It's-a-him! Dr Mario! Nintendo's mascot may be a koopa stomping plumber by day, but by night he swaps his dungarees for scrubs, moonlighting as a pill-pushing medic. And he'll soon be back to dish out prescriptions on smartphone devices, as Nintendo has revealed Dr Mario World for mobile phones.
Working with Line Corp, Nintendo is aiming for a summer 2019 release for the title on iOS and Android. If it follows in the footsteps of its SNES, NES and Gameboy predecessors, it will see Mario stacking different sorts of pills, Tetris-style, on top of multi-colored tummy bugs to cure patients.
The doctor is in! Mario puts on the white coat once again in the mobile game Dr. Mario World, targeting an early summer 2019 global release. #DrMario https://t.co/DTRBympHj0 pic.twitter.com/RfMZbbs3Mp31 January 2019
More mobile Mario
After seeing the success Niantic made of the Pokemon Go property, Nintendo is increasingly trying its hand within the mobile market.
With a little help from third-party mobile developers, it's already turned its franchises like Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing into mobile titles, as well as bringing Mario to smartphone screens with the free-running Super Mario Run.
It's been a massive shift for Nintendo, which has traditionally siloed off its characters and intellectual properties solely for its own hardware.
In China it's even letting its stable of characters hit other home consoles rather than merely its own Nintendo Switch system – you can get the likes of Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (complete with an AI-infused graphical makeover) on the Nvidia Shield console. In that territory, it's simpler for Nintendo to release its software on an established machine rather than jump through the local hoops of bringing its own hardware through the stringent Chinese accreditation system.
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