Nintendo does weird stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. right now things are going well for Nintendo, but in this world that’s a license not to pull back on weird stuff but to amplify it to the nth degree. Case in point: Nintendo Labo, a cardboard toybox with some real charm and a solid dose of classic Nintendo strange. We’ve got another dose of that last night when the company unveiled its next mass-market product in an explanation free-teaser. It’s a big rubber circle that you put a Joy-Con it. Let’s go to the video:
So yep, a big rubber circle that you can put a Joy-Con in, as well as a way to strap a Joy-Con to your hip. But while the form factor is a little silly, it’s pretty easy to see where Nintendo is going with this. It’s a fitness device, something that’s been in the company’s DNA ever since the power pad and which rocketed to prominence with the explosion of the Wii and Wii Fit. There’s also an indication of non-fitness games that we get from moments of a player using the hoop like a shotgun, and I’m sure it will be used for driving games as well. Some of the more active experiences also seemed to trend less towards exercise and more towards mini-games angle, si I’m going to go ahead and start getting my hopes up for a new Warioware right now. But the thrust of this product, from the initial trailer, seems to be fitness.
If it pans out, Nintendo could have another goldmine on its hands. As the NPD’s Mat Piscatella notes on Twitter, Wii Fit is one of the 5 top-selling sports franchises in history, and that’s in a category with some serious heavy hitters. And because of the way that Wii Fit catered to a largely non-traditional gaming audience, it also drove hardware sales in a way that other exclusives don’t do.
Nintendo wants that Wii money again. Switch money is good, to be sure–very good–but the company got a kind of crystal ball vision of just how far it could push its products back in 2007, and it looks like it’s going to try to pursue that same broader market with the Switch. Consumer tech has changed in a million intractable ways since 2007, and so nothing is guaranteed. Like most of Nintendo’s weird things, this could go one way or another. But the success of Wii Fit means that it basically had no choice but to try.
We’ll know more on September 12.
