Nintendo is Even Greater in 2025
A controller, a coffee, and a cigar, all is well
Nintendo is Great is a Substack devoted to playing and exploring every game ever released for a Nintendo console/handheld in chronological order.
Some posts are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Don’t forget to sign up below. Thanks for reading!
Happy New Year, everyone!
Yeah, I didn’t post anything these last couple of weeks. As I wrote on my sister Substack, the Sonoran Videogame Society, I collided face first into a holiday-related wall of overwhelm and I just needed to unplug. But I didn’t tell anyone! Which as an online content creator felt both horrible and liberating at the same time. I don’t think anyone took offense, but if you did, well… I’m sorry to disappoint, but not sorry I took time off.
Before I reveal what 2025 (most likely) has in store, I want to thank all 82 subscribers for reading, liking, commenting, and just plain ol’ being interested in what is (so far) purely NES content. Your interest and support lifts my spirits on the regular, and I’m not afraid to say it! Or, uh, write it, anyway.
Alright, FIRST UP: After I’ve finished covering every game released for the NES in 1986 (around early February), Nintendo is Great’s layout is going to change.
Every free post will be a monthly and/or quarterly rundown of all things Nintendo, starting with February 1987 and proceeding in chronological order from there. I expect the first couple newsletters will be quarterly, but as the NES game output increases in mid-to-late 1987, each issue will become monthly.
At first, these newsletters will cover only the NES, as Nintendo’s presence in the US was solely NES-focused until the Game Boy’s debut in 1989 (with the occasional Game & Watch release here and there).
They will likely feature overviews of all US releases, discussions of peripherals like the Famicom Disk System and Game Genie, glimpses into notable Famicom-only releases, and the origins of fun ephemera like Nintendo Fun Club newsletters, Nintendo Power, and Nintendo Power Strategy Guides. If I discover any interesting factoids, pictures of cool old merchandise, etc. I’ll probably throw those in there as well.
As Nintendo starts juggling multiple systems and their history as a gaming company grows beyond their NES-focused output, the newsletters will grow as well, eventually covering every Nintendo handheld and console like the SNES, N64, GBA, etc. and highlighting every game released for said systems within any given month.
Basically, Nintendo is Great is evolving into an actual newsletter.
I’ll still be proceeding through Nintendo’s history in chronological order, and I will cover every game, as promised in this newsletter’s original creed. Just how that looks is going to change.
I have no idea how often I’ll post these newsletters, but I expect they’ll take me more time than my current posts. I’d love to post them once a week, and I will certainly try to achieve that goal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I only post these beefier newsletters twice a month or so.
Paid posts will be devoted to more in-depth looks/breakdowns of the games featured within the free newsletters. Additional paid content is also planned for later in the year. More to come on that soon…
UPDATE: The morning I published this, Nintendo released a Switch 2 teaser trailer. According to the trailer, a Nintendo Direct specifically for Switch 2 will be on April 2nd, 2025, with only a 2025 launch window for the console so far. The trailer is sleek, but so far, the Switch 2 looks like a Switch with a larger screen and magnetic Joy-cons. Might have gotten a glimpse of Mario Kart 9, though, so… that’s cool! More to come in a couple months.
Lastly, the Switch 2 is supposedly launching this year, and if it does, I’ll be covering as much as I can. This hopefully means: buying the Switch 2, playing the games, and reporting back to all of you on my thoughts.
Will lightning strike twice for Nintendo? Given the proliferation of beefy, popular handhelds, like the Steam Deck, I have my doubts. For now, I predict a DS-to-3DS type scenario. The DS innovated and sold somewhere around 154 million units worldwide. The 3DS iterated on the DS and sold a little less than half that, 76 million units worldwide. So goes the Switch and Switch 2. But we’ll see! Perhaps Nintendo has a wild ace up their sleeve, instead of just more of the same.
Once again and as always, I appreciate you! See you next week!
Best,
DC
Sounds like a fun ride. Happy to be tagging along.
Looking forward to it! I guess I wrote a lot of thoughts here.
1.
Not sure if you were watching ProJared's "Now in the 90s" but it was my favorite thing to watch on YouTube while it was going on, and I was genuinely bummed when he ended it due to lack of interest. I actually don't watch that much of his stuff otherwise; I thought that series was the best thing he produced. In any case, maybe his format will give you some ideas for the newsletter format.
2.
I'm in the rare club that received I think 2 issues of the Nintendo Fan Club Newsletter. Based on your note, I probably don't even want to know what they would be worth if I kept them. I actually learned how to read from these and from Nintendo Power, after my parents threw in the towel and refused to read any more of this "garbage" to me.
3.
The Switch 2 will be interesting, and I think your DS to 3DS comparison makes sense. If I make the "bull case" for it, it's this: the Switch 1's form factor is a hit; the only reason it isn't more dominant is that there are so many popular games it can't handle at all, and the Switch 2 should largely solve that problem.
Because progress in computing hardware has been so stagnant over the past 15 years or so, it's easier than ever to have a device that is able to play most games at acceptable graphics quality for a long time to come. Especially if most games are designed with this hardware in mind. The only reason the Switch 1 can't play most games is that it wasn't designed to. Its hardware was pretty weak even when it came out; IIRC Nvidia was selling its same core chipset in 2012.
If the Switch 2 is able to play most popular games at an acceptable framerate and price point, and especially if it has fast load times and features like "quick resume", I don't see how it doesn't take market share from Sony and MS. But it probably doesn't EXPAND the market that much into casual gamers and phone gamers, the way the Switch 1 likely did, and the way the Wii and DS certainly did.
4.
As for the competition from the Steam Deck -- my wife got me a Steam Deck for Christmas, which I had resisted buying for my own good. We also got a docking station to plug it into the TV. I have a huge, mostly-unplayed Steam collection from my days as a single man, including a year or two subscribed to Humble Bundle. Plus I've been compulsively accepting the free games from Prime and Epic for years, with no plans of ever playing them because I don't really game on my home PC these days. So the thing has had a huge library for me to explore Day 1 at no added cost, and meanwhile the free games keep piling up from Prime and Epic. This is before we even get into emulation, where the fan community has built some tools to really simplify the process of configuring everything.
But I can also see how the Deck is not for the average gamer. Depending on my state of mind, sometimes it's not even for me. Sometimes games just don't work without extensive fiddling. And this goes double if you're trying to do multiplayer. I tried to get my wife to play some games with me, but I find she quickly loses patience if I call her over and hand her a controller and it doesn't work as intended. Which CAN happen on the Switch, but much less often, and it has that convenient menu that automatically pops up for assigning controllers.
I grew up playing DOS games right alongside my Nintendo consoles, so I'm used to things not working. In fact, at times I enjoy it because it feels like "earning it" when you finally get a finicky game to work correctly (this was even true with the NES, blowing on cartridges and so on). But this mentality was rare among us Millennials and even rarer among the youth -- though I would like to inculcate it in my kids. The Steam Deck seems like it could be a decent way to teach beginning computer skills.