• by Thom Forbes , September 8, 2016

Super Mario, the jaunty plumber who was arguably the first videogame superhero, will be coming to an iPhone near you this December. 

On the heels of his featured role in the Rio Olympics closing ceremony — where Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared dressed as Mario — the original game’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, took the stage along with Nintendo marketing manager Bill Trinen and Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple’s event in San Francisco yesterday to unveil Super Mario Run.

“The Mario smartphone game should bring in revenue quickly for Nintendo because players have to pay if they want to enjoy all the game’s levels…,” points out Takashi Mochizuki for the Wall Street Journal. 

It certainly gave a quick boost to its valuation, with Nintendo shares jumping 13% in the morning session Thursday, closing at their highest since late July, when the Pokemon craze was in full swing and it wasn’t quite clear that the company didn't actually own Pokemon, Reuters’ Makiko Yamazaki reports.

“Launching a well-known Nintendo character on the globally penetrated iPhone is one of the best scenarios that investors have hoped for,” Iwai Cosmo Securities analyst Tomoaki Kawasaki tells Yamazaki.

“Even more important is the publicity effect, because Nintendo is preparing to start selling a new console code-named NX by next March,” writes the WSJ’s Mochizuki. “The willingness of Mr. Miyamoto, a legend among videogame fans, to appear on stage with the head of company that is partly responsible for Nintendo’s troubles shows how the Japanese company needs to expose its characters to consumers who aren’t currently videogame devotees, and lure them to Nintendo game consoles and software.”

Bloomberg’s Pavel Alpeyev and Takashi Amano write that the Super Mario Run demo yesterday “showed a familiar scene — Mario racing across a two-dimensional landscape, jumping over obstacles and collecting coins — recognizable to anyone who played Super Mario Brothers on TV screens decades ago.” They observe that the game is “such a by-the-playbook move” that it “begs the question of why it took so long to deliver.”  

“The magic of Mario is that anyone can pick up a game and instantly start playing, and this time we’ve made it even simpler to begin,” Miyamoto says. “We want as many people as possible of all ages to enjoy playing Super Mario Run.”

But there’s more going on at the company. Although its “current home console, the Wii U, is awaiting its last rites,” and its “handheld platform, the Nintendo 3DS, is curiously absent of flashy holiday releases,” there are high hopes for the rumored Nintendo NX, a console-portable hybrid, reports Chris Plante for The Verge

“In its lovable characters, Nintendo has an army of ambassadors, ready to find players where they are, on smartphones, and guide them to where Nintendo would like them to be, Nintendo hardware. Between Nintendo’s gloomy fall schedule and new hardware announcement, there was no better time for Mario to appear on iPhone than today,” Plante writes.

“People see this announcement as a signal that Nintendo is all in with mobile,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, tellsUSA Today’s Matt Kranz. But he cautions that “investors might also be overlooking how difficult it could be for Nintendo to turn the games into profits … as it plans to charge for the downloads. Investors ‘appear to be missing the fact that the game is “free to start” and not free to play. It will be a paid download, which has proven to be a broken model, and which may limit the potential to monetize the game. We will see,’” Pachter says.

Time’s Matt Peckham talked to Mario creator Miyamoto shortly after the event. Miyamoto tells him the team that’s developing Super Mario Run is “mostly comprised of the original Super Mario development team” — he is the producer and Takashi Tezuka is the developer.

As for being on stage with Cook, the “legendary” Miyamoto says (with a laugh): “It was actually shocking for me, because when I met with him, I didn’t realize I was older than him, and he mentioned that he’d been playing my games in college.”

He’ll be playing them in retirement, too, if Nintendo is truly back where to it hopes it is.