This story was first published in Switchboard, a newsletter from Polygon that delivers all the latest Switch 2 news, reporting, and rumors directly to your inbox. Sign up here to get it weekly.
Former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata passed before the Switch launched in 2017, but he left the company with a vision that it’s beginning to make good on — one that will be crucial to the Switch 2.
“Mr. Iwata was the head of development, so he put a lot of thought and time into Switch,” veteran game designer and Nintendo fellow Shigeru Miyamoto told Time in 2017. “[T]he idea of Nintendo Switch being a device you can take out and anywhere, and the idea of it being a system that really allows networking and communicating with people, I think that’s something Mr. Iwata put a lot of emphasis on.”
The original Switch was pitched partly on the idea of bringing people together to play, with locally played games like 1-2-Switch and Snipperclips. But Nintendo clearly has bigger multiplayer ambitions, as some of its recent game output shows.
Despite its creativity and innovation, Nintendo can often seem behind the curve when adopting new technologies or game ideas. Nintendo abandoned the technological console arms race in 2006 with the launch of the underpowered Wii, proving it doesn’t need to win on graphics. The company instead prefers to follow the “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology” philosophy — creating new ideas using mature, reliable technology — that Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi described in his book Gunpei Yokoi Game Kan.
Nintendo has also been notoriously slower than its competitors in adopting online multiplayer features in its games, sometimes relying on clunky solutions like Friend Codes and the Nintendo Switch Online smartphone app to bring players together. Meeting up with friends in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a notoriously painful process.
But Nintendo has been keeping pace with a multiplayer trend during the Switch era, experimenting with ever larger numbers of players. Tetris 99, F-Zero 99, and Super Mario Bros. 35 — these competitive multiplayer games borrowed from popular last-player-standing games (PUBG, Fortnite) to modernize classic 8- and 16-bit franchises with huge player counts.
Nintendo likewise bumped up player counts in party game Super Mario Party Jamboree, which featured a 20-player mode called Koopathlon, and Everybody 1-2-Switch! which let up to 100 players get into the action through smartphone support. Even a flagship game like Super Mario Bros. Wonder supported online lobbies for up to 12 players (and borrowed some smart multiplayer ideas from the Dark Souls franchise).
We’re already seeing some of that in the new Mario Kart game for Switch 2, which looks like it will double the number of simultaneous online competitors seen in previous Mario Kart entries from 12 to 24.
Some of these massively multiplayer games have arrived near the end of the Switch’s life cycle, suggesting that Nintendo is getting started with its massively multiplayer ambitions.
Last year, the company started the Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program, a mysterious beta that Nintendo developed to “test the boundaries of mass multiplayer functionality and gameplay on our servers.” How Nintendo will implement its MMO-like ideas remains to be seen, but there are certainly strong Nintendo franchise candidates that could benefit from introducing higher player counts.
Bringing even bigger audiences together to experience the joy of play through Nintendo IP like Super Mario Bros. and Animal Crossing — as well as brand-new experiences — could be the culmination of Iwata’s vision.
The post A Nintendo game trend that looks like it will continue on Switch 2 appeared first on Polygon.
