With a simultaneous launch in 150 countries just months away, the work began.

One major reason DeNA and Nintendo chose App Engine was its ability to implement services demanding high levels of availability. Because they were anticipating a massive traffic spike on launch day, it was important that their cloud platform had the ability to scale quickly. App Engine’s auto scaling can automatically add or remove instances in line with traffic volume, and can be optimized in units of milliseconds. Adding to that, DeNA also compiled and shared estimation sheets with Google so they could anticipate the load on various services on day one. All this helped ensure they wouldn’t risk downtime while the systems where scaling.

With launch day rapidly approaching, load testing also became a major priority. Using Google Cloud Datastore, DeNA was able to complete a test with 3 million accesses per second. This gave both DeNA and Nintendo confidence that Super Mario Run’s back-end would be more than capable of withstanding the projected number of accesses when the game went live.

Looking toward the future

All of DeNa and Nintendo’s hard work paid off when Super Mario Run launched last December. Although there were more than 40 million downloads in the first four days alone, the launch went off without a hitch.

Now the teams are looking forward to tackling new challenges. A system like Super Mario Run generates log data in huge volumes, so plans are already in the works to use Google BigQuery to analyze those logs and apply any learnings to future app development. They’re also using their experiences with Super Mario Run and App Engine for the development of new games, like the recently released Fire Emblem Heroes. We look forward to seeing what they do next.

Super Mario Run is available for iOS and Android.