Miyamoto talks Super Mario Run's lack of variety in power-ups, Neko Atsume influence

A portion of a TIME interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

T: How did you pick and choose what gameplay elements are right for the iPhone and which ones aren’t? I noticed, for example, that I didn’t see any power-ups other than the mushroom in Super Mario Run like there are in the console games. Is that something we’ll eventually see in a mobile Mario game?

SM: I think with this being our first Super Mario game on iPhone, we’ve designed this both in what’s the best experience but also with a long road ahead of us in terms of what else we can do on iPhone. So perhaps you can look forward to some of that at some point in the future. But one thing we have done this time is that you’ll be able to play not just as Mario, but after going through the game and unlocking some things and meeting some conditions you’ll be able to play as some of the other characters as well.

T: The Kingdom Builder mode is a relatively new concept for Mario games. What made you decide to include that in Super Mario Run?

SM: There are a couple of reasons. One is there is actually a game in Japan that I’ve been playing on a smartphone with my wife, it’s called Neko Atsume, It’s sort of a cat collecting game. From that, I really got the sense of having this thing on your phone that you interact with on a regular basis, and then you grow and build it up from there, is a very compelling feature. And certainly Nintendo has had games that have done this in the past on our own platforms.

The other reason behind it, typically with the Super Mario games, what you’re really doing is you’re sort of strategizing and working your way through individual levels. And we wanted to have a method for you to save the accomplishments that you get in each of those levels and have a place where those accomplishments can kind of build up. And that’s where the idea for the Kingdom Mode came from.