Soapbox features allow our individual writers to give their own opinions on hot topics, opinions that may not necessarily be the voice of the site. After Kate argued a March 31 defense yesterday, she decided to tackle another popular topic: Why is Nintendo so focused on making old games?
Do you remember a few years ago, when every movie was a remake or sequel to a classic 80’s? Do you remember how exhausting it was for people who had little nostalgia in that decade? Maybe you do not – over the past year time has made a beige slime, so we are not even sure we will remember our zip code anymore, but it was a difficult time. Some of us wanted new movies. Innovation. Creativity. Instead, we have Ghostbusters (but women!), Blade Runner (but Deckard is old!), and Prometheus (but it misses the point of the Alien series!).
That’s good, though – all we get are awful live remakes of Disney movies and tens of thousands of Marvel movies and TV shows that you have to keep up with if you want to get a chance to understand the nuances of the following. Sigh. If this is the grumpy old man hill I’m going to die on, then it has to be. I want Hollywood to invest a billion dollars in something new.
Everyone aboard the grumpy train, because we’re on our way to Complainsville, population: me.
Progress is not made by looking back and trying to recreate our childhoods through murky rosy specifications. God knows we would all rather return to our relatively peaceful, uncomplicated childhoods, but they were peaceful and uncomplicated because we were children, and did not notice that the world was still full of war, politics, and misery. Continuously revived The Goonies not going to take us back to our flickering childhoods.
Similarly, the constant beating of sequels, remakes and harbors of old games gets a little tiring for my money. (I know I recently pleaded for a Pullblox sequel, but I contain crowds, okay?) A remake or sequel is usually an easy win for a publisher: the code base, exposition, and story already exist , so it’s undoubtedly easier to depend on something already made than to build something new. There are, of course, expectations to meet, and rarely a sequel or a remake to it – there is always an artistic or mechanical choice that angers and disappoints fans, like the new Pokémon Diamond and Pearl chibis, but people will anyway buy the games. , what does it matter then?
I’m going to get really grumpy old man here, but sometimes I feel like the modern Nintendo is afraid of the big risks. Lately – at least the last few years – Nintendo’s new IPs (intellectual properties – in short, new ideas, new series and generally just completely new games) have been spinning to showcase their latest technology or experiment with new technology.
I may be wrong here, but I think Ring Fit Adventure is the last first party game from Nintendo that was actually completely new. Before that it was ARMS; for this, Splatoon. There’s also Nintendo Labo, if you want to expand on the definition of ‘game’, and 1-2-Switch, which was little more than a fun technology demo for the underutilized HD rumble of Switch. All great games, but almost not all (except Splatoon, which already has sequels) and most of them hold the Joy-Cons in a big way and show what the Switch is capable of.
I know I know. It’s boring to complain that Nintendo does not give me what I want. I did warn you that I’m going into my prettiest old man states, and I promise I’ll be praising an obscure DS game again soon. But I do not want to relive my childhood endlessly with polished remakes. I would prefer to have access to the games of my past without paying £ 100 for a boxless copy of a GameCube game on eBay. I want technology to last longer than a single console generation. I do not want to be asked to upgrade and upgrade before I am ready to go on.
More than anything, I want new experiences, risks, leaps of faith that initially seem daunting, but eventually bear fruit. Nintendo fans (myself, hi) are hard to please, and there’s always the risk that an entirely new series like never before will take hours – Splatoon initially seemed strange, didn ‘t it? A Nintendo shooter? No thanks – but we all know they’ll get it.
The moment a business transitions from ‘throwing things against the wall and seeing what’s stuck’ to ‘fixing this – let’s make it over and over again, now we know it’ll always stay’ is inevitable, because that’s how businesses work. They have investors and shareholders to please, and the risks do not bring in the money. Mario, Zelda and the like earn the big bucks because they made themselves profitable; smaller games like Pikmin are postponed and occasionally run out to please the cult followers. It just makes sense.
Asking for new, risky things without having any idea what we really are wantnor is there any guarantee that we would buy it, similar to Google’s demand to invest millions in a new range of nuclear-powered tricycles, or affordable lunar travel. Of course, they have the money, the talent and the ties to do it – but why would they step outside their comfort zone if things are going well?
We now live in a world of extremes, where most things are judged by the masses to be excellent or awful, and everything in between is rested in the halls of “meh” and forgotten forever. Why dare a ‘meh’ if you can ensure an ‘excellent’? Even the worst title of the Zelda title will not fall below a 9/10 these days, and even if the test of time finally considers it a dud – like Skyward Sword – it will still sell, because it is’ n Zelda.
If there’s anything to look forward to over the past few years, we can probably expect a new Nintendo idea to be available soon, perhaps when all the Zelda / Mario anniversaries are a bit dead. But until then, it’s haunted and remakes, haunted and remakes, all the way to the bank. I will still buy it. Of course I will. I really love Nintendo’s work, and I’ll point out that none of these sequels or remakes have ever been bad. They just are not new – and I do not want to get stuck in a world where we get the same five games and movies over and over, like a Ready player one-flavored porridge.
In the meantime, I will look to India to rectify the strange and wonderful fix, and hope that someone finds it good to give them a billion dollar budget one day. A girl can dream.