Is Nintendo Just For Kids?
Nintendo has always been seen as the console for kids — at least since I was a tween. I couldn’t say how people viewed it before the mid-90s. After all, the Sega Mega Drive had awesome games like Sonic The Hedgehog, while Nintendo only had that brightly coloured plumber! Why go for boring old Tetris when Puyo Puyo had squidgy slime things?
However, looking at games released in recent years, I’ve wondered how much of that was Sega branding instead of Nintendo. After all, if your opponent is saying that you’re a family-friendly alternative to the edgy bad boy, wouldn’t you lean into that? But since Sega isn’t giving the free marketing anymore, there’s been no need to lean that way.
These days you can get the mature match-3 game Metropolis: Lux Obscura, and the gory DOOM Eternal on the Switch. In fact, if you go back to the Game Boy Advance, you could get Grand Theft Auto on it! So Nintendo has been trying to shift its image for decades now.
In the days of the SNES, things like Mortal Kombat had violence and the amount of blood reduced. But not all of the censorship was done by Nintendo of Japan. CHRONO TRIGGER, for instance, had your characters drinking soda rather than alcohol in the Western version. The European version of Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy removed a character shaking her hips and blowing a kiss!
The thing you have to realise is, while all of that censorship was being done only for the Western versions of titles — it wasn’t just the Nintendo versions. The Sega versions of Chuck Rock and the Mortal Kombat games (among others) had the exact same censorship!
So let’s take a look at what I still think is the main reason why people view Nintendo as “for kids”. It was back before the Miis on Wii and the adorable GameCube with that taunt of an ad tagline: “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t”. Printed across two pages, with a third page usually saying “Genesis Does It All”, it listed a bunch of Sega exclusive games. That’s it. It was 1990, before Sonic The Hedgehog hit it big! Sega didn’t have an “attitude” yet, they were just boasting about the exclusive titles they had available.
What kind of games wouldn’t Nintendo do? Here’s a list of the games from the double page spread:
- Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
- E-SWAT
- The Sword of Vermilion
- Columns
- Dynamite Duke
- Super Monaco GP
- Joe Montana Football
- Pat Riley Basketball
- James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing
Yep, according to Sega, Nintendo wouldn’t do puzzles, platformers, RPGs or sports. Dynamite Duke was a clone of Operation Wolf, which had been ported to the NES! Yet the thing is, this campaign began right at the start of the SNES’ life, and months before it would be available in the West.
Throughout the SNES’ life, Nintendo didn’t exactly go out of their way to publish games that could persuade people that they weren’t for kids. Third-party games tried, but Nintendo were happy to give Mario a stethoscope and keep publishing Kirby games.
Of course, then the Nintendo 64 had chunky cartridges instead of using discs like everything else. The GameCube had those mini-CDs. The Wii was directly marketed as something the whole family could use. The entire time, PlayStation was soaking up the “edgy” audience that Sega had garnered with Metal Gear Solid and the like.
However, since the PlayStation 4, Sony has been censoring things that Nintendo don’t. Adding effects to CG scenes in visual novels that show “too much”, removing bouncing breast options from games… While it’s not out on Switch yet, we can only assume that the half a second worth of buttocks in Crystar’s opening cinematic are going to be present, unlike on the PS4 version.
Of course, while the Switch is getting the least censored content of any Nintendo console, it does have parental controls. They’re quite good too, and you can control them from your smartphone if you want.
So, to answer my original question: is Nintendo just for kids? No, it certainly isn’t. Nintendo consoles are suitable for the entire family — just make sure to check your parental controls.
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