Has Nintendo really sold its soul?

The noteworthy feature of this generation has to be the new userbase Nintendo has generated, counter pointed by the loyal fans it has lost. From initially being seen as a revolution, the Wii is mocked and derided by long-standing gamers (AKA the hardcore). Lately Nintendo has embraced a new media-savvy, market-aware image, but this approach has caused friction. They have been accused of riding the wave of their cash cow, with questions being raised about whether they are the same company who led the golden age of game development back in the early 90s. For me, though, the distance between the Nintendo of today and the Nintendo back then is smaller than has been touted. While Sony and Microsoft often look to develop and promote huge, complex titles, Nintendo have always put accessibility first.

An arcade cabinet of Super Mario Bros was my first gaming experience. I was enraptured within minutes. It was challenging yet easy to pick-up-and-play, with only a D pad and two to operate. As a result of my addiction, my parents bought me a SNES and Super Mario World combination pack for Christmas '94. Like the original, Mario World was accessible yet deceptively complex, and it hooked my father into gaming for the first and last time. Because of our joint play, the console had the honour of a place next to the main TV in our living room. Although Mario World was a long and challenging game - Star Road, in particular, was 'nails' - its simplicity made it easy for non-gamers to fall in love with it.

In fact, when you look at Nintendo’s biggest success pre-Wii, the Game Boy points to another example of how Nintendo have always put an emphasis on accessibility. The original Tetris is an obvious example: a puzzle title with a universal appeal that took years to master. On a more personal note, however, I have always been an unlikely fan of Game and Watch Gallery, an ugly-looking collection of minigames that I'd picked up in a bargain bin in Woolworths back in the mid-90s. With no other incentive other than beating your high score, it had little to interest me until my uncle, a newly-wed in his early thirties, became addicted. He wouldn't leave our house before he beat my score on a coal miner simulation, in which you had to carry coal across multiple levels of a factory.

In the days of 2D gaming then, even the most unlikely players were hooked. But this all changed towards the end of the 90s, during the heyday of the PSone and, to a lesser degree, the N64. The latter is my favourite console of all time, but my dad was reluctant go anywhere near its three-pronged controller. He was put off by the extra buttons and the analogue control. This theme continued throughout the next decade, with my friends and I forced to play my N64 on the 14-inch television in my room. The living room, previously my SNES's domain, was now out of bounds. This relegation saw my hobby become isolated. Now I had to retreat to my bedroom on Christmas Day, for me alone to appreciate such delights as Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. With the complexity of 3D sacrificing the pick-up-and-play nature of 2D, my hobby had become an independent pursuit rather than a communal activity.

This situation only changed when I bought a Wii back in winter 2007. Now my family were playing games again. Super Mario Galaxy was incomprehensible, but they couldn’t get enough of Wii Sports. At the same time, I had enough of a balance of the hardcore (Galaxy) with the casual (Sports) to keep me interested. I was even more surprised by how quickly my five-year old cousin got good at Wii Sports Boxing - after only a morning's play, he was better than me, an experienced gamer! During this time, my hobby took on a new meaning: it had become public again, cool. Far from Nintendo losing me in its new approach, I felt pride at its new accessibility. This was what gaming was all about - or so I thought.

From being the butt of jokes in the Gamecube era, Nintendo had become a big gun again, generating vast streams of revenue at the same time as attaining critical acclaim for the likes of Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime: Corruption. Within the space of a year, however, I became frustrated with the Wii. From Galaxy’s release to selling my Wii at the end of 2008, not one game grabbed my attention. Since then, I haven’t regretted it. None of its titles stir my imagination in the same way that a glance at the release schedule of the PS3 or Xbox frequently does. In playing to its new casual audience, Nintendo has sacrificed its original userbase.

Although I feel Nintendo has its heart in the right place, and regard its early years as the template for its current casual focus, I feel it still needs to find the right balance between catering for casual gamers and making deep, lengthy games. Nintendo's new userbase may be supporting it at this point, but there may prove to be a time in which it will have to turn to the fans who stuck by it through the dark days of the N64/Gamecube eras. I only hope that, by that time, Nintendo has not hung those fans completely out to dry.