This week,Nintendo posted a 19 second clip to its YouTube channel. Through a grainy black-and-white filter, it shows a man standing in a room with a paper bag over his head. There’s a smiley face drawn on the paper bag. Some kanji appear onscreen at the end, whichIGN has confirmedtranslate to “laughing man” or “smiling man.” That’s all there is to this trailer, but it’s enough to have me excited about this strange new direction for the Big N.
Nintendo Isn’t Afraid To Get Mature Anymore
Remember whenNintendowas the family-friendly game publisher? I do. As a GameCube kid, I spent plenty of trips to Walmart peeking over at the Xbox display. The T- and M-rated games that dominated the green marquee featuring scary guns, scowling soldiers, and scantily clad women were a far cry from what was on display a few feet away. It all seemed so… adult. Even Microsoft’s E-rated mascot platformer, Blinx: The Time Sweeper, looked a little more mature than Nintendo’s, standing in front of a green-and-brown background with a sharp-toothed smirk and a more dangerous aura than Isle Delfino or City Escape.
It’s true that Nintendo’s offerings have never been entirely kid-friendly. I remember flipping the issue of Nintendo Power dedicated toResident Evil 4over so my parents wouldn’t see the age-inappropriate monster looming over Leon on the cover. Even before that, Conker’s Bad Fur Day defied my understanding when I passed it in the video store. A mascot platformer starring a cute animal… that’s rated M? How is that even possible?
But in the past few years, the Big N has been less loyal to this family-friendly facade. Ultra-violent games likeWolfenstein 2: The New ColossusandDoomare both on Switch, as isThe Witcher 3, which features decapitations aplenty and its fair share of sex scenes. It published the M-ratedBayonetta. While browsing the eShop recently, I was surprised by the sheer number of games with decidedly familyunfriendlynames. In five minutes scrolling through the tab of recent releases, I found various hentai games, Bikini Beach: Anime Girls Assault, and At Your Feet (which promises to let you “Romance beautiful women with gorgeous feet”).
This is ‘mature content’, but in a low-rent, uninteresting way. The Switch has been a fantastic console for indies, but that lowered barrier to entry has also led to a lot of trashier stuff clogging up the store. Gaming isn’t just for kids, so I’m not opposed to more lewd stuff being allowed on digital storefronts like the eShop and Steam, but it would be nice if it was a little more confined and required intention to find - the virtual equivalent of walking down the little hallway to reach the curtained off room at the back of Family Video.
What Is Emio? Who Is Emio? WHY Is Emio?
If those cheap games point to the downside of Nintendo getting more adult, the company making a horror game like Emio is the upside. We know almost nothing about the game at this point, except thatit has been rated M— PEGI 18 in the UK, Restricted 13 in Australia — for strong themes, violence, suicide references/themes, cruelty, and domestic abuse. Those aren’t typically words that inspire cheers, but seeing Nintendo roll out the red carpet for a horror game that is clearly targeting older players has me interested. This isn’t something this company often does, and when its consoles do host more mature games, they tend to be made by third-party developers.
Control on the Switch, ZombiiU on Wii U, Dead Space: Extraction on Wii, and RE4 on GameCube are a few examples; all released on Nintendo systems, none developed internally or published by Nintendo. Aside from Bayonetta, the only Nintendo-published M titles we have are Devil’s Third, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, Ninja Gaiden 3, Geist, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, the most recent of which was almost a decade ago.
Emio seems different. We don’t know much about it at this point, but it seems to have Nintendo’s full backing. I don’t know how the unsettling laughing man will fit into the company’s slate alongside Zelda and Mario, but I’m dying to find out.
