Nintendo stands today as one of the restless trailblazers of digital entertainment and a living museum of gaming nostalgia. But can it do it again, especially now that digital entertainment is changing so fast? The company’s next big move: the long-rumoured evolving Nintendo Switch. According to what Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, had to say in reporting recent financials, Nintendo is about to announce the successor to the Switch in the current fiscal year – which runs through March 2023 – and could set a new bar no later than next April. Should Nintendo develop another cultural phenomenon? Let’s take this story from the inside out.
What statement will be made by the eventual announcement of whatever Switch successor comes next? When Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo’s president, teased us that names won’t be announced until the device is released, he could have called it appropriately for whatever steps it takes. But ‘Switch next model’ invokes to me the idea not of some jump, but a thoughtful continuation. (I am reminded of the way that Sega changed the number on its successive consoles as a way of declaring their break from their pasts.) This kind of evolution implies that Nintendo is not trying to look ahead to the next great thing, but rather capitalising on the deeply successful formula called the Switch.
Expectations are sky-high for June’s Nintendo Direct, which will honour us with another preview of the software schedule for the rest of 2024, hopefully with a few more secrets in tow. But the persistent rumour about the big hardware upgrade – let’s call it the Switch 2 and move on – seems to point to the holy grail: more power combined with more flexibility, in the same small package.
Rumours indicate that the next Nintendo console will feature increased performance while docked, which is something many players have asked for. Performance levels could also be reduced while handheld, most likely to maximise battery life – a key concern for the device’s appeal of portable gameplay that the Switch markets.
Faced with an expanding repository of digital living libraries, which continues to swell with each passing year, backwards compatibility isn’t a feature: it’s a requirement, which is precisely what Nintendo appears to be promising players in the next-gen device; one that will, in its own words, honour the investments users have already made in the next-gen game collection, ‘letting players pick up their favourite titles and games and move them into the future’.
They’re still part of the story of evolution, though. The hardware design hints at larger console possibilities on the horizon – Andris began dowsing for narrative details that didn’t exist on the actual controller – and magnetic Joy-Con controllers. These go beyond surface-level pleasures to acknowledge gaming technology as an ever-shifting field.
This emphasis on evolution rather than revolution suggests an intimate understanding of Nintendo’s customer base, not just the gee-whiz desire for next-shiny but the incremental enrichment of an experience that remains in step with what Nintendo games do with tradition and what gamers love about them. The tensions that arise from this dual status as custodian and vanguard speak to the ambivalences that animate modern popular culture. I would argue that today, more than any other time in human history, the task of creating meaning is more diverse, variegated, confusing and, from that confusion, sublime.
It is in this realm that we can easily see how Nintendo’s products bleed out of regulated spaces of play and into pop culture, creating lasting impressions and indelible memories that form the common experiences by which generations of Nintendo users gather. From Mario and Donkey Kong to LCD gaming machines making it obsolete and Game Boy and Nintendo 64 reinventing the concept, Nintendo built the scrapbooks.
On the brink of a new Nintendo era, what do we know for sure? We know that they will write another chapter in their own history, joining the past, present and future into the next chapter in a very exciting story. The difference between the original Nintendo Switch and its successor is not simply a screen size or a processor, it’s holding hands with the history of Nintendo itself.
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Throughout the life of gaming, Nintendo has been one of the torchbearers in breakthrough ethos and the pursuit of innovative experiences. Nintendo has ushered generations into the next incarnation through toy-like ethos, yes, but also through the tales of heritage, an honoured guardian of heroism and adventure, where the ‘point’ might be unfathomable, but the heart of play is a world to be enjoyed. I look forward to discovering what he has in store next.
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