Nintendo on wanting to bring people together with Switch
Nintendo has a notable goal in mind with Switch: bringing people together. In an interview with The Independent, general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi spoke about wanting to create an experience similar to cards. With cards, people are able to play together and “play eye to eye”. That’s where Switch’s portability aspect comes into play, including the Joy-Con.
Koizumi explained:
“When you have a deck of cards, you can get family and friends together and play games that everyone knows the rules to. It’s very accessible, everyone can sit down and play together, and that became kind of a root for us as we thought about this. For generations, people would play eye to eye as they thought about strategy. We wanted to recreate some of that experience using technology.”
“You need a certain kind of hardware to make that social situation possible. And in the past we’ve had that experience with NES and SNES of having two controllers and it definitely felt like the social experience where your friend would come over to your house and play with you, and so we wanted to make that situation not only more possible, but more visible outside the house, to see people playing together like that. It’s the addition of two controllers from the start that makes creating those things possible.
Of course you could go online and play video games with strangers that you’ve never met before, but something a little bit different is possible here, where you can take the system outside of your house and run into someone you’ve never met before, hand them a controller and start playing right there, and that’s the sort of thing that, when you experience it, makes the other person and yourself very happy.”
Nintendo’s Shinya Takahashi chimed in as well. He spoke about how Nintendo is targeting two demographics at launch. With Zelda, that’s meant to appeal to core gamers. As for 1-2-Switch, the game is “really suited towards being an icebreaker with groups of people.”
“With the launch on Nintendo Switch we’re launching with two games, and one of them of course is Zelda, and in this case it’s a Zelda game that’s more than enough, it’s a much larger Zelda game than we’ve ever made before, and so there’s a lot more to experience there than you’ve experienced in past game. And obviously that’s for long-time Nintendo fans and long-time gamers.
“And then the other is 1-2 Switch, and as you noted 1-2 Switch is the type of game that’s really suited towards being an icebreaker with groups of people. It’s something that anyone can pick up and play. The original concept for Nintendo Switch was trying to come up with these ideas for play which offer anybody the chance to play these games wherever they want, and that was really the genesis of the idea for Nintendo Switch.”
Koizumi closed out with the following:
“In our goal to reach as many people as possible with interesting new gaming experience of Nintendo Switch, we had considered the needs of a lot of different types of people, you have more of the core gamers who want everything out of the system, and you want it to also appeal to people who might just be looking for new experiences and coming into it for the first time perhaps. But the thing that we decided that we wanted to focus on in both of those instances was the fact that they could carry it around with them. And not only that they would be able to carry it around but that they would be able to experience the same quality of gaming that they could in their living room outside of the house as well. For that reason we also wanted them to be sharing it with other people when they were outside, and that’s why we included two controllers, so that they could hand one to another person.
When thinking about trying to provide that play experience and what would be required of the hardware to do it, this is where we landed. In particular, the fact that there are two controllers is especially significant to us.
When thinking about why that is important, the idea is that in previous generations we’ve had the experience included in one controller only in the hardware, and that really starts to railroad us into a situation of focusing on one player games. We didn’t want that to be the case this time round, we wanted people to go outside of their house and invite others to play with them, so having two controllers from the start was very important for this.
And we made the colours different so that it would be very easy to understand who was who. That’s how we settled on this iteration of hardware, based on trying to incorporate these various themes that could be applied in these situations.”
