My Dream for Nintendo Stream

Nintendo’s new console doesn’t need to win back the hardcore; it just needs to win back me.

By: Seth Macy Art by: Jeff Brown
May 18, 2011

I still remember when I first heard about the Super Nintendo. I was in 8th grade, and it was all we could talk about on the junior high playground. Whispers swept through the herds the way smoke curls around trees on the edge of a forest fire. “I heard it’s going to have graphics like the arcades!” said one. “I heard that the games are going to look just like cartoons!” said another. “My dad’s step-uncle works for Nintendo; we have one at our house right now!” exclaimed the kid who always lied because his parents were divorced. The level of speculation rivaled that of an oil-futures market, and we became single-track thinkers, putting aside our surging pre-pubescence for thoughts of only what the next Nintendo console would bring us.

Few companies can demand this sort of cultish behavior from consumers. Apple comes immediately to mind, and although each new iWhatever launch is met with the same intense and frenzied fanboyism that a Nintendo console draws, ultimately it’s Nintendo, not Apple, who owned a large of chunk of many of our childhoods. With its seeds planted at such a young age, Nintendo fanboyism bears its most flavorful fruits in the months leading up to a console release.