The Evolution of Nintendo

By: Kirk DouglasTen months or so ago, I made a decision in my gaming life that I didn’t ever think would happen. Contrary to my nearly life-long love affair with video games, I sold the last two remaining consoles in my possession: My Playstation 4 and Nintendo Wii U.

Before selling my consoles last year, I used to regularly share in the excitement around everything from major game releases and re-releases, boxed sets and gaming console announcements with friends and co-workers. I was definitely the guy who would line up for a release at midnight or at the very least do a pre-order for the games I truly loved, so I could be among the first on release day to claim my copy. But things changed for me recently, and before I discuss why, I’d like to take a look back at where this love affair all began. There is one company most important in shaping my expectations and experiences around gaming and I’d like to call attention to them and take a look at their influence as of late.

Passion around gaming is something that I have experienced since early childhood, starting from the very first time I put my hands on an Atari console at my aunt and uncle’s house. I remember  my Aunt Jen and uncle Jim having the Atari 2600 and a slew of games ranging from the ever popular Frogger to Pong, Space Invaders and Pac-Man to name a few. I fondly remember arriving at their house where my parents would visit and find myself rushing down to the furnished basement to pop on the television and sit on the carpeted floor where I’d spend the next couple of hours entranced in video game nirvana.

As a child in my early years I wasn’t good at these games just yet but I was absolutely dazzled by the ability to interact with things on screen. Like most of my generation and those after, video games provided nearly endless entertainment and managed to capture my attention in ways that very few things could. Having a console was my new goal. I so desperately wanted that new form of entertainment and eventually, I would get it.

My wish came true in the form of a Nintendo Entertainment System. It was about 1988 when my mother promised me that if I got good grades in school I would be rewarded with the NES bundle that came with the Power Pad, World Class Track Meet and Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt combination cartridge, complete with the “Zapper” gun. I passed my classes that year, my mom kept her word and my life as a gamer began in earnest.

I was a pretty ‘normal’ kid, whatever that means, but I always had a sort of intrigue around electronics. I also appreciated art and music from a young age and liked the many elements of those things video games brought together. Until that point in my life, really the only games I ever played regularly were Uno or Sorry! at grandma’s house and that awful fishing game they made me play in speech therapy. You know, the one where you hold an artificial fishing rod, complete with a yarn string and a magnet to ‘hook’ those awful word-toting fish on the school room floor? Yeah, as you can imagine, no fun at all. Every word was a difficult one for me and the Nintendo was an escape that allowed the introverted aspects of my personality get lost in challenges that didn’t require me to engage verbally, while still invested mentally.

It was just me, my games and my wandering mind as I enjoyed the side-scrolling fun of Super Mario Brothers, the top-down Adventures of Dino Riki and the suck ‘em up and spit ‘em out chaos of Kirby’s Adventure.

Nintendo was a brand that every kid my age was hyper-aware of. Their marketing slogan “Now you’re playing with power” was something relentlessly pushed from TV commercials to cereal boxes and across the growing popularity of subscription gaming magazines of its time.

Looking back, the company had cultivated a loyalty that remained unbroken for many, even amid the more powerful later releases of the Sega Genesis and competing platforms. There was a strength in Nintendo's unique prowess to create likable characters and at times, genius gameplay dynamics amongst their many intellectual properties. One could easily argue that some of the best, most memorable titles of the 80's and 90's came straight out of Nintendo's in-house development teams.

Now in 2015 as I reflect on my life without console gaming, I can’t help but wonder what aspects of the game industry influence me now. And what exactly led me to relinquish my beloved consoles? The answer to the latter question is simple on the surface, but goes much deeper.

An ever-busy work schedule and lack of balanced free time has made committing to newer games difficult over the past few years. I found myself buying consoles and game titles that often went practically untouched for days or even weeks after purchase. In a recent conversation with a close friend I discussed my thoughts on how gaming has changed in many ways;, or at least my perception of it has. It seems so much of our recent titles have focused on deep integration of online play, expansive stories that take tens of hours of gameplay to finish the story mode and ever-expanding requirements (as much as into the hundreds of hours) to reach a sort of "completion" status.

Let me be clear that I don't think there is anything wrong with these experiences, in fact, I think there is plenty of room for those with a more relaxed schedule to find themselves comfortably entrenched in great gameplay and story lines that might not be experienced otherwise.

But what about the more, dare I say, 'casual' gamers? Like... Me. I think there is something we may have lost a bit from the gaming days of old. There was a pick-up-and-play aspect to many games in my childhood. An ability to simply stop where you were and pick a game up where you left off later, or just not really care if you had saved in the first place. I know many early titles didn’t allow saved games. But even if you look back at Super Mario Bros., you might agree that you didn't need to save to have fun.

With a flailing Wii U console on the market and rumors trickling in about a future console release [Nintendo NX] slated for late 2016 or early 2017, where has the magic of Nintendo gone? I can't help but wonder what has led this once hugely successful company to a distant third place in the home console market.

Though Nintendo has innovated many times over in controllers and interactivity spanning from the Nintendo 64 to the Wii and Wii U, these new interactions have done little to sustain growth for the company long term. Reintroducing major IP's like Super Mario 3D World and Smash Bros. Wii U have helped them gain some, but little traction in comparison to other consoles. The 80's King of consoles has been on a backslide for some time now and it's hard to see them on the rebound anytime soon.

There are some commonly shared opinions among gamers citing key areas Nintendo should really focus on improving. The Internet is often abuzz with people like me, loyal and optimistic suggesting that Nintendo could really see some success by throwing all of there resources behind rebooting their best IP's and improving hardware. Perhaps a complete overhaul of their purchasing and download policies, online multiplayer infrastructure and a modernization of their UI could help.

Could Nintendo's fun and often child-like representation of its operating system software be working against it? Some say yes, as the PlayStation and Xbox brands move ever closer to entertainment computing and modern UI designs that leave Nintendo's design choices often looking immature, unpolished and at times amateur in comparison.

And what is Nintendo's influence on the console gaming market today? Are people like me in their 30's purchasing titles to romance their inner child and have a taste of the company that we loved so much in our youth? I'm not sure this is true for anyone else, but I feel a little bit that way myself at times.

The fact is that I'm just not sure Nintendo has much influence outside of my demographic anymore. Dwindling flagship releases and nearly absent 3rd party support has left them in a heck of a difficult position in terms of attracting newcomers to their product.

All of this said, I may be hopelessly nostalgic and overly-optimistic, but I don't think they should be discounted just yet, and I've got a few reasons why and some suggestions on how these concerns might be addressed.

1) The Wii U, for all of its shortcomings introduced customers to a bunch of new ideas I believe just weren’t fully-formed. When the console launched, the company put emphasis on new personalization features building off the idea of a ‘Mii-verse,’, TV features that never really worked well and a bunch of other non-gaming related areas. They also showed off options like putting your controller on a gun-like mount that suggested a new and exciting way to play first person shooters, an accessory that we would later find to be barely useful at all. Though motion controls, video calling and off-screen gameplay made for an attractive feature set in the initial E3 trailer, it turned out that few of those features were useful or attractive offerings in actual day to day use.. Finally, the inclusion of on-board storage for their consoles and the introduction of full game downloads was a welcome addition but with capacity choice limited between 8 and 32GB options, there just wasn’t enough for anyone to take the console very seriously as a good host for a digital library.. Though they clearly spruced up their online offerings as compared to the original Wii (online offerings were disappointing to say the least), there are still some serious limitations making it hard to justify an online purchase versus a retail package. The problem of storage limitations are also not being helped by their back-end system tying games to individual consoles as opposed to a user's Nintendo Network ID. This has without a doubt been of real concern for some who’ve purchased digitally.

My advice to Nintendo is simply to fix these broken parts and re-focus on what is important. To take a look back at all they have learned from console and controller design and pull out only the very best aspects that people have enjoyed. Completely overhaul the user interface and rethink online services from the ground up. Offer competitive hardware and re-define the company as a viable option for casual gamers and serious gamers alike. I think its perfectly fine to keep the tried and true mascots, but ditch the childish interface and overly simplistic UI in favor of something with polish.

2)  Get in the Mobile game. Seriously. Tap back into that pick-up-and-play nature of games from back in the day. With endless gameplay experiences available on every other platform in parallel with mobile gaming taking off, this is a perfect time for Nintendo to bridge the gap between the two. Launch a new Animal Crossing game for your next home console and let me sell furniture to my neighbor from my iPhone while i'm at work. Reward me via your re-vamped online system for my relentless participation with achievements and accolades I can post on my social networks. Make it easy for me to find and invite friends in my age group or at my skill level so that i'm not constantly being put up against a 16 year old overseas who's invested far more time than I have avialable in whatever popular game I am playing.

3) Graphics. Make them great again. There was a time,(N64 comes to mind) when Nintendo truly changed what 3D gaming meant. I'm not sure we are in a place again where such a leap can be made. But I do know that Nintendo's offerings across the last few consoles have been anything but competitive. If you want to be taken seriously by real gamers, you've got to appeal to both the young and old and graphics provide a universal 'wow factor' that all ages can acknowledge. The fact of the matter is that our mobile devices are becoming so powerful so fast that they will soon put high-tier consoles to shame. These processors are becoming less expensive and Nintendo already has built-in relationships with companies like AMD who they should encourage to move the needle forward. If they can't get a tailored chip from AMD or NVIDIA that suits their platform needs, invest in a custom SoC (System on a Chip) that will allow the company to leverage the best in their software capability with a scaleable, custom chip manufacturing process that they can control. This latter suggestion to manufacture chips would be both daring and require a massive investment, but one thing Nintendo does have is money and this type of suggestion might not be completely out of the question to secure a better product roadmap for the future.

4) Recreate the best in third party partnerships. Nintendo hasn't had a strength in this area since the 80's and although often criticized for ruling 3rd party developers with an iron fist in those days, I believe it is possible to rekindle those relationships and create new ones in more effective partnerships for the future. Part of this problem can only be solved by Nintendo itself putting forth its highest development efforts to push console sales. That means pulling out all the stops and lunching with Mario, Zelda and one or two others headliners in tow within a reasonable launch window for the next console. The other part of that initiative needs to be in courting indie developers and creating partnerships with what's left of the major game studios. Re-create the Nintendo 'seal of approval,' so that customers know there will be a watchful eye on development to ensure there's a good quality of games on the market, regardless of quantity. Exercise openness and involvement in your partnerships to cultivate upstanding relationships so that developers want to continue working with you; I acknowledge this is all easier said than done, but it can happen with the right team of people in charge of such an initiative and Nintendo desperately needs this attention to partnerships.

5) Market the hell out of your future endeavors and ditch the ever-cautious, family-friendly approach that has grown into a comfortable but limiting box for the company. Somehow "Now you're playing with power" changed to "Wii want to play," and its a campaign that was speaking to people who are already having their desires for gameplay answered by mobile devices and other in-home consoles. Get back to being serious about making games for everyone and stop limiting the company party line to its aim on young kids and young families. There is room for many pockets of consumers to join in the fun of the next console offering from Nintendo and the marketing that drives it needs to show this reality. Nintendo seems to have had at least two identities in my lifetime, one that was powerful and forward thinking and one that gleefully traded powerful for playful, possibly to a bit of its own demise. It's time to merge the best of these parts and figure out who the company is as a whole and express that through product and marketing decisions.

These are a few suggestions that I sincerely hope Nintendo is considering moving forward. I don't consider my love affair with Nintendo at its end, but we are definitely on break until they get things sorted. For me, this is a company that has so deeply impacted my childhood memories and shaped my vision of gaming for so long that I can't stand the thought of them not being part of the gaming landscape. At the same time, it's hard to be in a position where I feel I am constantly forgiving them for making bad decisions repeatedly. When I sold both of my consoles late last year it was apparent to me that although my schedule was mostly to blame, there just wasn't a clear reason to hold onto either. My PS4 was offering up incredible graphics (for a console vs. computer) and great gameplay experiences that literally required more time than I had available to give. My Wii U, even with its more accessible pick-up-and-play advantages just wasn't advantageous enough with few interesting titles to choose from.

Nintendo's greatest strengths in recent years have been that they have somehow maintained a level of 'fun factor' that keeps me going back to their titles. As options for great titles on their consoles lessen and their catalog and offerings seem more and more dismal, it's hard to maintain my customer loyalty. I truly hope they turn it around. I'd love to see myself in line on launch day for their next home console offering.