Nintendo on the reception to Nintendo Labo, decision to use cardboard
Nintendo surprised everyone last month with the announcement of Nintendo Labo last month. Going after kids and kids at heart, Nintendo Labo will allow Switch owners to make creations out of cardboard and then use them with compatible applications / mini-games.
Using cardboard may have seemed out of left field, but it ended up being a natural fit. Nintendo commented on the entire Nintendo Labo project including the reception and the decision to feature cardboard.
Here’s what was shared:
Shinya Takahashi (Director, Managing Executive Officer):
When we first announced Nintendo Labo, a lot of people said it was a “very Nintendo” product. We are very thankful for that appreciation and support.
In our efforts to develop new forms of play, we at Nintendo always look to the integration of hardware and software. Nintendo Labo is just one of many projects under development, and it emerged from the idea of somehow setting the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers, which can be considered a mass of sensors, into some form of attachment. I’m sure we surprised everyone with the use of cardboard, but it is not so far-fetched if you consider how familiar the material is at least to Japanese people who from a young age use it for play and as a material for creating things such as fancy crafts. Moreover, it was important to us that cardboard is a very suitable material for the trial-and-error process. When we started with a “robot” prototype inside the company, we realized that the trial-and-error process of attaining a finished product was itself extremely fun, in addition to playing with the product. That led to our concept for Nintendo Labo to be developed as something that people could enjoy in all of its aspects, not just in playing with the finished product, but also in making changes along the way and after it is complete, and in understanding the mechanics.
Ko Shiota (Director, Senior Executive Officer):
Joy-Con is designed as a controller which makes full-fledged gameplay possible, but at the same time, our goal as hardware developers with Joy-Con was to widen the possibilities of the controller. Using Joy-Con to the fullest has continued to be a consideration ever since Nintendo Switch was in development. As Mr. Takahashi noted, one idea was to set Joy-Con in some kind of attachment, and the result (of that kind of thinking about hardware and software in parallel) led to the inception of Nintendo Labo.
Shigeru Miyamoto (Representative Director, Fellow):
I, too, want to express my heartfelt thanks that people see this as a “very Nintendo” product. I read (on the Internet) somewhere that someone admired management for approving a product like Nintendo Labo, but inside Nintendo there are a lot of people who want to make products like that, and Nintendo is the kind of company that hires people who want to make products like that. In fact, when we asked inside the company for ideas for novel ways to use Joy-Con, we received many, many proposals, and one of them was to use cardboard like people did in the old days to make things. Nintendo is the kind of company that welcomes those kinds of new ideas.
The fact that it was perfectly natural for a product like Nintendo Labo to arise gives me reassurance that everyone inside the company understands and is committed to Nintendo as a company that innovates new ways to have fun and not as a company that only makes video games.
