Dr. Mario World

~ the obit ~

Dr. Mario World arrived on 9 July 2019, a day later in Japan, built by Nintendo EPD alongside LINE and NHN Entertainment and shipped into fifty nine territories at once. Nintendo was three years into its phone strategy at that point and this was the entry that took the oldest property, a 1990 puzzle game that shipped on the NES and the Game Boy and was reissued for thirty years after.

The version that landed was not that game. In Dr. Mario the pills fall and you clear viruses before the bottle fills, and the pressure is entirely a function of gravity. In Dr. Mario World the pills rise from the bottom of the screen and you can hold several of them at once, working through numbered levels with a move limit instead of an endless run. That is the standard mobile puzzle template and it was applied deliberately, because that template is what people install.

Two million downloads landed in the first seventy two hours and produced somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars of spending. For a free-to-play game that ratio is a verdict rather than a start. Nintendo kept it running for two more years, announced on 28 July 2021 that service would end, stopped selling diamonds the next day, and closed it on 1 November 2021 at six in the morning UTC.

A free game with a heart meter that refills while you are asleep is a shape I have never had any patience for. In 2019 I was thirty five, and the phone games I kept were the ones that did not ask me to come back on a schedule they set. This one was reviewed as a decent puzzle game wearing an economy it did not need, which is close to what killed it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the change to the rules ~

Inverting the gravity was not a gimmick. It changes what the player is doing at a basic level, because a falling pill is a decision under time pressure and a rising pill is a placement puzzle you can study. Reviewers split hard on it. Game Informer gave it 8.75 out of 10 and Pocket Gamer gave it 1.5 out of 5, which is an unusually wide gap for a Nintendo release and the Metacritic average landed at 58.

There was a real-time versus mode where two players cleared against each other, and it was the part most people who liked the game pointed to. Ten or so playable doctors carried their own abilities. The design work was there. What sat around it was a stamina system and a gacha for the characters, paid for in a currency you bought.

~ paying for pills ~

Hearts limited how many attempts you got at a level, and coins came from playing. Diamonds came from a credit card, and diamonds were how you pulled for the doctors that made hard levels tractable. Polygon noted at the time that the game never quite forced you to spend, which was meant as praise and turned out to be the commercial problem stated as a compliment.

This is the awkward corner Nintendo kept walking into on phones. The company's instinct is to make something that is fair to the person holding it, and the free-to-play model earns almost everything from a small group of people it is not being fair to. Miitomo did not resolve it, this did not resolve it, and both are shut.

~ the last day ~

On 1 November 2021 the servers stopped and the app stopped with them, because everything in it was validated somewhere else. What replaced it was a website called Dr. Mario World Memories, where anyone with a Nintendo Account could look up their own statistics and the medals they had collected.

That is a gentler ending than most games of this kind get, and it is also an admission of what had been true the whole time. Two years of play had produced a number on a webpage. The bottle and the pills had never actually been on your phone.

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