(Skip to the 5 minute mark for the Switch.)
Reggie Fils-Aimé stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to show off Super Mario Run, Nintendo’s new mobile game coming to iOS and Android next Thursday, and brought a few surprises with him for the segment. First, Fallon got to try the title in front of the creator of Mario, none other than Shigeru Miyamoto himself, who cheered him on from a seat in the audience next to Nintendo Product Marketing Manager Bill Trinen. Miyamoto gave Fallon a thumbs-up for his gaming skills. Then, Reggie turned his attention to a yellow question mark block on a table that had, until then, appeared to be just decoration. “So,” Reggie announced, “we know you’re such a big fan, such a great gamer, you love to challenge us to bring you the latest and greatest surprises. We have one more surprise.“
Beneath the question mark block was a Nintendo Switch, and it looked identical to when it first appeared in October. As Fallon struggled to compose himself, Reggie reminded him of the Switch’s expected March release, and that Nintendo would be delivering more information about the system on January 12th. He then offered Fallon the chance to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the first time on the Nintendo Switch.
Reggie took control first, and opted for the Switch’s pro-style controller over the Joy-Con Grip. Link appeared on the wall screen behind them with a bow in his hands, wearing layers of armor and standing atop a stone structure. “What’s neat about this is, anywhere that you see, you can get to,” Reggie explained, as he let the camera to rotate around Link in order to show off the game’s draw distance. Visible at various points in the background were a building that resembled the Temple of Time (but no sign of Hyrule Castle), and the smoke-ringed peak of Death Mountain. The game looked indistinguishable to my eyes from past demos on Wii U hardware.
After dispatching a group of Bokoblins by rolling a boulder over the edge of the platform onto explosive powder kegs below, Reggie guided Link to a nearby hill before turning the game over to Fallon. Instead of handing over the controller, however, Reggie undocked the Switch, which appeared to still have the game running in the exact same spot. When Fallon asked if what he was holding was ‘the machine’ and if anything was left in the dock, Reggie gestured to the handheld and answered, “So, the machine is here, everything is here, the games are here, you can play it on your TV, you can take it on the go.” This appears to be confirmation that the dock will not include any additional hardware for extra processing power or storage, but we could still find out something different on January 12th.
To top off the night, Miyamoto sat in with The Roots and played the theme song to Super Mario Bros.
