon Go” shows how much demand there is for Nintendo games on devices made by other companies.