Nintendo Switch Sports launched at the end of April, and while it wasn’t the best-reviewed game ever, the sales seem to indicate that it’s going to do just fine in terms of lifetime sales. And when you think about it, why wouldn’t it? It’s a casual game for those who just want to pick up and play and battle their friends and family members in-house. Yet despite this very “obvious game to make”, why did it take over 5 years since the Switch’s launch to get the title?
Director Yoshikazu Yamashita and producer Takayuki Shimamura talked about this in an interview, and the answers are indeed a bit surprising. Including how at first…they didn’t think of any other sports that could/should be added to the game:
With the Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort games, we came up with as many ideas as we could think of…and most of them were achieved and implemented in the titles, so we felt that we had done all we could. My impression at the time was that if we were to do a sequel in the future, it would be quite difficult. Therefore, when this Nintendo Switch Sports project started, I honestly felt that there weren’t any sports left to be added.
What this led to was a series of prototyping experiments that took the game FAR from its Wii Sports roots, including making it so that the motion controls in Nintendo Switch Sports…were not a focus at all. Eventually, they saw the error in their ways and literally had to start over:
I felt really bad for all the staff who had been working on the game up to the halfway point, but I told them that our goal should be to create “the world’s most easy-to-invite to motion-based game.” Nintendo has a lot of other games that are deep and interesting, but even considering the differentiation from those games, I thought our mission was to create a product for 5-to 95-year-olds, that is highly approachable. And so, we made a fresh start.
Indeed they did, and again, while it may be the best game ever, it’s definitely resonating with those who are playing it, and that’s what matters.
