Former Nintendo software developer Ken Watanabe, not to be confused with one of the most famous Japanese actors of all time, says his ex-employer doesn’t create entirely new franchises all too often simply because it doesn’t need to.
From Watanabe’s perspective, Nintendo already has plenty of beloved IP to use essentially as templates for creating new and exciting gameplay experiences.
He told Bloomberg (paywalled): “New franchises haven’t come out simply because there’s no real need to make them. When Nintendo wants to do something new, it’s basically about the gameplay mechanics first — about creating a new way to play. As for the skin or the wrapper, they don’t really fuss over it. They just pick whatever fits that new gameplay best.”
Watanabe left Nintendo in 2015 after a 10-year stint working on games like Super Mario Wii, Pikmin 3, and Splatoon, so he presumably doesn’t have much insight into how the company works at the top level these days, but his theory is fairly well-informed and makes sense at surface level.
Why would Nintendo bother investing the resources into creating whole new IP when it has a huge cache of singularly beloved characters and worlds already? Instead, it can focus on innovating in the gameplay department and then just pick the IP that fits best thematically.
Donkey Kong Bananza, for example, seems first and foremost a groundbreaking experiment in destructible game worlds, physics, and non-linear exploration, and Donkey Kong was just the right ape for the job. Theoretically, you could swap out Donkey Kong for another big and strong Nintendo character, say King Bowser, swap the bananas for mushrooms, and call it a day. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bananza just the way it is; I’m just indulging this thought experiment.
A counterargument to that is, some first-party Nintendo games absolutely do have extremely specific and definable identities, like side-scrolling Mario platformers and pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda games, but Nintendo seems increasingly willing to wildly diverge from those IP conventions and experiment with different genres seemingly irrespective of franchise, lending more credence to Watanabe’s point year by year.
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