"Man, remember when games were good?" said my fiancée as she waited for a blue Yoshi to eat a Starman so she could exit the level and go cheat her way through a tougher one. We were of course playing Super Mario World, a game that came out when she was 9 and I was 11.
Nintendo had re-released Super Mario World on its fledgling Wii U console. You can download the 22-year-old (oh God I am so old and will die someday) game for 8 bucks; if like us you have already purchased a digital version of Mario World for the old Wii, you can pay $1.50 to upgrade it to the Wii U version. Said upgrade entails four distinct advantages: You can play the game on the Wii U GamePad controller's screen as well as the television; you can save your game at any time; you can reconfigure the button layouts; you do not have to boot into the abysmal Wii Menu and dig out your old Classic Controller to play it.
This is worth a buck fitty. Especially in the case of a true classic like Super Mario World. As I may have noted before, Super Nintendo collecting is all the rage these days, with prices spiraling impossibly upwards on what used to be dirt-common games, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that many of the games still deliver what players today are looking for. In most cases they generously allow you to save your game progress without cumbersome passwords. The difficulty levels of the games are more embracing of casual players – Final Fantasy on the 8-bit NES is a real pain in the ass, exempli gratia, but Final Fantasy II on Super Nintendo is downright relaxing.
Not to mention that the pixel aesthetic is making a comeback – this specific pixel aesthetic. Top-selling iPhone games use a deliberately 16-bit aesthetic – they might call it 8-bit, but it has too many colors and too small dots for that.
So as of right now creaky old Super Mario World is rivaling NintendoLand and New Super Mario Bros. U for hours logged on our Wii U. In fact, prior to this we'd barely even powered the damn thing up in 2013. After releasing a handful of games for Christmas and promising many more before the end of March, Nintendo delayed everything forever; ostensible "launch" game Pikmin 3 now won't be out until August and additional ostensible "launch" game The Wonderful 101 has gone AWOL. Third parties are releasing jack.
On a recent 8-4 Play podcast, I said that Nintendo should immediately institute some kind of App Store-like development environment, mobilizing the combined efforts of the world's indie developers to generate lots and lots of Wii U content more cheaply. Ryan Payton, formerly of Metal Gear Solid and Halo fame and now of the indie game Republique, offered that Nintendo could do something similar but by looking inward rather than outward: Make Wii U a "Nintendo paradise," he said, a one-stop shop for Nintendo's entire history.
Yes, well. I've been beating that drum since 2006 and the skin's about to break. Quite frankly I don't even think we'd have gotten this initial smattering of Virtual Console games on Wii U had Nintendo not been at a desperation point. Wii U sales slumped terribly after the holidays, and massive delays of almost its entire slate of game releases have left it without any reasonable path to success for a very long time. Meanwhile, you've still got three and a half million suckers who bought a Wii U who have nothing to do with it. Hence, at least a stopgap measure of Virtual Console: With no retail releases to speak of, may as well get some downloadable classics on there to generate buzz and cause people to turn their machines on. It worked in the case of my household, and evidently in others as well.
So why did Nintendo delay all of those games? At a recent Q&A session with investors, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata dropped the bomb: He had to delay these games, he said, because he had to pull development staff off of them to help finish NintendoLand and New Super Mario Bros. U, without which Wii U could not have been launched at all.
"The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them," Iwata said.
You see, Nintendo, by its own design, was the last major gamemaker on Earth to not have any experience whatsoever with creating high-definition games. And just like every other game developer found out, it always requires more resources than you think. Thing is, everybody else found this out in 2006.
So it really didn't matter how many other game publishers explicitly spelled out their issues with high-def game creation, Nintendo made the same miscalculation and is suffering the consequences. Noteworthy: Kotaku reported recently that Microsoft, too, is lagging behind where it wanted to be in development of games for the new Xbox console. Will this generation shift, too, prove more complicated than expected?
Back to Iwata. This is where it gets good. "The point I am trying to get across is that currently it is more challenging to sell packaged software for around $50-$60." No kidding! Some of us may even have said in the past that you might want to try not building your entire business around that, in case it all collapses one day. Nintendo has been belatedly attempting to build up its digital game sales business in anticipation of it being the primary driver of sales one day in the (near?) future, and posted mildly encouraging results at this investors' briefing:
What Nintendo wants us to take away from this chart is that it introduced digital sales of its major game software in the second half of the fiscal year, and proceeded to make nearly as much money in that second half as it had in any previous year. Actually, though, when I look at that chart, I see something else. Do you see it too? It's not as if Nintendo was totally in the weeds on digital content before this year. In fact, digital sales seemed to be rising steadily and were particularly strong in 2010, after which they dropped like a rock.
Hmm, what happened in 2010? Oh, that's right: Nintendo took Virtual Console round back of the barn and shot it in the head.
I may go my entire life without knowing the answer to the question of why did Nintendo take a growing service that was extremely popular and said, "Hey, you know what would be a great idea? If we killed this." Maybe it was to put emphasis on the original "WiiWare" downloadable games. Maybe it was because Nintendo was raking in so much cash from casual gamers buying Wii Fit that 100 million bucks a year for retrogames was small potatoes, not worth the resources.
Which brings us back around to Super Mario World on Wii U. I don't think these games should be seen as a mere stopgap, something to be dismissed if and when Nintendo manages to ship another couple few $60 Wii U games. When I was at the 8-4 offices in Tokyo to record that aforementioned podcast, the train station by our hotel had a large billboard not for a $60 game but for the Wii U Virtual Console release of Mother 2, aka Earthbound. Everybody found this a little bit desperate – this is how you have to advertise your new, $350 game console?! – and sure, Nintendo probably wishes it had something else to advertise.
But on the other hand, when we played Mario World we didn't feel like we were wasting the Wii U's potential. It's a great game even today, and the added bonus features of the Wii U version give it a sense of novelty. It makes us want to play more old games on Wii U. In other words, there's nothing shameful about turning Wii U into a "Nintendo paradise." It might even be the only option.
