Nintendo 1st Party Vs 2nd Party Developers

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The purpose of this thread is to analyze Nintendo's Intellectual Property and how it has been used throughout the history of Nintendo's consoles.

Beginning with the NES, Nintendo owned the rights to Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, Kirby, Yoshi, Metroid, Little Mac from Punch-Out, Startropics, Kid Icarus and Excitebike.

Nintendo's 1st party developers tend to lean towards making the traditional Mario games and Link games while 2nd/3rd party developers have been assigned Metroid, Kirby and other character cross-overs.

 

Once the Original Gameboy and later the updated Gameboy Color was released Nintendo introduced the popular character Wario and the hugely successful franchise Pokemon.  Nintendo continued to focus their 1st party developers on creating traditional Mario and Link games but also began licensing many of their properties excessively and with great success.

 

When Super Nintendo came out, Nintendo raised the bar on the traditional Mario franchise when they created the Super Mario World series.  Besides creating 2 new franchises, F-Zero and Earthbound.  they also re-purposed the Mario World characters into the mega popular Mario Kart.  Nintendo did a major update to the Link, Punch-Out!! and Metroid series.

2nd party developer RareWare had the opportunity of using Nintendo's Donkey Kong assets to create one of the most popular games on the Super Nintendo.  Released in the holiday season of 1994 the game went on to sell 9 million copies making it the 2nd best selling game for SNES.  The game was so good that Shigeru Miyamoto felt jealous when Nintendo and the gaming community gave such high accolades to the quality of the rendered graphics and how they made all Nintendo characters appear primitive in comparison.

Meanwhile, Shigeru had his sequel Super Mario World 2 rejected because the sprites looked too much like the first one and Shigeru refused to use the same computer pre-rendered graphics techniques that Rareware used so he had the characters re-drawn with a crayon style as well as adding an extra microchip to the game cartridge that allowed for rotation, scaling and other sprite scaling effects.

Rareware was upset with the criticism of DKC as well as the arrogance from Nintendo that they decided to make Nintendo's mascot Donkey Kong the character that needed saving in the next instalment of Donkey Kong Country.  This time Rareware designed their own original character monkeys and made them the hero.  In the end, all of these games were excellent in their own ways despite the drama which happened behind the scenes.

 

 

With the N64, Nintendo's mascot Mario had evolved from side-scrolling sprite scaling to full 3D worlds and the popularization of analog sticks on a home console.  Link also made a major transition from top down 8 way movement to full 3 Dimensional worlds.  F-Zero, Star Fox and Mario Kart had moderate updates in graphics only.  Yoshi's Story is an indirect sequel to Super Mario World 2 with side scrolling platform action and this unique crayon art style.

Rareware was renamed Rare and they updated Donkey Kong Country to full 3D environments while Hudson Soft began developing the new franchise Mario Party.

 

By 2001 it seemed that handheld gaming was reserved for Nintendo.  They completely dominated worldwide with the Super Nintendo level graphics found on the Gameboy Advance.

The device was replaced only 4 years later by the Nintendo Dual Screen but the Advance filled a huge gap left between 1989's Original Gameboy and the technology revolution which happened by the 21st century.

Besides mostly Super Nintendo era ports of Mario games and the two Metroid games, Nintendo comparatively did not develop much compared to 2nd and 3rd party devs.

The Intellectual Properties Nintendo owned began to shine in this era.  Advance wars, Golden Sun and Fire Emblem are the latest assets in Nintendo's warchest.  The older franchise characters all had original appearances and the Pokemon franchise was still hot.

 

Nintendo introduced and developed Pikmin and Animal Crossing for the Gamecube Generation.

2nd/3rd party developers got a chance to produce some original games using Nintendo's assets and done a good job at it too.

 

With the dual screens on the DS, Nintendo introduced interesting new ways to the play games. Out of the games which use Nintendo's assets, it seemed to me that the 2nd/3rd party devs were doing most of the work creating original fun games using Nintendo's assets.

 

You could say the most important thing about the Wii was the motion controllers.  They used an accelerometer and a gyroscope to detect how the controller was being moved or held.  It worked great for games which developed around it but many games seemed to play better with a traditional controller.

Nintendo surprised everyone with New Super Mario Brothers.  It seemed to please the nostalgic type of gamer as well as children because of the side-scrolling gameplay.  Not only this but the art style seemed like what people first felt going from Super Mario 3 to Super Mario World. 

Nintendo also pushed their 3D Mario into something much larger being Mario Galaxy.

Again, Nintendo seemed keen on outsourcing development most of their assets to 2nd/3rd party developers.  Xenoblade Chronicles is Nintendo's latest RPG.

 

The 3DS had all remakes of things from Nintendo's  properties.  Most games were either ports from the Wii U or they were career series titles such as Mario Kart 7, Animal Crossing remakes and Mario & Luigi remakes.

The Switch is to give us more ports and remakes, notably Metroid Prime 4, Pokemon 50?, Yoshi Platformer although some people are looking forward to Xenoblade 2, Fire Emblem and Mario's Odyssey.

To sum this all up, Nintendo has a great amount of Intellectual Properties and they don't seem interested in having the staff to make more than a couple Mario and Zelda games with a wacky mashup and a random game per generation.  Nintendo seems to prefer sub-contracting their characters to other companies with a bias on Donkey Kong, Wario, Mario Party , Metroid, Pikmin, Mario RPG/Paper Mario and many others. 

How are the "Nintendo games" going to compare to the most popular games that will come out on Switch in the Future?  The Switch console seems popular worldwide but the types of games people play today very by region and the ability to appeal to people.

 

[twiztor]

very cool little article/post. a few of the artworks confused me, since they were not the released coverart. nonetheless, they were all recognizable and interesting.

then i get to the GameCube era and see Donkey Kong Racing. i had never heard of this! perhaps it was Japan-only? so i did some research. And now i am sad that this game was never (fully) made. i was ready to play the hell out of it.

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, twiztor said:

very cool little article/post. a few of the artworks confused me, since they were not the released coverart. nonetheless, they were all recognizable and interesting.

then i get to the GameCube era and see Donkey Kong Racing. i had never heard of this! perhaps it was Japan-only? so i did some research. And now i am sad that this game was never (fully) made. i was ready to play the hell out of it.

I noticed that cover as well.  I remember thinking, "who the hell authorized a Donkey Kong Racing cover that doesn't even have Donkey Kong on it?   Good to know it wasn't real cover art.