The first official smartphone game from Nintendo will arrive by the end of the year with more where that came from. By March 2017, the company aims to have five mobile titles on the market according to CEO Satoru Iwata.
During a meeting with investors following the release of Nintendo's most recent earnings report, Iwata agreed that five games may seem like a small number. But when they aim to make each title a hit and because they want to support each one for a significant amount of time after its release, it suddenly doesn't seem that small.
If anything, Iwata added, it should demonstrate their serious commitment to the smart device business.
Iwata reiterated that the company won't simply be porting existing console games to smartphones. He said that even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game. Perhaps more importantly, he continued, is the fact that a port with a track record on a dedicated game system would not match the touch-first play style of mobile.
On one hand, I completely understand why Nintendo wouldn't be interested in recycling classic games on mobile devices. Yet on the other hand, myself - and probably many of our readers - grew up playing games from the NES, SNES and N64 era. A trip down memory lane would be awesome although Iwata is right; doing so on a touch interface would be difficult at best.