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The Gratuitous Rainbow Spectrum

"What Happened to Weird Nintendo?"

Kris Randazzo
7 minute read

I’m not a fan of clickbait titles. But this time around, I couldn’t help myself. Ever since the announcement of the Switch 2, I’ve been seeing a cavalcade of just the most absurd takes out there. “The Switch 2 is boring!” “It’s safe!” “I wanted Nintendo to come out and wow us with something we’ve never seen before!” "They've given up!" "I guess that's the death of creativity from Nintendo." “How could they have gotten this so wrong?” 

“What happened to weird Nintendo?” 

Nothing. 

Nintendo is still as weird and experimental as ever. No, the Switch 2’s form factor isn’t some radical new reinvention of the way we play video games, but in what universe does that signify an end to creativity? 

Do you remember this? 

Just a few months ago, in October 2024, Nintendo launched an Online Playtest for some new “game” where a bunch of people worked together to build stuff. It featured these bizarre caveman type characters, and their method of stopping people from sharing it around with those who weren’t part of the private playtest? Asking them politely. 

Or, how about this? 

While everyone was losing their minds, begging Nintendo for some sort of update on the Nintendo Switch Successor, Nintendo randomly drops a trailer for… an alarm clock. Not just an alarm clock, a $99 alarm clock that watches you sleep and wakes you up to the sounds of Nintendo games. 

Oh, remember this one? 

Back in July, Nintendo released a trailer that showed nothing but this creepy dude with a bag over his head, and asked the question “Who is Emio?”

Everyone thought Nintendo was launching some spooky new IP, but instead Emio was the villain in a new installment in the Famicom Detective Club text adventure series! 

They also released their own music streaming app completely out of nowhere, and revived the Endless Ocean series for some reason. 

No other game company acts like this, and that’s just the stuff they pulled in the last year! The Switch Generation may have brought traditional controls back as a standard for Nintendo hardware, but it brought with it some crazy creative stuff too. Mario Kart Live was a set of actual RC cars that you controlled with the Switch. They had cameras on them, and you could set up arrows and stuff around your house to create your own Mario Kart courses that you could race through on your TV. 

1-2 Switch was a stupid minigame collection that had players competing in stuff like milking cows. And its sequel was hosted by some random dude in a horse mask named MC Horace. 

Ring Fit Adventure is an exercise RPG. Like, a literal turn-based RPG where you do battle by performing various real-life exercises by attaching your Joycon to something called a Ring Con, that measures various movements. There’s a leg strap too, because you have to jog in place to move around in the game. And the villain is a bodybuilding dragon named Dragaux, whose minions are all little creatures that look like exercise equipment. 

When everyone was stuck in their houses during Covid, Nintendo distributed a free game called Jump Rope Challenge. You hold a Joycon and pretend to jump rope. There are rabbits who dress up as Nintendo characters.   

And let’s not forget LABO. Oh, my poor, poor, misunderstood LABO. Nintendo dropped one of the most effective trailers I’ve ever seen in my life to show off their new game series called LABO, where you follow on-screen instructions to build the most bonkers video game peripherals imaginable out of freaking cardboard. There was an RC car that you could actually steer using the Joycon’s vibrations. There’s a full size steering wheel that you plug a Joycon into and it uses the IR sensor to tell if you’re using your turn signal and which way you’re moving the wheel, while the other Joycon goes into the gas pedal and uses the gyro control to determine how hard you’re pressing it. There’s a cardboard fishing pole with string and everything, that you place the actual Switch into and use the tension on the string in tandem with the Joycons to actually fish. You can make a functioning piano. YOU CAN USE THAT SAME PIANO TO CREATE CUSTOM FISH FOR THE FISHING GAME! There’s a cardboard backpack with arm and leg straps that lets you literally run around in a game as a giant, transforming robot. There’s even a VR helmet. 

And then nobody bought it, because it was too weird. Well, you know what? I bought it! And I built every one of those things with my kids, and it was one of the most memorable video game related experiences I’ve ever had in my life. If you have young kids and you didn’t buy LABO, you missed out. 

All these things happened in very recent history, and you think Nintendo isn’t weird anymore because the Switch 2 doesn’t have some insane new form factor? 

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The fact of the matter is, we know almost nothing about the Switch 2. We know what it’s called, what it’s shaped like, it’ll be backwards compatible, and that there’s a new Mario Kart game on the way. That’s it. Literally everything else, even the super obvious stuff, is still just speculation. We don’t know how powerful the system is, we don’t know how backwards compatibility will work, we don’t know how much the games will cost, nothing. But most importantly, we don’t know anything about what this system can do. The assumption going around that since the form factor isn’t very different, the system has no innovations is completely unfounded, and flies in the face of decades of Nintendo’s decisions. The 3DS form factor was remarkably similar to the DS, and if you judged it solely on its looks, you wouldn’t have any idea that Street Pass existed. To assume that Nintendo doesn’t have anything weird up their sleeves is to ignore their history. It’s entirely possible that the Switch 2 will just be a more powerful Switch, but there’s literally a new button on the controller and nobody knows what it does. All signs indicate that the Joycons can be used as a mouse. You really think the company that came up with 1-2 Switch doesn't have something wacky in mind to showcase that particular feature? 

The point is, Nintendo is still plenty weird. They’ve just learned some hard lessons over the past few decades. The Nintendo Switch’s form factor was quite literally the culmination of all their previous hardware designs combined, from the detachable controllers of the Game & Watch, to the touch screen of the Nintendo DS, to the motion controls of the Wii Remote. They aren’t going to reinvent this particular wheel until they absolutely have to. In the meantime, let’s try to keep our heads and wait to see what Nintendo has to say about things in April. Because until they tell us the Switch 2 doesn’t double as a toaster or include a voice activated kickstand, we don’t know anything for sure. 

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