We’re just a month out from the big Nintendo Direct giving us the full rundown on the Switch 2. Fans have been patiently waiting for the new hardware for years, excited to see what the future holds for the successor to one of the best video game consoles ever made. I’m excited too, but I also know that no matter what Nintendo has planed, the Switch 2 doesn’t have a prayer of recapturing the magic of the original Switch launch. Perhaps no future console does.
This week marks the eighth anniversary of the handheld console hybrid’s release and somehow the device is still going. It’s been a hell of a ride full of great games, but some of the biggest are still to come later this year with Metroid Prime 4 and Pokémon Legends: Z-A. No other console has gone on this strong and this consistently for this long, and none of it might have been possible without the constellation of factors that serendipitously collided to make the Switch launch one for the history books.
First there was the drama surrounding Nintendo, the storied gaming company whose name had once been synonymous with “video game console,” but whose Wii U had bombed so spectacularly that many thought it should exit the hardware business entirely. At only 13.56 million units sold, the white box with the clunky tablet controller performed even worse than the GameCube. Nintendo’s handheld at the time, the 3DS, was similarly its worst performing portable ever, though by a much smaller margin.
Nintendo had long ago abandoned the gaming graphics arms race, but by the mid-2010s it seemed like it had abandoned common sense as well, taking overly ambitious swings at superfluous hardware gimmicks instead of making decent hardware in service of great games. The fact that the Switch did exactly that, bringing Nintendo franchises into HD for the first time ever, felt like a remarkable coup considering the basement-level expectations coming out of the Wii U era.
But it also made a great first impression based on a novel insight: portable gaming doesn’t have to be secondary. The conventional wisdom at the time was that no one wanted to play big, deep games on the go. They had Candy Crush for that. The rise of smartphone gaming was thought to be one of the main factors in dooming the PlayStation Vita. It turns out that Sony just didn’t make the right games. Being able to take console-like experiences from home on the go, or just to the bedroom, made the sleek but otherwise humble-looking Switch feel revolutionary.
And there was no better showpiece for that than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Most systems launch with a few visually dazzling but mechanically shallow games. They gesture at what the new tech is capable of but belie the developers’ inexperience in being able to completely capitalize on it. Few console launches get full-fledged sequels in one of the biggest franchises around, let alone a GOTY that redefines a genre. Breath of the Wild was all of those things, and eight years later its reverberations throughout the medium are still being felt.
The real magic of the Switch launch was feeling both of these things smashed together: a mechanically deep, richly emergent, gorgeous open-world adventure on a small tablet that could (almost) fit into your pocket (or sock). Breath of the Wild was a return to form for a series that had previously grown stiff and predictable, on a device that showed leaving the graphical arms race behind wasn’t a retreat from making great games, but the opposite. Hundreds of amazing games came to the Switch in the years that followed, but have any of them ever topped that feeling of first leaving the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild? The fact that it’s even still debatable is remarkable.
There’s one final, less impressive reason why the Switch 2 will have a hard time living up to the original Switch’s launch window hype: there’s no graveyard of Wii U games to cannibalize this time around. Mario Kart 8 was ported to Switch within its first two months, eventually becoming its most popular game ever. Plenty of other first-party Wii U orphans have been rescued this way, filling out the Switch’s release calendar as needed while Nintendo consolidated its console and portable game development teams into a single, streamlined machine.
Maybe the Switch 2 will launch with a brand-new 3D Mario whose sprawling levels and inventive designs rival those of Super Mario Odyssey. Maybe Mario Kart 9 will revolutionize the racing series the way Breath of the Wild did for Zelda. Maybe somehow, someway, a new mainline Zelda will also hit the Switch 2 in its first year even though Tears of the Kingdom will only be three years old. In any case, though, it’s still only possible to experience the feeling of playing those types of games on a handheld for the first time once, and that already happened eight years ago.
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