The newest wallet-burner from Apple - the sleek iPhone 7 - wasn't the only big thing revealed during the company's just-concluded event in San Francisco, California. No, we're not talking about the separate overpriced auxiliary adapter or the even more overpriced wireless AirBuds.
We're talking about Nintendo chief game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who took the stage in the event and announced a Mario game for Apple devices: Super Mario Run. The game will be available for both the iPhone and the bigger iPad.
The game is similar to the other 2D Mario platformer games, except the jumpsuit-wearing plumber is automatically running to the right side of the screen, like in endless runner mobile games. The control is limited to a screen tap, which will cause Mario to jump, with the height of the jump depending on how long you tap on the screen. This means that you can most definitely play the game while you're eating a bag of chips with one hand. Mario can also hop and slide on walls, and grab onto ceiling-mounted bars if you jump into them, so it's not like Mario will be simply jumping up and down in a very linear and boring way.
Super Mario Run will have three modes: a typical mode that features different courses for you to complete, a mode that allows you to take part in other people's completed course and attempt to, uh, one-up their performance, and a mode in which you can use the coins you gathered to create your own Mushroom Kingdom. Super Mario Run will be available worldwide on December 2016 and an Android version is in the works, too, as confirmed by Nintendo to Kotaku.
Super Mario Run is the product of Nintendo's recent foray into the mobile gaming industry, the main threat to their handheld console business. Last March 2015, they've struck a deal with one of the biggest mobile gaming companies in Japan: DeNA. They are now also more open to sharing their intellectual properties, evidenced by their loaning of Pokemon characters to Google and Niantic Labs to produce Pokemon Go (although it's still published by The Pokemon Company).