Email: Dear Nintendo

On the off chance that you post this, and the unfortunate-person-at-Nintendo-Assigned-to-read-your-site sees it.

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I am disappointed, Nintendo.  I understand that you’ve allowed Eiji Aonuma to base current Zelda games off of old text adventure games that he used to play, but this is ridiculous.  How can you say things like this, Nintendo?  How do you not even know the genres of your own games?

Zelda I
Zelda II
A Link to the Past
Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask

This is unbelievable. This is unacceptable.  I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw the assigned genres while looking through the Virtual Console. Since when was Zelda I an ‘adventure’ game?  When I think of Adventure games I generally think of games like Monkey Island.  I think Puzzles.  Puzzles more complex than those in Lufia II, much less any Zelda game.

In fact, the only Zelda game I found that had ‘RPG’ listed was the 3DS remake of Ocarina of Time.  How is one game an ‘adventure’ game, but its remake an action/adventure/RPG? At least you have the decency to add ‘action’ to Zelda II (you remember, the one that had traditional RPG elements like experience points.)

But no, that wasn’t enough, was it.  I thought you might just be unclear on what an action/RPG is, but I had to check, and on top of it all, you had to go and list Neutopia and its sequel as action/RPGs.  How is one game an ‘adventure’ game when it’s blatant copy is ‘action/RPG’?  How does that work?

No, you’re not mistaken, are you?  You know exactly what you are doing.  Is there really no low you would go to in order to justify shoving more puzzles in my Zelda?  I used to like you, I used to like your series, I was okay with Ocarina of Time, though it felt incomplete, and the Water Temple was terrible.  A waste of time.  I thought you’d make a better game, though, a complete one, one that would blow Ocarina of Time out of the water.

I realized today that I’ve been waiting thirteen years for you to make that game.  I’ve been waiting over half of my life for you to make good on the promises you made to me with Ocarina of Time.  You’ve added cel shading and set it on water, you’ve given it realistic graphics and added TRON-people, but you still haven’t made that game.  Why do you think that setting the game in the sky will be any different than the last cel-shaded version on the water? Why do you think 3D will help when you’ve already been giving me the same game for 13 years?

You know what? I was willing to go along, hoping that every new game you announced would finally be the one I’d been waiting for.  Then I played Spirit Tracks and I realized just how seriously you take me as a customer.  I realized just how intelligent you think I am.  I realized that you have absolutely no intention of making the game you’ve been promising me.  I realized that you haven’t actually been promising it for a very long time.

Well, I’ve decided that you’re not going to make that game, and that’s fine.  Go ahead and make your puzzle games that you call Zelda games.  I’ll just make the game that I’ve been waiting for.  That way I can finally have my game and get paid for it, too.  It can’t possibly be any worse than Spirit Tracks, and it can’t possibly take more than another 13 years to make, so I’ll just make my own.  It shouldn’t be hard, either, when the old cartoons, Minecraft, and possibly even the CD-I games are more Zelda than Skyward Sword can ever hope to be.

Changing history so that Zelda was something it wasn’t won’t make your stupid puzzle games sell.  It will only continue to defame the legacy of what once defined my life.  And it will make you look ridiculous, as well.

Oh, and good luck with Project Cafe.  You really should have listened to yourselves when you were talking about the Revolution.

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Another satisfied Nintendo customer!

Has it been 13 years since Ocarina of Time? No wonder these fans are starting to get antsy.

When Super Mario Brothers was out, I was like, “Now THIS is what I’m talking about!” Super Mario Brothers wasn’t so much ‘new’ as it was the logical evolution from the mechanics of Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers 2 was SO AWESOME that there were TWO Super Mario Brothers 2 games. There was the Japanese version and the Doki Doki Panic. When Super Mario Brothers 3 came out, well, the excitement was unbelievable. And it was fitting that Super Mario Brothers 4 escort the SNES to the market.

Since three (or four) Mario games came out on the NES, I naturally assumed there would be a Super Mario Brothers 5 on the SNES. It never came. I was disappointed. I figured Super Mario Brothers 5 would appear on the N64. Nope. So by the time the Gamecube was in its death spiral, I was happy that it was dying. “This is what you get for not making Super Mario Brothers,” I remember thinking. And when NSMB DS was shown at E3 2005 for DS, that was when I had to buy it.

But as years passed, you realize Nintendo has no desire ever to make the games you want to play. I have always felt Nintendo fans fall in love with one particular game and then try hard to convince themselves that the next generation sequel is ‘as good’ or ‘the same’. Eventually, years roll by and you realize it is never going to come. And then, a sudden change occurs in your outlook. You go from faint hope to despair.

What is the point of making customers if you are not going to maintain them? Imagine at a cafe, they sell vanilla ice cream which everyone loves. Then, they sell rocky road and refuse to sell vanilla anymore. Customers are disappointed and demand why there is no more vanilla. “Our chef doesn’t want to make it anymore.” What type of absurd answer is that? Once sales drop, the cafe then brings back vanilla ice cream but then throws in all these strawberry flavors. “I don’t want that. Why can’t I just have the vanilla?” “It is because our chef doesn’t want to do that. Our chef is a genius, you know!”

Nintendo’s market performance is so strange because their core market (the Mario and Zelda market) is on fire. Usually, when a house is on fire, you try to put out the fire. But instead, Nintendo focuses on ‘doing something new’ and builds additions to the House-That-Is-On-Fire. This only masks the burning demise. Despite the mega expansions DS and Wii added, the fire was still raging. And this is why the floor suddenly falls out of Nintendo’s market. Their core is on fire, and Nintendo keeps trying to ignore it.

The fire began near the end of the NES Era. As more and more latter NES games were becoming complicated, Nintendo was losing the adults who played the simple sports games and other simple Nintendo games. (And these customers did not buy the SNES because Nintendo thought it wasn’t worth making these simple games.) The N64 lost the 2d customers. The Gamecube began losing the N64 core.

The success of the DS and Wii came not from the expanded audience but really from the core audience. Not the core audience of the Gamecube, but the original Nintendo core audience. I’m talking about the ones who bought a NES to play simple sports games. The ones who bought a NES to play Super Mario Brothers. Nintendo decided they got ‘bored’, and decided to make more Gamecube games (e.g. more 3d Mario) which explains why Wii’s latter period would be so unstable. The Core Market was on fire again.

Emailer, you say you are tired of waiting for a game that will likely never come. You are a member of that Nintendo Core Market that is on fire. The market is on fire because Nintendo refuses to cater to your simple expectations.

We didn’t start the fire. The Core Market was always burning since Nintendo was turning. The Core Market is not games that have Mario and Zelda characters in them. The Core Market are actual Mario and Zelda games.

The Seventh Generation ends with the greatest of ironies. What we thought of the Expanded Audience and the Core Audience is misplaced. The so called ‘Core Audience’ of Nintendo were actually the Expanded Audience as they were largely kids who grew up with the Gamecube or N64 playing vast 3d games. The actual Core Market for Nintendo home consoles are those who play simple sports games and 2d Mario.

It is absurd to say 2d Mario is an ‘expanded audience’ game when everyone knows 2d Mario is the original Nintendo Core Market. Thanks to Super Mario Brothers 5, Wii sold more systems in December 2009 in America than any console ever had before in a single month.

From the perspective of the Gamecube and on, someone like me would be considered in the ‘Expanded Market’. But from the Big Picture perspective of Nintendo’s entire history, someone like me would be considered as the ‘Core Market’.

When is Nintendo going to get serious about putting out the fire in its actual Core Market?