Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto revealed Super Mario Run, an autoscrolling endless runner will launch on iOS this holiday season, during the Apple keynote in San Francisco Wednesday.
Borrowing its aesthetic from New Super Mario Bros. U and Super Mario Maker, Super Mario Run features simplified, one-handed platformer gameplay in which players guide Nintendo mascot Mario through a series of side-scrolling obstacle courses. Mario runs to the right automatically, and players can tap their device’s touchscreen to make him jump over chasms, pounce enemies, and navigate tricky platforming sequences.
While early levels offer simple challenges, the game’s later stages introduce blocks that change Mario’s direction, and items that allow players to stop and start Mario with precision timing. Though Super Mario Run eventually ramps up in difficulty, the goal remains to collect as many coins in each stage as possible before reaching an end-of-level flagpole.
Super Mario Run‘s gameplay is split across three modes. The game’s core campaign features a series of back-to-back levels, similar to previous Mario platformers released for Nintendo consoles. A second mode allows players to compete with friends in asynchronous coin-collecting challenges. Players can collect coins and toad followers in Super Mario Run‘s first two gameplay modes to unlock new items within a third mode, which features a customizable version of Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom.
Super Mario Run follows up on a handful of recent Nintendo mobile releases, including Miitomo, a unique social networking app that allows players to create and dress custom Mii characters. Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise also recently hit mobile platforms with Pokemon Go, a wildly successful monster-catching sim built atop an augmented reality framework.
Nintendo specified that Super Mario Run will be available as a paid app, rather than free-to-play, but did not announce an exact price. Super Mario Run will hit the Apple App Store this December.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”