Super Mario Is Finally Coming On iPhone: Nintendo Ready To Level Up Their Mobile Games

The most unexpected part of Apple's annual iPhone release event on Wednesday actually happened within the first few minutes, with the announcement of the first Super Mario game for the iPhone. Nintendo Co. will release Super Mario Run in Apple Inc.'s App Store in December, the first time the popular franchise is appearing on a smartphone.

Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the creators of the original Mario game, gave a short demonstration of the game at Apple's event on Wednesday. A basic version of Super Mario Run will be available free to download, but to play the entire game, users will have to pay. The Kyoto-based company didn't say when the app would be available for Android devices, Bloomberg reports.

Neil Campling, an analyst at Northern Trust Capital Markets, wrote in an e-mail, "It's a big deal, this venture is perhaps the biggest endorsement we could possibly have imagined that Nintendo's strategy to monetize their huge franchise IP on mobile and ex-platform reliant technology is the right one."

Nintendo first said that it would move into smartphone games last year, unveiling a partnership with Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA. It has been slow to embrace smartphones, ignoring investors and fans who have clamored for years for its most popular characters to show up in mobile gaming. It's only recently that the company has started to change its tune.

According to IGN, the fact that Nintendo had such a high-level executive on stage to make the announcement shows that the game maker is serious about its mobile strategy, said Joost Van Dreunen, who runs SuperData Research, a research firm that tracks the gaming market. 

"With Pokemon Go this summer, everybody has been going nuts -- my guess is, they scratched their heads and decided: 'we have to do this now,"' Van Dreunen said. Rather than treating mobile as a cannibalizing platform, Nintendo will probably "create lite versions of games on mobile, call it advertising, and then get people to buy the device."

Here we go again... Nintendo soars after Super Mario game announced for #iPhone7 pic.twitter.com/0ue7dPeO52

— David Ingles (@DavidInglesTV) September 8, 2016

Nintendo shares in Tokyo jumped as much as 18 percent to 29,200 yen in early trading, following a 29 percent jump in the company's American depositary receipts in New York. The company said any anticipated impact from the new game is already included in its earnings forecast for the current fiscal period, and that Super Mario Run will also be introduced for Android-based devices. DeNA Co., the Japanese mobile-game developer, collaborated with Nintendo on Mario's iPhone debut, and its stock climbed 21 percent to 3,390 yen.

The other Nintendo games coming to smartphones are Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing. Unfortunately, Nintendo announced today both Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem for smartphones have been delayed. Both were originally scheduled to release later this year, but it looks as though they've been pushed back to March 2017 at the latest. No official dates have been announced by now.