In the age of technology, there’s little that stays the same. With each brand in a relentless race to release new and improved smart phones each year, these new products don’t tend to stick around for very long. Their novelty fades fast. The iPhone 14 is the new and exciting smart phone only as long as it takes for the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro to release.
But where planned obsolescence seems to reign supreme in this technological landscape, Nintendo has made a career of products that are built to last. Go ahead and dust off that old N64 or Super Nintendo in the closet if you doubt me. For all of the company’s faults, it’s an area where they deserve all the credit they get. But more than built to last, the games these consoles run are timeless.
While the nostalgic value of our video games is widely open to debate, Nintendo’s driving force has always appeared to be the fun factor before all else. Microsoft and Sony have been releasing more powerful consoles than Nintendo since they first began releasing consoles. That Nintendo has remained such a dominant force in the video game industry even as its hardware limitations have grown increasingly glaring says volumes about the company’s focus. Stacked up with the likes of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, it appears like a David & Goliath battle — not just in size, but with regard to specs as well.
While hardware improvement took a back seat for Nintendo, joy remained their driving force.
Even by the release of the 2013 PS4, Nintendo was already being dwarfed in critical ways by its biggest competitors. But where Sony and Microsoft put so much of their energy into the hardware and graphical capabilities of their consoles, Nintendo’s focus has remained squarely on delivering fun games through a formula that’s remained almost unchanged since the 1980’s.
But there’s one key difference now. When in the past Nintendo often entered into competitive territory against Microsoft and Sony, it appears now to move in almost bold defiance of them. Having gone over six entire years without an improvement to its hardware since the launch of the Nintendo Switch, they’ve entered into new territory. In this tech world that only seems to accelerate faster and faster, they’re like salmon swimming upstream. The Switch had already shown its age upon its 2017 release and has paraded proudly forward without even attempting to improve more than its screen — with the tepid release of the Switch OLED.
But there’s a reason it’s continued to sell as well as it has. As more and more games have continued to release to critical acclaim, it’s not difficult to see why. At Nintendo, they’ve achieved a mastery of their formula. Their games perform spectacularly in spite of the console’s limitations. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is as timeless to play as it was when the switch first launched. So is Mario Odyssey. Even Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which released originally on the Wii U in 2014 as Mario Kart 8, remains in many peoples’ eyes the greatest family racing game ever made.
When in 2021 I began to yearn for the release of Nintendo’s next big console, the games that have come out in the intervening years have made me wonder what really I could want from my next console that I don’t already have here.
If Nintendo can skate past the release of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom unscathed — a game expected to be one of the broadest and most expansive the company has undertaken yet — they might be able to sail smoothly for a full decade without a new console. In the world where so many want new and improved smart phones each year, that would be a fairly staggering achievement.
Nintendo’s new consoles have often moved in direct accordance with the latest games in their biggest franchises. Each console gets a new Smash Brothers, a Kirby or 2, a 3D Mario game, and a Mario Kart. But with Nintendo boldly adding an entire game’s worth of brand new and revamped race tracks with this latest DLC (Downloadable Content) booster pack, it’s made me wonder what place a new Mario Kart game would even have on a new system.
With Kirby and Pokemon games abounding, two new Metroid titles to choose from, and a widening list of virtual console games to peruse through, they’ve given fans every reason to be happy with what they have. With Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, including in this latest rendition of the game every character from its 5 prior iterations, as well as over 100 stages to play on, I’m not sure what a new game in the series could even have to offer.
As with Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, it still has a hallowed place in the world of video games even years after its launch. If Nintendo can release a followup to Mario Odyssey on Switch — which, let’s be honest, they can and it’s probably already in the works — then Nintendo has little reason to push a new console on its consumers for the foreseeable future.
I think they’ve likely decided that their wisest move for the time being is to keep releasing games that play spectacularly within their limited framework. So many of their games released within the last few years are widely considered to each be the best in their respective universes.
The Switch is quick, snappy, and finds clever ways of making games that feel fresh, timeless and expansive — even in the face of ones that are over ten times their size, and are played on consoles a hundred times as powerful. Their method stands as a testament to the idea that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Mario might eventually see his day in 4K, but for now, I can’t say I see the hurry.