The Many Families Of Nintendo.

  

Hi! Welcome to a new ongoing series called "The Many Families of Nintendo." (Thank you for the amazing title idea, HawK!)

Here, I'll be looking at development studios and their output, and then making predictions for what they’ll be doing next, with some insider knowledge thrown in here and there. I've split the insider and speculative stuff into separate parts (Knowledge and Prediction respectively) to prevent confusion.

 

Today we'll be looking at some of Nintendo's smaller studios, as well as some partner studios. Let's get started.

 

Nintendo Software Technology

 

This one's interesting. NST is easily one of Nintendo's most diverse teams. They've worked on everything from 1080° Snowboarding, Wave Race Blue Storm, and Metroid Prime Hunters, to Mario Maker 3DS, Captain Toad, and Snipperclips. They were also trapped in a dungeon making nothing but Mario Vs. Donkey Kong games for about a decade. They hit the big leagues earlier this year with the release of Bowser's Fury, which was a co-operation with 1-Up Studio, who are a support team of Nintendo EPD Tokyo.

 

Zippo's Knowledge:

I know nothing about what the studio has coming. What I do know is that 3D World + Bowser's Fury was done at least a good 9 months before it's release, so whatever they're working on is already well into development, I figure.

 

Zippo's Prediction:

My guess would be that they're making a smaller game. I'll actually go and make a bit of an insane prediction here and I'll say...

NST is going to remake Donkey Kong '94. The game is a revered classic and I think another reimagining of the origin of Mario and Donkey Kong would be amazing. Think of it this way, DK94 is TWICE as old as the original DK was when DK94 was released. It would also serve to contextualize the lore that was retconned in Odyssey, now that it's heavily implied that the original game actually took place in New Donk City.

 

 

Game Freak

 

The ever-reliable (and controversial) developer of the mainline Pokemon series.

 

So it's already known that Game Freak's next game is their extremely ambitious open world Pokemon game, Pokemon Legends: Arceus.

But this is absolutely an experimental game being made by a different team at Game Freak. As with all of the previous generations, the next generation is already in development, and has been since Sword and Shield released. This isn't inside knowledge, this is just how Game Freak works.

 

Zippo's Prediction:

Given the current schedule and the release of two mainline games in the next six or so months, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the next generation of Pokemon will debut in 2023, meaning this will be a four year long generation, just like generations III and IV. It'll serve to improve the next game's quality by giving them an extra year of development. It also means more time to push merch of gen VIII Pokemon. 

 

Grezzo

 

Easily Nintendo's most reliable team when it comes to remakes/remasters. They're very good at what they do and they have great turnaround time for their projects. Zelda is their bread and butter, but they've worked on Luigi's Mansion for 3DS and most recently Miitopia for Switch.

 

Zippo's Prediction:

Despite the anniversary for Zelda being kind of a dud, I think next year could look much better. I'm going to make a guess and say Grezzo's next project is going to be remakes of Oracle of  Seasons and Oracle of Ages. They're classics that are not in circulation, and given how similar they are to Link's Awakening, remakes of those two could easily run off of that engine. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

 

Bandai Namco:

 

While they are a completely separate company, Bamco has been a huge ally of Nintendo for many years now, there's very rarely a year where Bamco and Nintendo don't have something in the works. They've been the developer of Smash Bros. for the last decade, and that was a massive undertaking that they've done a wonderful job with. They've also had their hands in a ton of Mario games, including four Mario Kart arcade games, Mario Baseball, as well the most recent mainline Mario Kart games, Mario Kart 8 and Tour.

 

Zippo's Prediction:

I'm going to go and make a prediction that the Mario Baseball series is coming back, with Bamco at the helm. They last worked on Mario's outfield antics in 2017's Mario Sports Superstars. This is the prediction I'm most confident in. I would expect a career mode, full online play, all of that stuff. Will probably look visually stunning. Batter up!

New Pokemon Snap DLC also seems pretty likely to me.

 

Koei Tecmo

Same situation as Bamco here. They've been a big supporter of Nintendo with both Zelda and Fire Emblem, among other things, and Nintendo had enough faith in them to give them the latest Fire Emblem game. Age of Calamity in and of itself is a pretty fucking big deal.

 

Zippo's Knowledge:

Fairly obvious, but I'm repeating my own rumor here, KT is working on the next mainline Fire Emblem, While Intelligent Systems is finishing up a remake of one of their past Fire Emblem games.

 

Intelligent Systems

 

Last one of the day. Intelligent Systems is one of Nintendo's longest running partner studios, as  they've made everything from Fire Emblem, WarioWare, Advance Wars Super Metroid, Paper Mario, Codename Steam, and Pushmo. Extremely talented studio. I may not always be a fan of their output, but they’ve made some of my all time favorite games.

 

Zippo's Knowledge:

I've gone on and on about the Fire Emblem remake, so I'll spare your time on that one. This one is incredibly obvious, but they’re already hard at work on the next Paper Mario game. For those who didn't know, development on the next Paper Mario starts as soon as the current one is out the door.  Fun fact. I was told in February of 2020 that Origami King was finished, meaning this one has been in development for quite a while now.

 

Zippo's Prediction:

Adding on to that, I'll go ahead and make a pretty likely prediction. Given we're probably about halfway through the Switch's life cycle, I'm going to say that this new Paper Mario will probably release on Switch before the system's time in the spotlight is over. A three to four year development time would match up nicely with that, methinks. I'll also go and predict that either a remaster or a new Pushmo game is coming down the line.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this one. I'm really happy with how it turned out. This blog has reached a milestone of over 300,000 views. Absolutely insane. Thank you for lending an ear.

Big thank you to my buddy Jerome for the amazing banner.

https://twitter.com/SynRushuo

Another big thank you to my friend and trusted editor, David, for the great editing work as always.

https://twitter.com/dv_kh3

That's it for today, but I'll be looking at some bigger Nintendo-focused studios the next time we meet in this series, such as MonolithSoft. See ya then!