Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto once again finds himself at the center of attention throughout the gaming world as he leads his company down an unfamiliar path: a third-party developer for smartphones! I’m still letting the words “Nintendo” and “third-party” sink into my brain a full two weeks later.

But it’s true. With the success of Miitomo, Nintendo is shooting for the moon with Super Mario Run, and the world wants to know everything there is to know about this game. The most recent interview comes from Yahoo Finance, and in it, Miyamoto discussed how the game came to be with the aid of Apple.

It started when we were working on Miitomo (Nintendo’s social game for iOS and Android), or before that when Mr. [Satoru] Iwata (Nintendo’s late CEO) was still with the company. Apple invited him to have a conversation about how the two companies could work together and they started working on ‘Miitomo’ and then this opportunity came up.

However, Miyamoto made it perfectly clear why Nintendo will never abandon its console gaming space.

At Nintendo, we still put a lot of importance of sitting down and playing face to face.

That reason runs adjacent to why Nintendo won’t yet commit to VR. Strapping yourself into a set of goggle limits your interaction with others, creating irreconcilable differences with Nintendo’s goals.

As for Android, Miyamoto says developing for the iPhone was easier.

One of the reasons we focused on iPhone first was the stability of the platform and being able to get the level of response that we want out of the games. And that’s not to say that Android devices don’t have the same level of responsiveness. But because there are so many Android devices, trying to engineer the game to work across them all requires quite a lot of time.

Nintendo has primarily developed for dedicated hardware for the past 30 years! Getting to know the ins-and-outs of the iPhone is easier than all of the Android devices. Again, this falls right in line with the company’s stances on dedicated platforms.

And finally, he hopes that the game boosts Mario’s popularity throughout the world on both the iPhone and all of Nintendo’s own platforms as well.

I feel very lucky, because there are a lot of people in Japan making characters and games that become popular in Japan. So I feel fortunate to be able to bring Mario to an audience around the world. And now with the reach of smart devices, we can bring Mario to an entire generation of kids, and hopefully be able to recapture those older players who played when they were younger and remind them how much fun it is to play a Nintendo game.

Words to live by. Nintendo never let’s you go. Once you feel like you are out, it pulls you right back in. Can’t wait to play the NX, can’t wait for Super Mario Run. We should have more information on both in the coming months.