The Folding Stuff

Will Labo be Nintendo’s biggest mainstream success since Wii Sports?

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Picture, if you will, an alternate reality where Nintendo had issued a press release before the Labo reveal video went live. Imagine for a moment that it had somehow tried to explain the precise nature of this strange new venture in words. We’d think this venerable company, having enjoyed the most extraordinary creative and commercial recovery during Switch’s first year, had suddenly lost its mind. You can imagine the tittering responses – indeed, there were still a few of those once Labo had been unveiled. This so-called ‘new way to play’ was all about cardboard? How wilfully obtuse. But then people lost their minds in a different way. Yes, it still seemed slightly silly, but it was also rare, strange and undeniably exciting. And categorically, unquestionably, a new way to play.

Labo is the kind of Nintendo project that comes along every so often and wrongfoots us all – the result of an unswerving internal focus on fresh thinking. As a publisher, it might lean (in some cases rather too heavily) on established brands, but as Arms producer Kosuke Yabuki explained in Edge 312, Shigeru Miyamoto always asks key staff to consider how the latest entry in a series is truly different from its predecessors. But it goes much further than that, extending to Nintendo’s recruitment policy. As Miyamoto recently explained to the New York Times, he prefers applicants with experience and interests outside games. Those with a broader range of passions, he reckons, are more likely to come up with new ideas. Hence the conceptual absurdity of something like Labo.