Apparently Nintendo doesn’t like money
One of the biggest recent success stories in gaming has been Nintendo’s line of mini consoles. The NES Classic and SNES Classic are miniature recreations of the iconic machines, pre-loaded with plenty of classic games ready to play.
They have been so successful, that Sony have straight up borrowed their idea and are bringing out a PlayStation Classic next month.
All this would suggest that the next logical step would be an N64 Classic.
A little N64, with Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 and Ocarina of Time and even GoldenEye on it, and four controllers, would fly off the shelves, right?
Well, it’s not coming any time soon, unfortunately.
Kotaku interviewed Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and of course, they asked him about a potential N64 Classic. And the news wasn’t good.
“I would not ever rule something out,” Fils-Aime said, “but what I can tell you is certainly that’s not in our planning horizon.”
https://twitter.com/kobunheat/status/1063160821121863680
Damn.
He elaborated, suggesting that the Classics line of consoles was only a short term thing, and they weren’t focusing on any more for the time being.
“We were clear when we did the first two Classic series that, for us, these were limited time opportunities that were a way for us as a business to bridge from the conclusion of Wii U as a hardware system to the launch of Nintendo Switch.
“So while consumers may have been anticipating something, we view these as limited time opportunities.”
The Wii U of course was a horrible flop, and the Switch is doing pretty well, so this would suggest they’ve got no need to do another classic console for the time being.
He also implied that if you want to play classic N64 games, the place to keep an eye on would be Switch Online.
“We’ve also now been very clear that as the consumer looks forward to engaging with our classic content that is going to happen more and more with the subscription service.”
