The Nintendo Story: Part Four

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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.

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, 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. 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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,

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.

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

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,

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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

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 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, 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 of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot com m