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In a recent interview with GameInformer, Miyamoto had some rare insight into the interworkings of Nintendo.

According to Miyamoto, Nintendo has changed its outlook fairly significantly in the last 10 years. Before this point, Nintendo had a purely game-centric focus, wanting to solely commit to making the quality titles we’ve come to expect. However, as time has passed, Nintendo have wanted people to see them as Nintendo, and not just a company that makes games. This is why in recent years there has been such a big push for more real-life entertainment, including the Universal Parks, LEGO Mario, and the recent Mario Movie.

It feels like Nintendo has been on fire lately. The Switch continues to sell really well, the Lego sets are very popular, you have two Super Nintendo World locations open, and now the Super Mario Bros. Movie is hitting theaters. What do you attribute the affluence of Nintendo in this era to?

SM: You know, approximately ten years ago, we thought that the popularity of Nintendo was directly attributed to the amount of fun that the games we made were. We were making characters for that purpose of being used to make the games fun. Because of that, we try to avoid setting any unnecessary things like maybe deciding what Mario likes to eat because we didn’t want that to then become a limitation for any future games that we release or create. And so that’s the kind of approach that we’ve been taking.

But really, about ten years ago, people would think that you’ve got to decide between Nintendo and Sega or Sony and Microsoft, and we thought that creating fun games is how we can get people to make the decision to choose Nintendo. But now, people aren’t looking for that. There are just a lot more forms of entertainment available, and there are just a lot of things that people want to have and that people want to purchase. Within that competitive field that we find ourselves now, our focus has shifted into how can we get people to choose Nintendo as Nintendo and really ask, “Why would people choose Nintendo?” Talking about the Super Nintendo World park, and in the movie as well, to see people’s reaction as enjoying Nintendo as a product – Nintendo as a brand – was something that was really great to see. I wanted to really make sure that people understand that Nintendo is something that brings reassurance that is safe and really almost like a necessity for any family. That’s the kind of thing that I’d really like to make sure happens.

[GameInformer]

Many of us Nintendo fans already viewed Nintendo as a necessity, making it interesting to see that that has been the plan for quite some time. While this push has seemingly been quite Mario heavy, one can hope to see Nintendo branch out into some of their other franchises soon! Click here to check out the whole interview.

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the8bitlego

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Comments (1)

dark weres

12M ago

Nintendo is necessary for anyone who claims to like video games IMO.

Between web3 grifting, aggressive mobage marketing, Sony/Microsoft's predatory EULAs where you agree that you no longer buy games when you "buy" them, and people talking about their NVidia TPK69420 graphics cards and what kinds of games it could theoretically play, if they could get the rest of their rig assembled and booting up, and the diminishing returns of Moore's Law, talking about video games when you're not talking about Nintendo, just doesn't feel like you're talking about video games anymore.

Gimme the people that just discovered that huge pixel-Luigi wandering in the ocean in the background of Mario 3D World, or who want to show off their favourite weapon combo in Bayonetta 3, and for whom the Switch's CPU/GPU are just not as interesting a topic as what Monolith Soft is up to at any given moment.