Around here, we have a saying that goes, “Nintendo is going to Nintendo.” If you have been paying attention to the company since it singlehandedly breathed new life into video games in the 1980s, you will know that it is well-known for doing things differently. Sometimes, you can say that is “the Nintendo magic,” as they have a history of coming up with great things that you would never see coming. In other cases, the reasoning behind some Nintendo decisions can be completely lost on us.
We went through a lot of “interesting” Nintendo decisions over the years and narrowed them down to the ten most baffling. Here are some of our favorite Nintendo moments that made us go, “Wait… what?”
10 most baffling Nintendo decisions
10. Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS not allowing you to download online courses
While the Wii U had its fair share of problems, there were a few standout games. Even when Nintendo put out a less-than-desirable console, they had some pretty great games to back it up. One of those was Super Mario Maker, a great community game that allowed you to make Mario levels, and you could download other player’s courses to play through yourself.
Seeing the success of the title, Nintendo set out to port the game over to the 3DS. On paper, that’s a great idea. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this version of the game only allowed you to share your levels with local players. No online functionality to upload your levels for others to play. By this time, everyone knew that the online sharing functionality was what drove the Mario Maker community.
9. Pushing the Virtual Boy in such an unfinished state
Anyone growing up after 2000 may point to the Wii U as Nintendo’s biggest failure, but there are arguments for a couple of other hardware selections. The most prominent of these is the Virtual Boy. This device sought to deliver virtual reality to players in the mid-1990s. As you might expect, considering VR is still struggling to find a foothold nearly 30 years later, it didn’t go well. It hurt people’s backs after playing for more than 10 minutes, only displayed red and black colors, and had a total of 22 games in its entire life. Who knows if the Virtual Boy ever had a chance to be a better-received console with more time, but there is no way that the higher-ups looked at it at launch and thought it was a “Nintendo quality” product.
8. Not selling games available in Nintendo Switch Online
Starting with the Wii, Nintendo broke ground in a big way with the Virtual Console. This digital shop allowed them to sell many classic games from the NES, SNES, and more. At the time, there was a lot of demand to have access to these games again. It had its warts, but we would say it was a highly successful and appreciated feature for the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U.
Now we are on the Switch, and while subscribers to Nintendo Switch Online can access many of the games that were on the Virtual Console, there is no way to own them outright. If your subscription ends, you lose access to those games until you pay for it again. In one way, we can see this as a way to try and push value to NSO, but after all of these years, we can’t believe they never added a way to keep your favorite titles for the long term.
7. Paper Mario’s transition away from an RPG series
The first two Paper Mario entries were very beloved by its fans. They are both turn-based RPGs that see Mario travel around a paper world, meet many colorful and unique characters and companions, and are still talked about today. Following the release of The Thousand-Year Door, though, Nintendo did all it could to get away from that formula. Super Paper Mario was a platformer, The Origami King uses a weird spinning puzzle combat system, and Sticker Star was a mistake.
Outside of the re-release of TTYD in 2024, the Paper Mario series has lost all that fans of those original games loved, to the point that the heads of the series are saying in interviews that it is “no longer possible” to make unique characters, which sounds like some gross overarching decisions from the higher-ups. That said, it was a complete surprise for The Thousand-Year Door to be released again, so hopefully, that thinking has changed for the future.
6. Giving up on series for odd reasons
As mentioned in our Mario & Luigi Series Return Is a Sink or Swim Moment article, Nintendo is no stranger to abandoning beloved series. The problem, is they give very weird justifications for why some franchises are never seen again. The two that stand out to us are:
- Chibi-Robo was given a last chance with Zip-Lash, which was a mediocre 2D platformer in a series built on exploring a 3D world.
- F-Zero isn’t made to avoid competing with Mario Kart, even though they are completely different racing games.
Of course, every series has its own situation, and the lack of sales can be a driver in why a series is never seen again. However, we would argue that long-abandoned series like Earthbound, Star Fox, Rhythm Heaven, Punch-Out, Wario Land, Kid Icarus, and many others have just as much a chance to succeed as Metroid and Pikmin do nowadays. They just need good games made for them.
5. Limiting the Classic Edition consoles
In 2016, Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition. A year later, the SNES Classic Edition came out. Both were the talk of the holiday season. Everyone wanted these mini consoles that emulated dozens of beloved Nintendo games from the past. For whatever reason, though, Nintendo quickly stopped making them. They were an instant sellout and never produced again.
Of course, there are many ways to get most of the games on these devices, and it’s likely if you have one it is collecting dust on a shelf. That being said, this is just another instance of Nintendo having a super popular product that people want, but for no real reason not selling it.
4. The Nintendo Creators Program
As much as people love Nintendo franchises, the company itself has worked hard to diminish creativity in the community in the past. Probably the most high-profile of these efforts was the Nintendo Creators Program. Even though content creators were giving free advertising for Nintendo’s games, the company would take up to 40% of the ad revenue from videos featuring their IP. The ability to join this program was always backed up and tough to get into, and you had to let Nintendo look over your content before posting it so they could approve it for monetization if they liked it enough.
It’s hard to believe that even before the Nintendo Creators Program, the company was even worse with content creators. At that time, Nintendo didn’t allow any monetization at all for videos containing their games. Luckily, they are much more in line with others these days, but it wasn’t that long ago it didn’t want you to share your gameplay at all.
3. Voice chat capabilities
Think of your favorite online gaming moments with friends. The first things to likely pop up are games like Fortnite or Call of Duty. Games that you were able to talk with your friends during. Those kinds of functionalities have been pretty standard in console gaming since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It took Nintendo until the Switch to have any form of voice chat available, and even now, it’s not a good way to handle things. If you need to set up a chart for people to be able to hear both their friends and the game audio, you’re doing it wrong.
To this day, the only way to use voice chat is through the Nintendo Switch Online app. Luckily, there is Discord, which is a better overall alternative, but you still need another device to be able to use voice chat with your friends on Nintendo games.
2. Mario 35th anniversary games being axed after six months
In 2020, Nintendo celebrated the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. This event brought the Switch port of Super Mario 3D World, some small memorabilia like a new Game and Watch and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, and the release of two games: Super Mario Bros. 35 and Super Mario 3D All-Stars. The former was a battle royale-like game where you raced through levels of Super Mario Bros. against 34 other Marios, and it was a lot of fun. It got really monotonous, but with updates, you could see how that game could have legs. 3D All-Stars brought Super Mario 64 (which wasn’t updated for widescreen), Super Mario Sunshine (which still featured a ton of bugs), and Super Mario Galaxy (but not its sequel) to the Switch.
We won’t deny that there were a lot of reasons why game development in 2020 was more difficult, so we can excuse the shortcomings in the content released. What we can’t get over, was Super Mario Bros. 35 and 3D All-Stars both being taken down from sale and service six months later. They were available in September and, at the end of March, were pulled from the eShop and physical stores. At least All-Stars has physical copies out in the wild that you could likely find today, but there is no possible way to play Super Mario Bros. 35 in any form right now.
1. Everything with the Wii U
There are so many reasons that the Wii U failed. To start with, the name and the reveal of the console did a poor job of letting customers know this was a new console. Many thought it was just a tablet controller for the Wii. That tablet was never great to play with and made development undesirable for many games. For a gaming company that has been running for so long, it is still wild to think about how not one person in the leadership team stopped to think about how the lead-up to the Wii U was a bad idea.
Of course, the Wii U had some great games, with the best making their way onto the Switch. It was only a few years into the Wii U’s life that you could tell Nintendo was giving up on the console and looking forward to its successor, which, thankfully, was better in just about every way. The Wii U is an example of how gaming companies that see great success are susceptible to thinking whatever they make will turn into gold regardless of their actions.
“Honorable” mentions
Getting this list down to just ten was actually the hardest part of this article, seeing as how Nintendo likes to make interesting choices almost regularly. Here are some others that stood out to us:
- Being so late to adopt online and HD
- The commitment to friend codes
- The handling of joy-con drift
- Never giving an official way to listen to OSTs (before Nintendo Music app)
- The inability to keep up with demand (hopefully changing with the Switch 2 release)
- Saying the Nintendo DS was not a successor to the Game Boy Advance
- Thinking the Nintendo 3DS could exist long-term alongside the Nintendo Switch
- The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures requiring a GameCube, four Game Boy Advances, and cable ports to get the full experience
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokémon save files on Switch not being compatible with the cloud
- NES-101 requiring an R/F hookup
- Region-locking DSi and 3DS games
- The changing charging adapters for DS and 3DS
- Overproducing Animal Crossing amiibo but underproducing Smash amiibo
