Nintendo Shares Soar as Mario Comes to Smartphones

TOKYO—Nintendo Co.'s share price surged on Thursday after the Japanese videogame powerhouse said it would introduce Mario the plumber, its most famous character franchise, to smartphone platforms beginning with Apple Inc.'s iOS.

The smartphone game "Super Mario Run" will come to iPhones and iPads first by December, followed by a planned launch for other smart devices running Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s Android OS, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto said at an Apple event in San Francisco on Wednesday, during an introduction of the new iPhone.

Nintendo's share price opened 18% higher at ¥ 29,195, while DeNA Co., Nintendo's partner in developing smartphone games, saw its stock price rise 21.5% to hit its daily trading limit of ¥ 3,955 shortly after the market opened in Tokyo.

The new Mario game will be free to download but will require payment to unlock full game features, Nintendo said.

Nintendo's latest flagship videogame console, Wii U, has struggled to compete with Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. machines. Investors have called on the Kyoto-based company to bring its well-known game franchises to smartphones, the game industry's fastest-growing source of revenue.

So far, Nintendo has released a communications app called Miitomo for smartphones. It has said it would release games for smartphones based on its Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem franchises by March 2017. Those games, plus the newly announced Mario game, make up the full lineup from the Nintendo-DeNA partnership for the current Japanese fiscal year, which ends March 2017, according to DeNA spokesman Tomoyuki Akiyama.

Write to Takashi Mochizuki at takashi.mochizuki@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 07, 2016 21:35 ET (01:35 GMT)

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