The Forgotten, the Maligned: Super Mario Run

Thanks to Cart Boy for suggestions.

Back in April, the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto did an interview with Variety to promote The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and in an exclusive made a fairly notable announcement: Nintendo’s storied Mario franchise would be stepping away from mobile devices. People were happy to hear it; after all, Nintendo’s relationship with gaming on the phone has been rocky from the start. Some of their games have been wildly successful, but others like Dragalia Lost or Dr. Mario World shuffled into an early grave. What ties them all together is a failure to earn the respect and awe for which the publisher is known. And none was more notorious than Super Mario Run.

Excitement ran high when Nintendo announced a Mario game for smartphones at an Apple Keynote event, a few months before its December 2016 launch. Historically, the company never lets its IPs outside their dedicated consoles; it hadn’t in a significant way since the Nineties. The prospect of people who don’t own Nintendo getting to play Mario—a real entry in the mainline Super Mario series at that, and the first one with Miyamoto’s deep involvement since Super Mario Galaxy—was special. There was also some natural trepidation amongst the plumber’s fans; after all, the mobile market was seen as something of a creativity cesspool. Half a decade earlier, it was a space of real innovation, but any stature of a video game made for phones had long cratered. But the hype won out, at least outside of Nintendo’s passionate online fanbase. The company’s stock jumped after they announced it with partner DeNA, and when it launched it topped the charts for downloads. No surprise there.

This was the two companies’ second collaboration; earlier in the summer they released Miitomo, a weird social networking app based on the Mii brand. And there were several games to come. With Nintendo’s Wii U a massive failure and the phone market untapped, they and DeNA made mobile games a priority. Alongside the first two, their initial five game plan consisted of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Mario Kart Tour. Nintendo made a few other games separately years later, and DeNA similarly worked on Pokémon Masters with The Pokémon Company, whose mobile games are largely separate from Nintendo. This was a sizable undertaking by a company not known for these kinds of projects. Mario Run was unique among the others in one way, in that the game costs a fixed price to pay. You download it for free, get the first levels as a demo, and then decide if you’d like to spend ten dollars for the rest. The other games were fully free-to-play. But let’s put a pin in that.

Image: Source Gaming. Mario Run can only be played in vertical mode, so I combined screenshots to better fit a website layout. Notice the extensive amount of empty space, perfect for tapping the screen.

Now, as a game, Mario Run is anemic. To fit the system it’s on (i.e. smartphones, which as a rule lack the kinds of buttons you find on gamepads), it’s the company’s foray into the endless runner genre, which had hit its peak in the mid-2010s. Mario automatically moves forth in a 2D plane, with assets taken from the New Super Mario Bros. games, and you tap the screen to make him jump. Small enemies like Goombas are harmless, but you can jump off them for extra coins or to pull off tricks. With your ability to go back restricted—there are some closed-in levels where Mario turns after hitting the wall, and one surface lets him jump backwards—it’s all about chaining jumps, avoiding harmful enemies, and finding the hidden pink and purple coins hidden in each rather short level. And if you can get as many gold coins, all the better.

It’s all quite Mario-esque, for its benefit. Jumping on Koopas instead of over them kicks their shell forward to hit other enemies. Red coins hold bonus power-ups. The New Super Mario Bros. twirl is there, which helps the platforming a bit. The series’ high quality level design, where every course is short and plays with one or two gimmicks, is there aplenty. The best and most crucial holdover, though, is the classic Nintendo game feel, which is surprisingly there given the lack of an A Button. Tapping the screen, and holding it to increase each jump, feels surprisingly tactile. The format’s very ill-suited as a replacement for a controller, but it works well enough. This helps make Super Mario Run quite fun for the inherently flawed experiment it is. It doesn’t make me want Nintendo to continue down this road, but it doesn’t embarrass itself either.

Image: Source Gaming. Run also features traditionally harder kinds of Mario challenges, from Ghost Houses and castles to boss fights.

Mario Run has a few other things mostly to incentivize playing every day, which is unusual given that the sole purchase is for the game itself. The biggest is Toad Rally; you play in endless, 30-second levels against other players’ performances to make your main menu more attractive. Winning consistently and the coins you earn from levels net you cosmetics, bonus prizes, and other playable characters. Each of the latter adds a new twist, like Daisy—in her debut as a lead in a Mario platformer—having a double jump. Daisy herself is the reward for beating the Remix 10 mode, an array of bite-sized levels that get thrown at you all in a row. The alterations and random elements of these modes are all good at papering over the fact that there isn’t much meat here, just six sets of four levels apiece, thirteen bonus postgame levels, and a number of riffs on those. That’s rather slim compared to a standard Mario game, especially when they’re so small. Each one is well designed, but it’s very much a fraction of another mainline entry, hence costing a fraction of their price.

But really, the gameplay itself is immaterial; it’s that pricing that’s important. Now, releasing a game like this is perfectly fine. You provide a demo, which Nintendo rarely releases and often takes undue development time, and it fits the fast and flippant nature of playing on your phone. But consumers didn’t like having those levels locked when downloading the app itself cost nothing. It seemed as though Nintendo was offering something for free before charging you. That’s a valid reaction, even if I think selling it this way might’ve been the right call artistically for this format. But that itself was eclipsed by a bigger point of contention, that many players felt it shouldn’t cost a thing at all. This was something Nintendo didn’t understand about the mobile market; they assumed the space would be welcoming to the kinds of normal video game purchases you expect from a big publisher.

Image: Source Gaming. While it was in the service of transparency, Nintendo did themselves no favors with their terminology, with terms like “free to start” seeming dishonest or confusing.

Turns out that mobile players—or Nintendo fans who were interested in Run—didn’t want that. It wasn’t even just that the game was adequate and nothing more, or that the business model was seen as deceptive; there was a fundamental block purchasers had about the idea of paying money to play a game on your phone outright. The common argument was simply that the game was on mobile, so the whole thing should be free. It was one I regularly encountered as a player, as a journalist, and it was so pervasive that the sheer number of negative reviews on the app store caused Nintendo’s share value to temporarily plummet. For the first few months, Nintendo viewed the percentage of consumers who made the full purchase to be a disappointment, though it would slowly do better over the following years and ultimately was a financial success. This was three months before the Switch would launch and turn the company’s luck around, so they were feeling the heat.

This attitude is largely an aftereffect of the proliferation of “games as a service,” a business model that first flourished on mobile devices in which a game isn’t simply a work of art you make and sell but an experience or brand that consistently expands, theoretically for years. To make back development costs that can run from expensive to dirt cheap, and to get people in the door, these run on microtransactions. You can play for free to some extent, but it costs money to unlock the important features or bypass a long term grind (and often, both). These systems are incredibly exploitative. They promise no cost, but their “optional content” often racks up to far above any justifiable asking price had the game been a one-time purchase. Many of these dole out prizes randomly, so you gamble for what you get, or stick them on a concrete “Battle Pass” that demands a constant grind. Costs are generally gated to an in-game currency that costs real money but calculates it inconsistently to trick you. There are plenty of things that do the same, from the rate at which prizes are doled out to time sensitive events.

Images: Source Gaming. The Remix 10 and Rally modes add a bit of extra flavor and energy, but they’re mostly there to keep you playing regularly.

I take umbrage at the idea that Run should’ve been this, or that it should’ve been free entirely. Regardless of how much time and labor it cost, it was a complete game; it deserved to sell itself as one. Personally, I think the ten dollars was a fair amount for a decent number of shallow but polished levels and a relatively interesting experiment. Perhaps it should’ve been cheaper, though I find that train of discussion unhelpful given how high development costs are across the board. But others held that any kind of initial cost was too high, including Miyamoto, who concedes that part of the game’s failure was specifically due to the fixed price. He feels that was necessary to the Mario brand, and I’d agree; their flagship should feel more… respectable given its history. Less dishonest. The big companies especially shouldn’t take part in this chicanery. But they do, from EA to Square Enix to Ubisoft. Even Disney. And players have accepted it.

This is what makes the mobile market scary and depressing: it is so rife with exploitation and bad creative design that those have become the ideal. As consumers, we’ve been thoroughly trained to expect products that nickel and dime us, to the point where a normal release (and yes, a boring and lesser one in this case) is seen as a ripoff. Studies regularly bear out that almost all the profits to these “freemium” games come from a sliver of players who often get hooked on the need for content that’s gated for no reason other than this. It’s from these “whales”—that’s literally the industry term for its own audience—paying well over the intrinsic worth of this content that the games make back their money and then some. Essentially, these comparatively few players foot the bill for production costs, sometimes huge ones, so the rest of us don’t have to. Even if we choose to not spend money on these, which I do as a rule, we’re still profiting off them. This ratio of downloads to purchases held true for the “premium” Mario Run, so only a sliver of the insanely high three hundred million free downloads it got by the end of 2018 actually led to a paid purchase.

Image: Source Gaming. The various menus of Super Mario Run do push you into playing regularly, though without the microtransactions or sizable content it comes across as somewhat odd.

Small optional purchases are probably here to stay, but it’s more equitable when the transaction is fair, consistent, and open. Super Smash Bros.’ Mii Costumes are acceptable to me; they don’t add much, but they’re fun enough, you’re never at a loss for not owning them, and they have a cheap, fixed price: $0.50 for a one piece outfit and $0.75 for a two piece. Multiversus sold costumes as well, but for far more money, and one you first spend on a secondary currency to hide how arbitrarily the stuff is priced (the most expensive ones cost more only because they’re more popular). It also has a ton of other optional content, and allows players to earn some of it without paying, but much of what someone might actually want isn’t on that list. Pokémon Unite does something similar by paywalling most things, including the item that lets you rename your avatar if you need to. Characters you can earn without paying, but that can take an obscene amount of time, since each is expensive and the currency to unlock them is doled out slowly. People worked on this stuff and deserve to be paid, and it’s fair to put a cost to their labor. But this element of mendacity and obfuscation is unethical.

And Mario Run did partake in several of these practices, though not the microtransactions, thank god. For one thing, Nintendo emailed me within a day of reloading it to advertise games on Switch. There were also the time sensitive events, the added content, but those were at least minor. You can get Luigi automatically when you buy the game at certain times, though that offer came long after he had already been added as an in-game reward. Like several free-to-play games, it restricts how often you can play Remix or Rally, particularly if you only have the demo. That’s the main source of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp’s revenue, “allowing” you to do more each day by paying up. Run doing this isn’t, strictly speaking, great, but I do find it less egregious when it still functions like a demo. I suppose Nintendo felt they had to have some kind of infrastructure to keep people playing. Which says something about how they viewed this space. Mario’s mobile outing wasn’t free-to-play, but the genre had infected it from the start.

Image: The Pokémon Company. The delightful Pokémon Picross on 3DS had in-game time limits too, and microtransactions, but that was at least a release where you literally couldn’t pay beyond an amount that would’ve been perfectly fine as a purchase price.

It’s fairly clear they lost interest in Super Mario Run not too long after everyone else did. Or perhaps they never viewed it as more than an experiment to work with smartphones, test the waters, and promote the My Nintendo rewards program. Over the years they did add new features, characters, and cosmetics to promote upcoming games (along with the occasional slashed price for the full game). The biggest was Remix 10. It’s still supported; most of my time with the game was in Rally racing the ghosts of other players. But there was no second pack of sold levels, no conventional sequel. Fans were worried there would be, that Nintendo would redouble their efforts on putting traditional Mario in this nontraditional space, but that never happened. It even seems like the game has been retconned out of the mainline series. Miitomo also folded a few years later, as have several of their other stabs at this. Miyamoto’s comments in that Variety interview were music to our ears, but they were unsurprising after over six years.

Of course, it’s not as though they actually left the mobile market. They still have a substantial presence with Pokémon GO, Fire Emblem Heroes, Mario Kart Tour, and lesser projects like Pokémon Masters and Pikmin Bloom. None of these are “one and done” purchases like Run was, but games as a service that have spent years bilking players of their money. I played Heroes for years without spending anything or feeling I’ve lost something for it, but it’s an undeniably predatory experience. It’s not as though Nintendo hasn’t pulled exploitative stuff before, or that they don’t today, but these games feel tangibly different. Their mobile releases at least have limits on how much a person’s allowed to spend at one time, but that itself gives away the grift. They only want to use their consumers so much.

I’m not suggesting that Super Mario Run was ever going to radically redefine the mobile market, or pave the way for one-and-done products over play factories. It’s a mediocre game worth its ten bucks and nothing more. It lacks anything to justify entering the Mario canon—well, maybe the goofy medley that plays for the Remix courses. But Nintendo did learn from its failings: the mobile market doesn’t want bespoke Nintendo experiences. They want exploitation. And the Big N happily followed through with one game as a service after another, most of which have made considerably more money despite not getting anywhere near the number of downloads. Critics lambasted Mario Kart Tour for being lifeless and gating things behind absurd prices (the “forty dollar Diddy Kong” was a notorious example), but players seem either fine or willing to tolerate it. Certainly more than the endless runner.

Image: Source Gaming. Tickets for Toad Rally can also be purchased via My Nintendo with Platinum Points, which is sort of a gray area; you can only earn those as achievements in various games. I’ve got a ton just from Fire Emblem Heroes, though on principle I don’t spend them on this kinda stuff.

Is the mobile market doomed to this? I don’t want to think so, but it’s hard not to. We’re far from the days where a Doodle God or Angry Birds could easily top the charts, and if many of those had live ads peppered into the gameplay. At the very least, I purchased Doodle God again after over a decade as research for this article, and today it’s full of needless in-app purchases, promotions for less interesting and more expensive sequels, and requests to track my data that I could not decline fast enough. There’s a free-to-play version as well that appears to be the same. There just seems to be a prevailing belief that the largest market in the games industry isn’t just inherently cheap, but ideally cheap. That we should let easily manipulated fellow players pay for us. We’re sheep, and we take part in this.

And this of course isn’t just happening on your phones but everywhere in the industry. That’s the niche miHoYo found with Genshin Impact: make a normal high budget game, kit it out with an obviously unnecessary free-to-play element, and the money’ll roll in. This is why Multiversus or Pokémon Unite gate all their content behind terrible UIs that constantly push you into paying. It’s why Fortnite actively targets kids. This is a morally bad way to make money, but it’s also one that’s not financially reliable, and it’s disconcerting that the industry has moved so aggressively into this. Multiversus burned through half a year’s worth of updates in under half the time to keep players hooked, and it had to put itself on an ongoing hiatus to retool itself. In seven years Overwatch went from being a trailblazing, world-renowned shooter to a joke. Square Enix had a lineup of games as a service, many with a solid IP behind it, and almost all of them failed.

Image: Sensor Tower, which released this chart in January 2020. Heroes would cross the $1 billion threshold soon after, and Mario Kart Tour would go on to make well over two hundred million over the next three years, but almost all of Nintendo’s other mobile games are seen as failures. Dr. Mario World would only generate an additional $9 million before Nintendo delisted it.

It’s because of this landscape that Super Mario Run’s legacy is cemented: Nintendo’s first step into a massive market, a poor one, and one that led them to follow a much darker road. They came into our phones expecting people to want a standard if shallow Nintendo experience and instead found the one gaming space that rejected that wholeheartedly. They were eyeing the free-to-play model from the start, but there’s a reason they kept making those and not one-time purchases. On the plus side, their love affair with this model is at least waning. Fire Emblem Heroes is still going strong, and Mario Kart Tour’s servers and stores will still be supported, but after four years on the market the latter will no longer be getting new content. We can rest easy knowing there probably isn’t a F2P Zelda waiting in the wings. Probably.