The Nintendo Story: Part Four

It's been two years since we last detailed the course of Nintendo. What has the company been up to since April 2016?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from half
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer and
I love all things tech, and it's time to revisit
an old favorite topic on tech Stuff. Two years ago,

(00:27):
back in twos sixteen, I updated a series I've been
doing about the company Nintendo. Now. In the first two parts,
I covered Nintendo from its origins up until about two
thousand and eleven, So two thousand eleven was when we
recorded those first two episodes. Chris Pallette, my original co host,
and I recorded those shows. Then in part three, I

(00:49):
covered two thousand eleven to early two thousand sixteen, but
at that stage, Nintendo had yet to come out with
its most recent console, which we now know, of course,
as the Nintendo Switch. Uh So today I thought it'd
be a good time to revisit the company yet again
and catch us up on what it's been doing over
the last couple of years. But first, I figure we

(01:11):
can do a really quick summary of where the company
came from in case you aren't eager to dig up
those old episodes and listen to them all over again.
So this is sort of the previously on tech stuff.
Back in the late nineteenth century, in the late eighteen hundreds,
and yes, that's how old Nintendo is, there was a

(01:33):
man named Fusahiro Yamauchi who founded a hanafuda cards company
and he called it Nintendo Copai. Hanafudo cards are used
for lots of different games in Japan. They're kind of
like Western playing cards, like poker cards in that way,
so we use those cards to play all sorts of

(01:54):
games like bridge or poker, or hearts or spades, and
tons of other games. Well back in the eighteen eighties,
no one could possibly have foreseen the future of this
playing card company and what it would become in the
latter half of the twentieth century. For two generations, business

(02:15):
grew steadily, and by generations, I mean Yamauchi's son would
take over the business and then his grandson would take
over the business. It actually followed the family line. By
the nineteen fifties, Fusahiro's grandson and the third president of Nintendo,
Hiroshi Yamauchi, was heading a company that was the dominant

(02:35):
producer of plastic playing cards in Japan. But Hiroshi Yamachi
recognized that there was a need to diversify the business,
so he made a licensing deal with Disney to print
the famous company's cartoon characters on these playing cards. This
actually opened up a new market for Nintendo, because up

(02:55):
to that point the cards were largely the realm of gamblers,
but now with popular Disney characters on cards, there was
suddenly this huge appeal to a younger audience. Nintendo also
produced books that laid out rules for new card games
that were suitable for kids, so that kids just didn't
become hardened gamblers using classic Disney characters now. While this

(03:20):
continued on, the company began to launch different businesses and
lots of different industries in an attempt to diversify, because
at that point, Yamachi saw that the playing card business
was very niche oriented. He actually saw other playing card
factories while he toured the world and realized they were
all very small operations and that if he stuck with

(03:42):
that one business, it would limit Nintendo too much. Unfortunately,
most of these other ventures Nintendo entered into failed miserably
in the market, so the playing card business was drying up,
and their various attempts to diversify even going into things
like hotel els and uh and and vehicles. None of

(04:04):
that was working out. That's when an engineer named gun
Pay your KOI helped inject some life back into the business.
He created an extending arm. He was working in Nintendo
in a manufacturing plant, and he took various pieces and
he created essentially kind of a robotic arm or an extender,
like a grabber sort of thing. And people saw it

(04:26):
and thought, well, that's kind of neat, you know what,
I think kids would really like that. So the company
decided to make a consumer version as a toy, and
Nintendo entered into the toy making business in earnest and
really the company still considers itself to be a toy company.
By the late nineties seventies, Nintendo had returned to a
more stable place in the industry, as was one of

(04:48):
the few companies producing toys at that time in Japan.
As computers and video games started to emerge, Nintendo got
into those as well, and at first the company acted
as a distributor for other ducts like the Magna Vox Odyssey.
Then the company began to produce arcade games like the
legendary Donkey Kong for actual video game arcades, not for

(05:10):
home use. Following the arcade game success, they began to
make video game cartridges for various home systems, like the
Atari twenty six hundred, and then company executives decided it
was time for Nintendo to make a console of its
very own instead of making games for other platforms. But
it was pretty bad timing all things considered, because Nintendo

(05:34):
was just getting into developing a console as the market
in the United States was headed toward a major collapse.
In the early nineteen eighties, the US market was oversaturated
with various consoles like you Had the A twenty six hundred,
the Atari fifty two hundred, the Intellivision, the Colliquo Vision,
and tons more. Plus there were home computers that were

(05:56):
coming out around this same time, like the t Lash
four A, the Commodore sixty four, and the Apple two.
Low quality controls and companies like Atari meant that there
was also a flood of substandard games that were rushed
to market in an effort to make a quick buck.
The consumer market couldn't sustain this pace, and by three

(06:17):
the whole thing was caving in on itself as consumers
got tired of feeling like they were being fleeced. Stores
were even beginning to refuse to carry games and systems
because of this bad impression. So this was not the
best time to debut a console, and yet Nintendo continued.
They persevered, and they introduced the Fama com which is

(06:39):
better known in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System.
In the US, the company paired this video game console
with a robot of questionable utility. This was actually a
ploy to get toy stores to carry the Nintendo, since
they were awfully shy about getting back into the home
video game market after that crash in ninety eight three.

(07:00):
But the plan worked and Nintendo earned itself a spot
in video game history, creating some of the most beloved
franchises in the video game world in the process. You
can listen to the first two episodes of the Nintendo
Story UH to hear the full account of what I
just summarized, plus obviously I go into a lot more detail. However,

(07:21):
we are going to skip ahead a bit. We're just
gonna acknowledge that Nintendo produced several consoles. There was the
Super Nintendo, the Nintendo sixty four, the GameCube, the Wei,
and the Weiu, not to mention numerous handheld game systems
since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the
time of my last recording, the most recent system on

(07:44):
the market was the Weiu, which, while innovative, had failed
to make a real impact on gamers. In fact, we
Use sales hit somewhere around thirteen and a half million
towards the end of twenty seventeen. That actually puts it
at the bottom of Nintendo's consoles in terms of sales.
Contrasted with the Wei, the predecessor to the We You,

(08:07):
and that was the best selling home console Nintendo ever produced.
The we sold more than one hundred one million units.
The only Nintendo device to out sell the we was
the handheld Nintendo d S, which sold an astonishing one
fifty four million units, putting it right behind the PlayStation

(08:28):
two for best selling video game system of all time.
It's hard to see that we You as anything other
than a commercial failure. One other thing I should mention
that I covered in the third episode of the Nintendo
Story was the passing of sartorro I Watta. He had
served as Nintendo's fourth president, the first one not of
the Amachi line from two thousand twelve to two thousand fifteen.

(08:51):
A Wata gets a lot of credit for Nintendo's focus
on creating accessible and innovative methods of playing games rather
than on raw computing power or graphics, so contrast that
with like the Xbox or the PlayStation consoles. His death
and from complications due to bile duct cancer shocked the
video game industry. And what a successor and the fifth

(09:12):
president of Nintendo is Tatsumi Kimishima. Kimishima worked at san
Hua Bank of Japan for more than two decades before
he transitioned his career in a big way because in
two thousand he was elected the Chief financial Officer of
the Pokemon Company. So he went from working in a

(09:33):
financial institution for twenty seven years to becoming the CFO
centered around cartoon characters that are forced to fight one
another for our entertainment. It's quite the leap. In two
thousand two, the first president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa,
he retired, so Hiroshi Yamauchi decided that Kimishima was the

(09:54):
ideal candidate to head that part of Nintendo's business, and
Kimishima began the second president of Nintendo of America. In
two thousand and six, he became the CEO of Nintendo
of America. Then he changed over to become the managing
director of Nintendo. When I Wada passed away suddenly in
two thousand fifteen, he was selected to become the company's

(10:14):
fifth president. It was Kimmishima who would introduced the next
Nintendo console to the world. When I recorded part three
of the series back in we knew there was a
new Nintendo console on the way, but we didn't really
have any details other than a code name. In March,
Nintendo called the new console the n X, that being

(10:36):
its code name, and earnings call in April sixteen revealed
that the company planned to have a worldwide rollout of
this new console by March of seventeen, but there was
still no mention of a name. This would hold true
all the way through E three. That's the big Video
Game trade show that takes place in Los Angeles, California

(10:57):
each year. Nintendo's booth included a section themed after the
upcoming legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. Now,
while Breath of the Wild would become a flagship title,
a launch title for the Nintendo Switch, the new hardware
was nowhere to be found on the show floor, at
least not for the average attendee. Breath of the Wild

(11:18):
would also get a release on the previous generation of hardware,
that being the Wii You That was the version that
attendees got to try out while they were on the
show floor. This led some in the video game journalism
world to question Nintendo's strategy. You have a new console
on the way, so some analysts are saying, why are
you releasing a game that would be a killer title

(11:42):
for this new console on your older hardware, which presumably
would strain the capabilities of this older hardware to the
limit in order to create a comparable experience to the
one gamers would have on a brand new system. Now,
to be fair, Breath of the Wild started out as
a we U title that was the beginning of the project.

(12:04):
It was only when Nintendo was starting to develop the
Switch that they said, let's also develop a version of
this title for our next generation console. So it wasn't
like Nintendo set out from the beginning to create a
splintered experience, but there were a lot of theories that
were going on around that time. Some people said, well,
the we use sales numbers are so low that Nintendo's

(12:26):
just not worried about cannibalizing its own sales because there
aren't enough we U units out there for it to
make a huge impact. Other people said, well, maybe this
was an attempt to sell a few more we U
consoles before Nintendo stopped producing them entirely. Uh. Either way,
Breath of the Wild came out both for the we

(12:46):
U and the Nintendo Switch at the same time, that
being March of Seen. Effectively, it was the first Nintendo
game for the Switch and the final Nintendo game for
the we U. And by Nintendo game, I mean game
actually developed by the company Nintendo, not through a third
party that that then published on Nintendo. But I'll chat

(13:08):
more about Breath of the Wild when we get to Seen.
Back to E three now. Traditionally, companies take the opportunity
at E three to host enormous press events and announced
upcoming hardware and game titles. Nintendo has done this in
the past, but more recently Nintendo has started to distance
itself from the media circus that is Press day at

(13:29):
E three, opting instead to broadcast some live streamed announcements
over the Internet. This included a lengthy demo of Breath
of the Wild, in which the company showed off the
open world style of gameplay, as well as new elements
never before seen in Zelda games, and the company also
announced that a new mobile game was on the way

(13:50):
to Android and iOS phones that summer. That game would
be Pokemon Go. Now I've done a full episode about
Pokemon Go, but for those who somehow missed out on
this game, it encouraged players to venture out into the
real world to hunt virtual Pokemon monsters. You'd use poke
balls to attempt to capture these monsters and add them

(14:11):
to your Poka decks. I'm told these words make sense.
The game featured several other items and gameplay elements, many
of which were designed to encourage players to purchase virtual
tools that they could then use within the game, and
it linked real world areas of interest, such as public
art installations, with important in game sites like gyms, where

(14:33):
the three factions within the game could battle it out
over which team ran the facility. Pokemon Go would become
a big hit for about a month, encouraging people to
wander blindly around while flicking at their screens in an
effort to capture rare Pokemon critters. I remember being somewhat
irritated as I tried to walk to or from work

(14:54):
and having the maneuver around groups of people standing in
the middle of the sidewalk trying to catch yet another
Piggy or Boba sor or whatever the heck they were called.
But all right, this is where I have to admit
I also played it. I had I had the game too.
I was one of those jerks. The game still is
going to this day, and there are a lot of
people who still play it. Later generations of Pokemon monsters

(15:15):
have been added to the game over time. I think
the overall popularity of the game has been in a
slight decline, but it's left a hardcore group of enthusiasts
who continue to try and catch them all. Still, this
game brought a lot of attention to mobile gaming and
also to augmented reality. I think you could argue that
the augmented reality aspect of the game was pretty basic

(15:37):
in its implementation, but it's still required people to merge
real world experiences within game experiences, so I think it's
still counts. Breath of the Wild and Pokemon Go were
the two big announcements at E three, but the world
was still waiting to find out what the next Nintendo
console would be called, and Nintendo had another classic trick

(16:00):
but sleeve to reveal a little later that same summer.
I'll tell you more about that in just a second,
but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
In July, Nintendo announced it would offer up a limited
run of a special console, the nes Mini. It looked

(16:24):
like a manager version of the original Nintendo Entertainment System
here in America. In other markets that more closely resembled
the original colors and formed factor of the Famicom system.
The emulator had thirty games coded onto it and could
hold saves for those games, which already put it ahead
of the original system it was copying. The cost of
the nes Mini was sixty dollars here in America, making

(16:47):
it about two dollars a game, and those games included
a lot of classic bestsellers in Nintendo's history, such as
Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, the fiendishly Difficult
Ghost in Goblins, Donkey Kong, which was the game that
really gave Nintendo its start in video games in the
first place, and punch Out, my personal favorite of the

(17:09):
games from that era. The console shipped with a single
in NES Classic controller with a notoriously short chord. People
really complained about how short that controller's chord was. It
was designed to copy the old rectangular controllers of the
original in E s. It's also compatible with the WE
Classic Controller Pro, so if you have one of those,

(17:31):
you could hook that up to the NES Classic Mini.
The announcement revealed that the consoles would become available in November.
A month before that, various retailers began to offer pre
sale reservations for the system. They sold out practically as
soon as they became available. The ne NES Classic Mini

(17:51):
became a sought after item. Now. I was able to
get one, but only because I happened to get a
message from the Amazon Treasure truck, which stopped here in
Atlanta with a few reserved systems at a regular retail price.
But other people were not so lucky and either had
to go without or cough up ridiculous amounts of money
on sites like eBay. Nintendo had only produced about two

(18:15):
point three million units. That sounds like a lot, but
it didn't come close to meeting demand. The original nes
sold more than sixty million units when it was still
in production. To make matters worse, the company announced on
well right around April seen that it had discontinued the

(18:36):
ne NES Classic, which made fans go bonkers because there
were so many who wanted to get one and didn't
have the chance. It also drove up the price for
the remaining units considerably on those resale sites like eBay. Later,
Nintendo would say that by mid eighteen it would begin
to produce more in NES Classic editions. This was likely

(18:59):
in response not just to the fans who felt left
out because they never had a chance to buy one
of them, but also to combat the rising market of
third party clones that were springing up. These cloned systems
often used emulators that were not optimized to run Nintendo games,
so they would create an unsatisfactory gaming experience for anyone

(19:20):
who bought them. As of the recording of this podcast,
Nintendo has yet to make more of these available, but
a visit to the product's website says they're coming in
the summer of One other thing that happened with the
NES Classic was that hackers learned how to access the
system's memory and add in new games. There have been

(19:41):
several hacks that allow a NES Classic Mini owners the
chance to add their consoles library and increase it dramatically,
including using titles that were not on the original in Nes.
This is the point in the podcast where I mentioned
that while you certainly can hack your in NES Classic
to do these things, there's always a risk involved with

(20:03):
such activities. If you break your system, you may find
that you've got a sixty dollar paper weight and very
little chance of turning it back into any sort of
useful piece of hardware. So just be careful and know
what you're getting into before you start messing about. In October,
Nintendo finally announced that the n X console would officially

(20:23):
bear the name Nintendo Switch. The Switch is a hybrid console,
meaning it can be both a docked console that uses
a television as the display, or you can undock it
and use the device as a handheld gaming system. The
handheld version of the console looks like a video screen
flanked by two detachable game controllers called joy Con controllers.

(20:46):
Each controller has a thumbstick and buttons. Nintendo announced that
the system would also support a more traditional game controller
similar to Xbox controllers, called a Nintendo Switch Pro controller.
While Sintendo didn't initially announced the tech specs for the switch,
those details did later become public. With the joy cons attached,

(21:08):
the switch measures four inches or ten centimeters tall, nine
point four inches wide, or about twenty four cimeters and
half an inch thick or one point to seven centimeters.
That doesn't take into consideration the height of the thumbstick, however,
so if you take those into account, the thickness increases
to one point one two inches or two point eight centimeters.

(21:31):
It weighs about point eighty eight pounds, so not even
a full pound. It's about point four kilograms with the
joy cons attached. The Nintendo Switch has an in Video
tegra X one s o C as the brains of
the machine. S o C stands for system on a chip.
This is an integration of several different pieces you would

(21:53):
find in your typical computer device, such as a central
processing unit more on that in a second, a graphics
processing unit, a memory controller, and some other components, but
they would all be put on a single chip. This
saves space and it's great for things like portable devices.
The CPU powering the Nintendo Switch is an arm cortex,

(22:15):
a fifty seven with four processing cores, meaning it's a
quad core processor. And just to remind you guys, that
means the CPU can break up certain types of computational
problems into smaller problems that each core can tackle individually.
Not all computational problems work this way, but many that
are related to video games fall into that category. One

(22:37):
day I'll have to do a full episode on ARM
processors and the company behind them, but as a quick
and dirty explanation, I'll simplify it to say that ARM
processors are typically less complex than the type you find
in desktop computers, such as those that use Intel's X
eight six architecture. They consume less power and they generate
less heat than those more complicated CP use, which makes

(23:01):
them ideal for mobile devices. The graphics processing unit has
two hundred fifty six cores. It's also KUDA enabled or
c U D A KUDA as an acronym that stands
for a Compute Unified Device Architecture, and it's an Application
Programming interface or a p I from Nvidia. The purpose
of KUDA is to give developers access to a hardware's

(23:23):
capabilities so that the software the developers design runs smoothly
on that hardware. When docked, the switches GPU runs at
a max clock speed of seven sixty eight mega hurts.
In handheld mode, it down shifts to three hundred seven
point to mega hurts. The switch is also home to
several sensors, such as an accelerometer and a brightness sensor

(23:46):
that allows not just for dynamic adjustments, but also the
potential for gameplay mechanics further on, so you might have
a game that relies on you turning the switch this
way or that in handheld mode, or going outside into
bright sunlight in some cases. The display on the handheld
switch device is six point two inches on the diagonal
and has a resolution of twelve eighty by seven twenty pixels.

(24:09):
It also has multi touch support for up to ten
points of contact. When you dock the switch, it sends
video out at ten a DP resolution and sixty frames
a second natively, though many games run at a frame
rate much lower than sixty. The system has a pair
of speakers and audio is in stereo. The battery for
the switch is a lithium ion rechargeable battery that, according

(24:32):
to Nintendo, will provide between two and a half and
six and a half hours of battery life, but that
depends upon the type of game you play, so some
of them push the system a little harder than others,
and so the battery life is shorter than others. The
harder you push the system, the more juice you're burning through,
So it takes about three hours to charge a switch

(24:53):
all the way back up to fully charged from fully drained.
The switch has thirty two gigabytes of storage space on
or the device, which is important because all save games
are stored on the hardware. That means if something happens
to your switch, you lose all of your saves. There's
no cloud saving feature to keep your progress in a game.

(25:14):
If your switch is lost, stolen, or damaged, you pretty
much lose everything. Now, some of that storage space is
not available to the user because the system reserves it
for system critical operations. You can purchase memory cards in
the micro S d h C or micro S d
x C formats, with each card holding up to two

(25:35):
terabytes of additional storage if you've got the cash for
that sort of thing. The Nintendo Switch can connect to
the Internet via WiFi or a local area network or
land adapter. It also has Bluetooth four point one and
yet no support for Bluetooth headphones, much to the consternation
of some gamers I follow online, such as Ashley Jenkins,

(25:56):
who has spoken extensively about the switch. This is essentially
a plug for miss jenkins work on her series The
No and just in the interest of full disclosure, I
don't think she has any idea who I am, so
this is just me as a fan of her work.
She does good coverage of stuff like this. The switch
does have a three and a half millimeter headphone jack,
but it's located in a spot that some gamers just

(26:19):
feels awkward. Plus a lot of people just don't want
to have chords and cables anymore. They prefer this bluetooth
wireless approach. Switch owners can access multiplayer through online services
that will eventually be locked behind a subscription service similar
to Xbox Live, but that has not been launched yet.
There's a sort of a free preview version of what

(26:41):
is available, but the paid subscription approach hasn't gone into
effect It's supposed to before the end of Gamers can
also purchase games online and download them to the switch,
though the limited storage space presents a bit of a
challenge in that regard, because while thirty two gigabytes sounds
like a lot, video games these days can easily dwarf

(27:02):
that amount of storage space. Games for the Nintendo Switch
are on game cards, which are essentially cartridges. These small
cartridges have a special coding called dina tonium benzoit. This
stuff doesn't help the performance of the cards in any way. Instead,
it's meant to act as a deterrent for would be

(27:24):
cartridge choppers. See, Nintendo was worried that some young enthusiasts
might want to pop one of these cards into his
or her hungry little mouth, so they use this coding
to give the cartridges a bitter taste. In fact, this
chemical has a reputation for being the most bitter chemical
compound produced. It's an additive used in many toxic compounds

(27:47):
in an effort to dissuade people from ingesting them. So
you'll find this stuff and cleaners and automotive supplies and
things like that. However, the chemical itself is non toxic.
It just gets added to toxic stuff because it tastes
really awful and it makes people rethink their decisions. Also,
it was apparently discovered accidentally when a bunch of chemists

(28:08):
were working on creating a dental and aesthetic. So you
gotta wonder what it was like the day they found
out how bitter that stuff was. Anyway, let's get back
to the Switch. The announcement got folks excited, but the
actual launch of the console was half a year away.
We learned about the name and some of the specs
by the end of twenty sixteen, but it wouldn't be

(28:29):
until the spring of when the Switch made its debut.
And when it did, a few media outlets picked up
on something unusual first. Like a lot of Nintendo launches,
the Switch was in very high demand right out of
the gate. Demand in some markets greatly exceeded supply, which
resulted in long waits for fans as they checked their

(28:50):
local stores and online retailers for updated inventories. By April seventeen,
a month after the system went on sale, and initial
figure said that nine hundred six thousand Nintendo Switch units
had been sold, so just under a million. But here's
the weird part. Those figures also said that nine hundred
twenty six thousand copies of Zelda Breath of the Wild

(29:14):
had also been sold. In other words, twenty thousand more
copies of the game were sold than actual Nintendo switches.
But you say, wait a minute, Breath of the Wild
was available not just for the Switch but also the
Wei U, So surely that nine six thousand number includes both, right,
that explains the discrepancy. But no, it doesn't, because the

(29:37):
nine six thousand figure was just for copies of the
Switch version of Breath of the Wild. The WU version
sold about four hundred sixty thousand units in that same
time frame. So what we're left with is a story
about how a game for a system actually out sold
the system itself. So what gives? Forbes ran a story

(29:59):
on this in April when he's seventeen, and the writer
offered up a few hypotheses to potentially explain this discrepancy.
One possible explanation was double dippers. There could be some
enthusiastic gamers who had bought two copies of the game,
one basic version that they were just going to play,
and one a collector's version that they wanted to keep.

(30:20):
That's possible. Maybe some of them just never planned to
play it at all. They just wanted to buy the
Zelda game because they love Zelda so much. And it
was more or less a collectible, though an expensive one.
Maybe some people thought I'll buy this now and then
I'm gonna mark it up and sell it online for
people who can't find a copy in their local stores.
That's another possibility. Or it could be that they were

(30:42):
buying the game because they wanted to have a game
as soon as they got a switch, but the switch
itself wasn't yet available in their market. Maybe it had
already sold out and they were waiting for new shipments,
but meanwhile Zelda was available, and they thought, well, I
can go ahead and buy the game now, and that way,
when the Soul gets here, I'll have something to play
on it right away. That's also a possibility. Whatever the reason,

(31:06):
it meant that Breath of the Wild enjoyed a attach
rate that that means that there was a copy of
the game sold for every single system sold in that time. Technically,
you could actually say that it had a one percent
attach rate, because, like I said, they sold more copies
of the game than they sold of the console, as

(31:28):
the comparison that we use. Most celebrated title was New
Super Mario Brothers. You so New Super Mario Brothers, You
biggest title on the WU and had a sixtent attach
rate both the system and Breath of the Wild. We're
doing well right out of the gate. Breath of the
Wild continues to do well to this day. They passed

(31:48):
the six point seven million mark in Januar on the Switch,
and they had another million in sales on the WEIU,
which put Breath of the Wild just behind Legend of
Zelda Twilight Princess for the most popular Zelda title of
all time. By that time, the Nintendo Switch had gained
this distinction of becoming the fastest selling console in US history,

(32:11):
at least according to Nintendo. One game that did surpass
Breath of the Wild in attach rates by the end
of seventeen, at least in the US, was Super Mario Odyssey,
a three D platform starring Nintendo's beloved mascot Mario Mario
because we learned his last name is Mario and the
presumably his first name is Mario, so there you go.

(32:33):
Super Mario Odyssey didn't come out until October two thousand, seventeen,
but it has sold more than nine million copies, so
it rocketed to first place for all Nintendo Switch titles.
Other launch titles for the Nintendo Switch included a couple
of Shovel Night Games. Those are a series of comedic,
medieval themed side scrolling adventure games. Ubisoft's Just Dance seventeen

(32:57):
was another launch title. Super ammerman Are from Activision was
another one, also a game called One to Switch from Nintendo.
That last one is a party game that pits players
against each other in a series of mini games, some
of which are truly bizarre. Now I've got more to
say about Nintendo and what's been going on over the
last few months, but before I get into this last section,

(33:20):
let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. One
thing that happened not long after the switch announcement was
the release of the mobile game Super Mario Run on iOS.
A version for Android would launch in March. The game

(33:43):
is a side scroller in which a little Mario runs
across the screen. Players control when Mario jumps, and they
collect coins and avoid obstacles and enemies along the way.
The goal is to get through a level and as
little time as possible. There are other elements to the game,
but that's the basic idea. This was a big move
for Nintendo, which for years had avoided making its ip

(34:04):
available on any hardware that was not produced by the
company itself. Ever since, it got into making its own consoles,
and it kind of stuck to that philosophy. The game
has received a mixed reaction from critics and fans. Some
people were critical of the game's price tag, which was
ten dollars that's considered to be pretty high for some
mobile games, and there was a lot of criticism as

(34:26):
well that the game requires a persistent Internet connection in
order to work. The internet connection makes it tricky to
play the game in places where many people feel it
would actually work best, like on a plane. Still, the
game's sales helped boost Nintendo's financials in a positive way
last year. In that was a huge year for Nintendo.

(34:48):
It was enjoying success with the launch of the Switch,
it was having to dance around supply issues with the
NES Classic Mini, which was way more popular than the
company appeared to have anticipated, and then June seventeen, the
company made another announcement it was making another classic system emulator.
This time it was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Like

(35:10):
the NES Classic Mini, this system looks like a manta
version of the original console, and depending on what market
you live in it would look like the original S
and E S for that market. The Supernintendo first became
available in nine here in the US, although it had
already shown up a little bit earlier in Japan back
in n While the NES was an eight bit video

(35:33):
game system, the S and E S up the ANTI
with a sixteen bit approach. The S and E S
Classic attempts to cash in on the nostalgia players have
for that beloved system. Like the NES Classic, it has
a selection of games that are saved to the system itself.
In the United States, those titles included things like Contra three,

(35:53):
Donkey Kong Country, Final, Fantasy Three, The Legend of Zelda,
A Link to the Past, Street Fighter to Herbo, Hyper Fighting,
Super Metroid, and Super Mario World, among others. Other regions
had a slightly different lineup of games. Nintendo made a
promise that the company would do better with this S
and E S Classic than it had with the NES Classic.

(36:17):
It produced more units of the Manager console. Even so,
the demand for the S and E S Classic was
crazy high, and finding one became a big challenge for
many people. Nintendo had originally intended to only offer up
a limited run of this console, but after having seen
what happened with the NES Classic, the company committed to
producing more units throughout two thousand eighteen. This was around

(36:40):
the same time the Nintendo also committed to producing more
NE NES Classics. Reporters discovered that the two systems, the
S and E S and the NES Classics were running
on exactly the same hardware, which means you could, in theory,
by one and hack it to run games meant for
the other. But again I advise against doing that unless

(37:02):
you are confident you know what you're doing and you're
cool with accepting the risk that a mistake could turn
your classic console emulator into a nostalgic piece of otherwise
inert plastic. In early Nintendo announced a product called Labo.
Labo is a line of kits that are meant to
encourage STEM learning, that's science, technology, engineering, and math by

(37:26):
giving kids a chance to build various devices out of
pieces of cardboard pre cut pieces of cardboard, and it
uses the Nintendo Switch as the brains and sensors and
even the motors for some of these gadgets. Nintendo calls
these gadgets toy cons. Some of them allow you to
make a new controller system for the switch, such as

(37:48):
a cardboard set of handlebars for like a motorcycle game.
Others let you make music. There's a cardboard piano which
relies on the infrared sensor on the right joy con
that dete which key is being pressed at any given time.
There's even a fully fledged robot suit kit, which lets
you control a virtual robot character while you wear special

(38:09):
cuffs on your wrists and ankles, and you use that
to move this virtual robot around like a digital puppet.
As of the recording of this podcast, the Labo products
have not yet officially hit store shelves. That will happen
on April eighteen. They're pretty expensive. The Variety kit will
set you back about seventy dollars, while the Robot Kit

(38:31):
costs a whopping eighty dollars. Now, keep in mind these
kits are largely cardboard, so some people have criticized this,
saying Nintendo is charging exorbitant amounts of money for what
amounts to a cardboard kit. Other people are saying, well,
you could argue that, but this is also a valuable
teaching tool for people who want to learn more about
engineering robotics. That kind of thing and it could lead

(38:54):
to all sorts of really cool applications. So there are
people on both sides of the fence on this. But
that's about it for this update. I could add that
the Nintendo Switch has featured games made famous on other platforms,
such as Elder Scrolls five, Skyrim, or the upcoming release
of Wolfenstein too for the Switch. These games have a
much more mature tone than what you would typically find

(39:17):
on Nintendo, but there have been other titles on other
Nintendo consoles that dealt with dark subject matter in the past,
so it's not like this is brand new. It's just
a very, um, let's say, visceral example of that trend.
And with E three coming up as the recording of
this podcast, I'm sure there will likely be other announcements

(39:38):
that will necessitate an update to the series again. You know,
in a couple of years. Nintendo continues to be an
important player in the video game industry, and they continue
to cater to a different kind of audience than the
audiences that Sony and Microsoft are going after with the

(40:00):
A Station and Xbox platforms, respectively. That doesn't mean that
a gamer can't enjoy one or more of those systems.
They might have all of them, but what it does
mean is Nintendo does not want to play by the
rules that Microsoft and Sony are setting, where they're really
focusing on the technical capabilities of their respective systems and

(40:22):
how many pixels they can show, whether they can go
into four K or eight K resolution, uh, how realistic
the animations are. All of that is stuff that Microsoft
and Sony have really been concentrating on, while Nintendo says,
you know what, We're gonna leave that to you because
that game changes all the time. And if you bank

(40:43):
on making your console the state of the art in
graphics and sound of today, next year, you're already behind
again because those continue to get better and better, but
your console is going to remain the same. If instead
of that, you try and come up with innovative ways
to play games, whether it's creating more group based games

(41:07):
so that you get lots of people over at your
house to experience something together, or different control schemes so
that you control your game in a completely different way,
it means that you've differentiated your console from these other
two powerhouses, and it's worked more or less for Nintendo
over the past few generations. It worked great for the

(41:28):
we did not work so great for the WEIU, and
it seems to be working great for the Switch, which,
if it stays on its current trajectory, stands to become
one of the best selling game consoles of all time,
assuming that can sustain that level of growth. In the meantime,

(41:48):
I look forward to seeing what else Nintendo comes out
with over the next few months. I do not currently
own an Nintendo Switch. The last Nintendo console I purchased
was the first Nintendo we But I've seen enough of
the Switch to make me curious and perhaps I might
even explore purchasing one. I definitely want to play with one.

(42:09):
I haven't even really had the chance to do that,
but then I don't get out much. I hope to
get a chance to play with one and maybe purchase
one for myself at some point if I really like it.
What I really need to do is hook ond that
Nintendo Entertainment System Classic many that I have. Because here's
where I admit something that I'm not proud of. It's

(42:30):
still in the shrink wrap because while I bought it
two years ago, I have not had a chance to
play it yet. That's my life, guys. I'm still playing
through Skyrim on the PC. But I hope to be
able to play more of these games, and I hope
to do more episodes about big, big companies in tech,
as well as the products they work on, the innovations

(42:52):
they've created, the way that they've shaped our world. If
you have suggestions for any sort of tech topic, whether
it's a company, a specific technology, somewhat important in the
technological world, anything along those lines, let me know. Send
me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how
stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a
line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of

(43:14):
those is text stuff h s W. Follow us on
Instagram and make sure you dropped by twitch dot tv
slash tech Stuff. I record these shows live. You can
watch me as I live stream and make mistakes and
yell at my producer for not having seen movies that
I think are important but probably aren't important, but you know,

(43:35):
I still maintain that they are important. You'll get to
see all of this amazing content if you go to
twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. Plus, you can join
in on the chat room and you can tell me
that I'm being a mini head, because sometimes I am.
I look forward to seeing you and I'll talk to
you again really soon. For more on this and thousands

(44:00):
of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot com
m