Is Nintendo About To Zynga-fy Mario?

You've probably heard of Mario. You also probably haven't played one of his games in a long time. That's become more and more of a problem for Nintendo over the past year—and it may have finally pushed the company to consider making a deal with the devil by bringing some of its work to smartphones and tablets.

Speaking to Seattle's KING 5 News this week, Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aime said that the company is "doing a lot of experimentation" in developing "little experiences you can have on your smartphone and tablet." Lest he enrage any Nintendo purists, Fils-Aime made sure to add that the "main goal" of these mobile "experiments" (he was even careful not to call them "apps") was to ultimately "drive you back to your Nintendo hardware."

What this sounds like, then, is that the company is only willing to concede that it might make some dumb little smartphone mini-games that could in turn give you more coins in the next Super Mario console game. But qualification aside, it's hard to overstate how surprising this concession is.

Analysts and angry investors have been begging Nintendo to make something like a Pokémon iPad app for years now. The company's response has always been a swift shake of the head. As one executive put it when I asked him this very question back in August: "One of the reasons that people have such a fondness for Nintendo franchises and characters is that their games are paired so well to Nintendo’s hardware. Nintendo’s IP works best on Nintendo systems, and that’s where it will remain."

It's a legitimate, if stubborn, reason. It also helps explain why the people who still love Nintendo will threaten to murder your entire family if you say something bad about the company on the Internet. A business that was more singularly focused on its bottom line would have taken the combination of something like Mario (the best-selling video game franchise of all time) and the iOS app store and seen nothing but dollar signs. But Nintendo seemed to care more about the purity of its work than shilling a few more games about the pudgy Italian plumber.

If you play a game as glorious as this year's masterpiece Super Mario 3D World, you'll even start to believe Nintendo yourself. But that's the whole problem: I'd much rather play 3D World than Candy Crush, but the game is only available on the Wii U, a video game console that's been selling extremely poorly ever since it was first released in 2012. The console sales matter less to me as a reflection of the state of Nintendo's business—though I'd hate to see it go under—than a simple observation that it's sad that more people won't be able to see an incredible mind like Shigeru Miyamoto's at the top of his game.

Which raises a frustrating question: why do video game developers, artists that they are, have to hide their best work behind such imposing machines? After I posted my original review of Super Mario 3D World, a friend sent me a message asking if he should pick up a Wii U so he could play that game, or a PlayStation Vita just so he could play Tearaway, or a Nintendo DS for The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

"You made them all sound so good!" he said. And all three of these games are really good. But taken together, just being able to play all of them would cost him almost $800. We don't force people to choose between reading Cormac McCarthy on an iPad and buying a Kindle to get access to Philip Roth. Jay Z and Beyoncé might have given their latest albums over to Samsung and Apple respectively, but only before they were distributed more widely.

I don't know if bringing more games to iOS or Android would necessarily solve this problem. And loyal gamers certainly fear that once a company like Nintendo starts making smartphone apps, soon every game will be as repetitive and lifeless as Candy Crush Saga.

I understand this concern, but it doesn't give video game developers much credit for the fact that they've been consistently producing amazing work across any number of machines as the technology behind them continuously evolves. It's time for companies like Nintendo to stop focusing on the "little experiences," and start thinking about what they could really bring to the devices we already own.

-@YannickLeJacq