Nintendo’s holiday line-up does not include a new retro console, a surprise for fans and media who expected the 2016 NES Classic and 2017 SNES Classic retro consoles to be followed by a 2018 Nintendo 64 Classic. Fils-Aime isn’t one to announce new products on the fly during an interview, but he made it sound like the window for Nintendo doing such a device is closed for now.
“We were clear when we did the first two Classic series that, for us, these were limited time opportunities that were a way for us as a business to bridge from the conclusion of Wii U as a hardware system to the launch of Nintendo Switch,” he said. “That was the very strategic reason we launched the NES Classic system.” The Wii U had been fading fast by early 2016 and the Switch didn’t launch until early 2017.
“So while consumers may have been anticipating something, we view these as limited time opportunities. We’ve also now been very clear that as the consumer looks forward to engaging with our classic content that is going to happen more and more with the subscription service.
“Would you rule out an N64 Classic coming?” I asked.
“I would not ever rule something out,” he said, “but what I can tell you is certainly that’s not in our planning horizon.”
I'm jealous of people who buy all these mini consoles and actually have the extra HDMI ports to plug them in and play them.
The side of my TV contains an HDMI and USB port, which are just picture perfect for plugging these things in.
My living room TV has 4 and they're all full (cable, bluray, PS4, Switch). I'd play them up in the bedroom, but there's a raspberry pi hooked up there that might make things a bit redundant.
My wife and I invested in one nice, large-ish HDMI cord that we just constantly keep hooked up to our TV, and can hook up to whatever non-permanent installation we need at the time, like one of our laptops to watch an Amazon rental or to play local multiplayer on Steam, or the old gamecube or SNES mini for more old-fashioned gaming.
I'm jealous of people who buy all these mini consoles and actually have the extra HDMI ports to plug them in and play them.
The side of my TV contains an HDMI and USB port, which are just picture perfect for plugging these things in.
My living room TV has 4 and they're all full (cable, bluray, PS4, Switch). I'd play them up in the bedroom, but there's a raspberry pi hooked up there that might make things a bit redundant.
Buy a nice reciever with lots of inputs. Zelda sounds awesome coming from a good sound system.
Not to mention the fact that Nintendo doesn't want to devalue their IP like that. Sure there is no cost in adding more games, but by putting a ton of games in there for essentially pennies, that's like saying the games aren't really worth anything individually. What IP holder wants to send that kind of message?
20 NES/SNES games is super paltry, even with those very weak excuses. Even weaker considering Zelda and Mario are included in the Minis AND the NES app on Switch. The valuable IPs are all there already, they could include 40 more 1st party games without devaluing anything. Seriously, that excuse is almost offensive to the intelligence of everyone here.
And hey, nintendo forked the money to put licensed games on a service like Nintendo Online...
Again I really don't get why you people go to such lengths to defend things that are bad for consumers for no big gain to the corporations. I mean, I actually make a living working for gaming companies, but I always put the player before companies.
I'm not defending their reasons. I'm just telling you why they're never gonna do that thing you want them to. Yes, there is no hardware reason for them not to put 200 or 300 games on there. But letting people own the game for literal pennies does create a perception that the games are basically worthless.
Look at Disney. They could easily afford to sell their movies for less, and drop the price over time. Instead, they leave the price up and just pull it from the market periodically. They cultivate the perception that their movies have value.
NES Classic as a stopgap makes sense, but wasn't Super NES after the Switch was released?
Anyway, if we hadn't heard anything well before now, I knew getting it this holiday was extremely unlikely.
Oh, and updated the OP with the Christmas NEOGEO Mini. Am I reading that right, and it comes with all the games of the original AND new ones on top of that?
I like the red color. Reminds me of the arcade cabinets. Didn't see a price, though.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
NES Classic as a stopgap makes sense, but wasn't Super NES after the Switch was released?
Anyway, if we hadn't heard anything well before now, I knew getting it this holiday was extremely unlikely.
Oh, and updated the OP with the Christmas NEOGEO Mini. Am I reading that right, and it comes with all the games of the original AND new ones on top of that?
I like the red color. Reminds me of the arcade cabinets. Didn't see a price, though.
Yeah sounds like it'll come with more games than the original.
I'm jealous of people who buy all these mini consoles and actually have the extra HDMI ports to plug them in and play them.
I just have mine plugged into my computer monitor. I have no spare outlets or HDMI ports in my living room setup. Not that the controller cables would allow for living room play, mind you.
NES Classic as a stopgap makes sense, but wasn't Super NES after the Switch was released?
I'm guessing this was part of Nintendo's emergency Plan B in case Switch flopped, but even after it was successful they figured they might as well put it out.
See also: all the 3DS ports, smartphone games, etc.
If you're gonna get an HDMI switch, it's worth it to get one that's remote operated. Get one that's USB powered so you don't have to worry about an extra plug.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
I bought a 3-port HDMI Switcher for my Classic systems. Something like this:
Not this exact brand, but something similar. You can get them on Amazon for $10-$20. Probably wouldn't hurt to pick one up.
For what it's worth, if you use a hacked NES/SNES Classic, switchers like this might not work if they're not powered. I've helped a few people in the hakchi Discord channel lately whose systems were powering off after turning them on. Turns out that unpowered switches draw on some power from the HDMI cable and it's more than the NES/SNES Classic power supply can handle.. As soon as these people disconnected the system from the switch and connected it directly to the TV, it worked again.
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
I use the same type of HDMI switch for my consoles, to my capture card, which then routes to my TV and my computer. Probably not the most glamorous way to both capture and split three devices among one HDMI port, but eh. It works.
I bought a switcher to keep most of the "big" stuff plugged in (cable box, 3 consoles, and a cord going to a PC). Honestly though, I'm someone who grew up shuffling consoles around TV's. First it was the RF plugs of the NES/SNES, then the AV plugs of a PS1. Scooching behind a back heavy CRT and connecting shit virtually blindfolded. AV plugs were technically easier (no screwing in, just plug 'er in) and technically harder (gotta memorize which plug is which). Today, there is a port on the side of the TV within easy reach, and it's one plug for everything.
So I'm sorry. Your cries of how hard it is on you to juggle equipment today mean nothing to me.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Somewhere I still have my Zektor component video switch; it only had four inputs, but at the time that was enough (DVD, VCR, cable box, PS2). And it would output all audio through an optical cable, so once I had the optical running to my receiver and the component video running to my TV, I never needed to change inputs anywhere but on the switch.
Someday I'll dig it out so that I can hook my PS2 and GameCube back up, maybe.
(For the classic consoles, etc., right now I have the NES Classic hooked up to the front input on my receiver; and if I decide to swap that out for the PSTV or something, I'll just do it manually.)
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
I bought a switcher to keep most of the "big" stuff plugged in (cable box, 3 consoles, and a cord going to a PC). Honestly though, I'm someone who grew up shuffling consoles around TV's. First it was the RF plugs of the NES/SNES, then the AV plugs of a PS1. Scooching behind a back heavy CRT and connecting shit virtually blindfolded. AV plugs were technically easier (no screwing in, just plug 'er in) and technically harder (gotta memorize which plug is which). Today, there is a port on the side of the TV within easy reach, and it's one plug for everything.
So I'm sorry. Your cries of how hard it is on you to juggle equipment today mean nothing to me.
Yep, all my childhood gaming was on an old TV with only a coaxial input. We needed RF adapters for all our consoles. At our peak, we were having to switch between the NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, N64, and Cable television using this fancy switching technology:
I can't imagine how many times I gave the CRT the ol' reach-around.
RF adapters were easier in the UK, no need to screw the cable on, just a plug (often to be found with two or three daisy-chained). Much rougher with the American screw-on connectors.
And then there were those daft separate wire things in the Atari 2600 era...
You haven't lived until you cracked open that new issue of COMPUTE! magazine and hand typed game code into your machine! Something like this:
And you better believe it never worked the first time you typed RUN. Expect at least 2-3 screenings of your code to figure out where your typo was located.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
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Oh yeah, used to do that on my ZX Spectrum. Usually from Input magazine or something. In my case it did not either teach, or engender a love of, programming
Still, I have vaguely fond memories of a game called Droid that came as a listing like that. It randomly generated a simple maze, and you had to pre-program your droid to make it through to the other side without hitting a wall. I didn't have a cassette (remember them?) handy to save it on, so I left the computer on until I could get hold of one... and of course, my grandmother, who I was staying with at the time, switched it off, not knowing...
Kids these days with their USB drives and hard drives and their cloud storage will never know that anguish
Oh yeah, used to do that on my ZX Spectrum. Usually from Input magazine or something. In my case it did not either teach, or engender a love of, programming
Still, I have vaguely fond memories of a game called Droid that came as a listing like that. It randomly generated a simple maze, and you had to pre-program your droid to make it through to the other side without hitting a wall. I didn't have a cassette (remember them?) handy to save it on, so I left the computer on until I could get hold of one... and of course, my grandmother, who I was staying with at the time, switched it off, not knowing...
Kids these days with their USB drives and hard drives and their cloud storage will never know that anguish
Of course, even if you had a cassette and a tape player with suitable inputs, it was always a crapshoot as to whether the program would save correctly and then load successfully.
Oh yeah, used to do that on my ZX Spectrum. Usually from Input magazine or something. In my case it did not either teach, or engender a love of, programming
Still, I have vaguely fond memories of a game called Droid that came as a listing like that. It randomly generated a simple maze, and you had to pre-program your droid to make it through to the other side without hitting a wall. I didn't have a cassette (remember them?) handy to save it on, so I left the computer on until I could get hold of one... and of course, my grandmother, who I was staying with at the time, switched it off, not knowing...
Kids these days with their USB drives and hard drives and their cloud storage will never know that anguish
Of course, even if you had a cassette and a tape player with suitable inputs, it was always a crapshoot as to whether the program would save correctly and then load successfully.
Thankfully by that point I'd graduated to the +2 version of the Spectrum that had a built-in cassette "datacorder", which was about a billion times more reliable than the separate tape player setup.
That was... oh God. Volume control is out by half a millimetre? Sorry, you're out of luck! It was bad enough trying to load commercial software on that thing, let alone reliably save/load your own stuff. The +2 was so, so much better for that - not flawless, but definitely a lot better.
Hey fellow old nerds, do you remember that feeling when you got your first real hard drive?
100 Mb of space... that's like 80 floppies worth of stuff! Amazing days.
Hey fellow old nerds, do you remember that feeling when you got your first real hard drive?
100 Mb of space... that's like 80 floppies worth of stuff! Amazing days.
Over and over and over. And I still make the same statement every single time.
"I'll never fill this up!"
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Hey fellow old nerds, do you remember that feeling when you got your first real hard drive?
100 Mb of space... that's like 80 floppies worth of stuff! Amazing days.
Pfft. I remember in the 80s when my dad upgraded the IBM PC he used for work. Before, absolutely everything ran off floppy drives. When he got the hard drive installed, he could store a whopping 1 MB of information. I remember that figure absolutely blew my little mind.
Never mind, misremembered. It was 100MB.
cloudeagle on
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Hey fellow old nerds, do you remember that feeling when you got your first real hard drive?
100 Mb of space... that's like 80 floppies worth of stuff! Amazing days.
My parents got a Mac Plus around 1988 which included an external 60 MB hard drive. That thing lasted me from 6th grade to 12th grade. There was pretty much no way we were going to fill up that hard drive back then. One time my dad lent the hard drive to a coworker to copy all his stuff onto our drive, so suddenly I had all these new games to play! And he also had copied some other stuff on there which I don't think my parents would have approved of. I certainly didn't expect a program described as a "font" to actually be a grainy animated digitized image of a naked woman dancing with samples of moaning playing.
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Perhaps the worst part about this might be not getting fresh new N64 controllers to play the games with.
Interesting that he/they consider the existing Classic systems to be stop-gaps, whereas Sony appears to be bandwagon jumping to ride the "craze".
Steam | XBL
The side of my TV contains an HDMI and USB port, which are just picture perfect for plugging these things in.
My living room TV has 4 and they're all full (cable, bluray, PS4, Switch). I'd play them up in the bedroom, but there's a raspberry pi hooked up there that might make things a bit redundant.
Or because they are so small and use the same power input / hdmi you just swap two cables and move a box.
I missed the release of the PS1. The early games had those large, book-like cases.
Buy a nice reciever with lots of inputs. Zelda sounds awesome coming from a good sound system.
3DS: 1521-4165-5907
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WiiU: KayleSolo
I'm not defending their reasons. I'm just telling you why they're never gonna do that thing you want them to. Yes, there is no hardware reason for them not to put 200 or 300 games on there. But letting people own the game for literal pennies does create a perception that the games are basically worthless.
Look at Disney. They could easily afford to sell their movies for less, and drop the price over time. Instead, they leave the price up and just pull it from the market periodically. They cultivate the perception that their movies have value.
Anyway, if we hadn't heard anything well before now, I knew getting it this holiday was extremely unlikely.
Oh, and updated the OP with the Christmas NEOGEO Mini. Am I reading that right, and it comes with all the games of the original AND new ones on top of that?
I like the red color. Reminds me of the arcade cabinets. Didn't see a price, though.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
Yeah sounds like it'll come with more games than the original.
Steam: betsuni7
I just have mine plugged into my computer monitor. I have no spare outlets or HDMI ports in my living room setup. Not that the controller cables would allow for living room play, mind you.
Steam: pazython
Wouldn't you need a trackball?
I'm guessing this was part of Nintendo's emergency Plan B in case Switch flopped, but even after it was successful they figured they might as well put it out.
See also: all the 3DS ports, smartphone games, etc.
My Vizio M might only have adaptive lighting, and no HDR (not that it would remotely help in this case), but it does have 5 HDMI ports.
Not this exact brand, but something similar. You can get them on Amazon for $10-$20. Probably wouldn't hurt to pick one up.
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Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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For what it's worth, if you use a hacked NES/SNES Classic, switchers like this might not work if they're not powered. I've helped a few people in the hakchi Discord channel lately whose systems were powering off after turning them on. Turns out that unpowered switches draw on some power from the HDMI cable and it's more than the NES/SNES Classic power supply can handle.. As soon as these people disconnected the system from the switch and connected it directly to the TV, it worked again.
My Backloggery
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Glad to see the old traditions being kept alive
Steam | XBL
Yeah, at one time I think I had my PS1, Sega Genesis/CD, and SNES plugged into the same CRT with a switcher.
My Backloggery
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
So I'm sorry. Your cries of how hard it is on you to juggle equipment today mean nothing to me.
- Xbox 360
- Xbox
- Turbo Duo
- Dreamcast
- Saturn
- PS2
- N64
SNES and Japanese PC Engine were getting swapped in too at times but there wasn't room for all of them in the setup!
Steam | XBL
Someday I'll dig it out so that I can hook my PS2 and GameCube back up, maybe.
(For the classic consoles, etc., right now I have the NES Classic hooked up to the front input on my receiver; and if I decide to swap that out for the PSTV or something, I'll just do it manually.)
That is quite a range of systems!
My Backloggery
I can't imagine how many times I gave the CRT the ol' reach-around.
And then there were those daft separate wire things in the Atari 2600 era...
Steam | XBL
All the different connectors and work around techniques made setting the clock on the VCR a snap.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
And you better believe it never worked the first time you typed RUN. Expect at least 2-3 screenings of your code to figure out where your typo was located.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
Still, I have vaguely fond memories of a game called Droid that came as a listing like that. It randomly generated a simple maze, and you had to pre-program your droid to make it through to the other side without hitting a wall. I didn't have a cassette (remember them?) handy to save it on, so I left the computer on until I could get hold of one... and of course, my grandmother, who I was staying with at the time, switched it off, not knowing...
Kids these days with their USB drives and hard drives and their cloud storage will never know that anguish
Steam | XBL
Of course, even if you had a cassette and a tape player with suitable inputs, it was always a crapshoot as to whether the program would save correctly and then load successfully.
Thankfully by that point I'd graduated to the +2 version of the Spectrum that had a built-in cassette "datacorder", which was about a billion times more reliable than the separate tape player setup.
That was... oh God. Volume control is out by half a millimetre? Sorry, you're out of luck! It was bad enough trying to load commercial software on that thing, let alone reliably save/load your own stuff. The +2 was so, so much better for that - not flawless, but definitely a lot better.
I do not miss the EAR and MIC cable.
Steam | XBL
100 Mb of space... that's like 80 floppies worth of stuff! Amazing days.
Over and over and over. And I still make the same statement every single time.
"I'll never fill this up!"
Pfft. I remember in the 80s when my dad upgraded the IBM PC he used for work. Before, absolutely everything ran off floppy drives. When he got the hard drive installed, he could store a whopping 1 MB of information. I remember that figure absolutely blew my little mind.
Never mind, misremembered. It was 100MB.
My parents got a Mac Plus around 1988 which included an external 60 MB hard drive. That thing lasted me from 6th grade to 12th grade. There was pretty much no way we were going to fill up that hard drive back then. One time my dad lent the hard drive to a coworker to copy all his stuff onto our drive, so suddenly I had all these new games to play! And he also had copied some other stuff on there which I don't think my parents would have approved of. I certainly didn't expect a program described as a "font" to actually be a grainy animated digitized image of a naked woman dancing with samples of moaning playing.
My Backloggery