Nintendo’s release calendar, dotted with Star Fox and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, might make you think you got sucked up by a wormhole and thrown back to the ’90s (until you look at the price tags). Mario creator and Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto can empathize. He knows the developer has been fiddling with a lot of remakes lately, but he thinks it’s reasonable to do so when fans have such short attention spans.
Miyamoto tells Famitsu in a new interview (translated by Nintendo Everything), “Some people might say there are a lot of remakes, but after five years, a lot of people have outgrown games and stop playing them.”
Just guessing, but I think there are probably a few people out there who would take issue with the idea that they have “outgrown” one of the developer’s titles, especially after a measly five years. I, for one, have been gladly helping my Nintendo DS Cooking Mama in the kitchen for a glorious 17 years.
But Nintendo seems eager to introduce newcomers to what first made it a major video game brand.
Miyamoto continues, “Young people today don’t have the opportunity to play games from 10 years ago, so remaking them to be more playable and releasing them again is a good way to meet the demand.”
I’m a little skeptical of this, too – I think young people would have more opportunity to play Nintendo’s old games if the developer didn’t actively kill servers for hardware like the 3DS and Wii U. That said, I don’t expect developers to keep their old hardware alive forever.
Instead, I wish Nintendo realized that a fresh crop of fans might be willing to donate their organs if it started releasing undeniably creative, new games the way it used to all the time – and is now trying to replicate, but heavily through remakes. It’s willingly stuck in the past.
Earlier this summer, former Nintendo marketing leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang expressed frustration with Nintendo’s remake strategy in a YouTube video on the topic, worrying that a “truly creative company like Nintendo” had resigned itself to being a nostalgia act.
“That would be so sad if they kind of buried that [innovative] part of themselves away because they were too scared to take the risk,” Yang said at the time.
Miyamoto seems to think remakes are one way Nintendo can earn stardom among a new generation, telling Famitsu, “Letting people know the original games also leads to future developments, so we’ve been actively pursuing that recently.”
It’s heartening to know Nintendo is at least keeping “future developments” in mind as it revisits its older titles. But if Miyamoto really believes players completely drop a lovable game after just five years, he might underestimate what made Nintendo’s greatest games so great to begin with.