Don't expect Nintendo to bring Mario games to iOS.
Illustration: Chris Kohler/Wired.com

We’re never going to see Super Mario Bros. on the iPhone, no matter how much Nintendo’s investors may clamor for it.

In the wake of the disappointing launch of the Nintendo 3DS portable gaming machine — this month, the company slashed the price of the device worldwide by as much as 40 percent — investors and analysts have said the maker of Mario and Pokemon should expand into the rapidly growing smartphone games market.

Some even say Nintendo should use its $10 billion cash reserves to aggressively acquire mobile- and social-game developers, as many other game publishers have done recently. “Nintendo should try to either buy its way into this [mobile] platform or develop something totally new,” a fund manager told Bloomberg earlier this month.

Not only is that not going to happen, it would be a bad move. I’ve been making the point for some time now that Nintendo needs to respond to the major changes taking place in the way people discover, purchase and consume videogames (even though the gaming giant insists its 3DS business has been in no way affected by the rapidly spreading availability of significantly cheaper portable videogames).

Nintendo’s games are so excellent that the company would dominate any space it enters, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But Nintendo’s games are excellent only because the company takes several distinct and unique approaches to making them so. One example: The company crafts its hardware and software in tandem; abandoning this practice would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Take Sega. (Please.) The brief lifespan of the Dreamcast system, the final two years that the company spent in the hardware business, was marked by an exceptional creative fecundity. Those two years produced Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, Rez, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Seaman … an avalanche of extraordinary, groundbreaking games spanning genres.

When the company said it would go “platform agnostic” and discontinue Dreamcast, conventional wisdom held that this was a brilliant move: The company’s amazing games, now published on every platform, would surely make it one of the strongest software publishers on the planet, a sort of Japanese Electronic Arts.

How’d that all work out? The restructuring may have turned around Sega’s slumping financials, but it killed the creativity. With Sega suddenly finding itself in cutthroat competition with the rest of the industry, it didn’t take long for the development imperative to shift from “create distinctive, unique experiences that make our hardware stand out” to “sell games.”

Every one of the game series I just mentioned is dead, and Sega finds itself way down the list of the world’s biggest game publishers. This is not to say that Sega, faced with the unappetizing prospect of competing against Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, should have stayed in the hardware business — just that strength in one aspect of the videogame biz does not necessarily translate into strength in the other.

Soon after Sega “went third-party,” but before anyone realized that the Sega that would result was not the Sega they knew, conventional wisdom said Nintendo should do the same thing: Abandon the GameCube, put Mario on the Xbox, Zelda on the PlayStation 2. It wasn’t the right move then, because Nintendo DS and Wii ate everyone’s lunch a few short years later. Neither does it make sense now.

Nintendo’s approach to problem-solving has always been — to put it as nicely as possible — deliberate. It hesitated to put CD-ROM technology into the Nintendo 64, which was the one critical decision that caused the Japanese gamemaker to lose industry leadership. The easy thing to do would have been to release a CD-ROM add-on device, but this would have split the consumer base into haves and have-nots, forcing developers to decide whom to support. Better, Nintendo reasoned, to wait it out — support the N64 to the best of its ability and do a better job with the next machine.

The company could afford to be deliberate. Even when Nintendo was “losing” the console wars, it was always comfortably in the black, every year.

With DS and Wii, the company’s unconventional wisdom paid off. Around 2003, many assumed the next handheld machine from Nintendo would be something of a portable GameCube: small disc-based games, gorgeous graphics on a wide screen. In other words, a PSP. We know how that worked out; going with cartridges over discs was the right move.

Nintendo will eventually respond to the changing market.

I believe Nintendo will, eventually, respond to the changing market. Years from now, the company will have everything it now derides as being useless and/or harmful: a flourishing digital store with persistent user accounts across devices, a wide variety of inexpensive games, downloadable versions of retail games and more power in the hands of developers to set and adjust pricing and content.

It’s not that Nintendo has been made irrelevant by Apple, it’s that old methods of game distribution are dying faster than Nintendo expected them to. Sales of packaged Xbox and PlayStation games are still higher than digital, but when the day comes that digital revenues eclipse discs, Microsoft and Sony will be ready for the changeover. I think Nintendo understands that it needs to be ready, too. In characteristic fashion, the company will take its sweet time.

The belief that Nintendo should rush to acquire a mobile-game company and start cranking out iPhone versions of Nintendogs is founded on the idea that Apple has made Nintendo irrelevant. Apple’s success is certainly challenging long-held assumptions about how much games should cost and how they should be developed and sold, but it doesn’t mean people are going to play games only on their smartphones from now on. This is a solvable problem, and Nintendo is a company with the wherewithal to solve it.

Giving up and going into crisis mode at the slightest hint of trouble is not the Nintendo way, something that those who own stock in the company should probably have known, going in.