Rainy day recess meant Wii Sports tennis in the classroom. In the mid-2000s, Wii Sports was the mainstream video game. People bought the Wii for Wii Sports, making it, for some, a $250 game. Wii Sports benefited from being bundled with nearly every Nintendo Wii, but the pair elevated each other into the rarified air of pop culture phenomena. For context, the recent Elden Ring has sold 12 million copies, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game that consumed the early days of pandemic lockdown, has sold 37 million.
Nintendo shipped nearly 83 million copies of Wii Sports. Surely, if any franchise deserved prioritization, this was it. And yet, I have been dumbfounded for the better part of 15 years by Nintendo’s decision to put one of its biggest hits of all time on the back burner. Nintendo only has so many internal studios and trusted partners, and only so much space in a year to release games without competing against itself. This meager attention to franchises - franchises that other game publishers would make a deal with the devil to annualize - has more to do with practicality than stinginess. I’m looking at you, F-Zero and Golden Sun and Wave Race and Earthbound. Nintendo’s treasure box is so deep that it will go years, even decades, without creating a sequel for many of its hit franchises. Alchemy doesn’t exist, but Nintendo does.Īt any moment, Shuntaro Furukawa can greenlight a new Metroid or Animal Crossing or Zelda or 2D Mario or 3D Mario or Mario Kart or Mario Teaches Typing, and a few years from now, that decision will have produced the closest the entertainment industry has to a guaranteed profit.
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