Journalist stumps Fils-Aime on the Nintendo dogma

Ahh Christmas day. I am writing this while I wait for the turkey to finish cooking. The young kids are busy playing with new Ipod Touches. Not one of them has or desires a 3DS.

Here is a recent interview with Reggie Fils-Aime. Listen to this quote.

So when I look at gaming experiences on social networks, there’s a variety of entertainment value. Some are strong, some are not. But in the end, how will they evolve? Doing the same thing over and over again is no longer fine.

And that is the Nintendo dogma. It is the license for ‘creativity’, e.g. the license for the developers to be selfish. However, Nintendo has been doing the same thing over and over again with 3d Mario one after another or Aonuma Zelda. Making an actual Mario or Zelda game would be doing something different.

But the journalist jumps in and stumps Fils-Aime on the Nintendo dogma:

Is that really fair when you have Mario Kart 7 coming out?

Oh snap. How can Nintendo say that doing the same thing doesn’t sell when Mario Kart franchise is their healthiest series? Or when NSMB DS or Super Mario Brothers 5 performs so well? Or when the ‘different’ Metroid: Other M doesn’t do well? Let’s hear Reggie’s answer:

We continue to evolve the experience by providing a level of customization that’s new, or different ways to race with a sail and a propeller that allows you to drift under water.

Who cares? Certainly not the consumer. It’s still the same game.

What we’ve done with Mario Kart 7, for some of the tracks, you can actually win when you go off the track, which never existed before.

This existed with Super Mario Kart, the very first game in the series. Perhaps Fils-Aime should play it. With the feather, you could get off the track all the time and make crazy shortcuts. My favorite off track moment was with Super Mario Circuit 2 and using the ramps to skyrocket yourself hard to the right where you would fly over the finish line.