You were mistaken: the Nintendo Switch isn’t a games console. Having sold ten million Switches in its first ten months on sale, Nintendo is pivoting to cardboard.
The console’s success was unprecedented – just ask Nintendo, which hasn’t been able to manufacture hardware fast enough to keep up with demand. Now, in typically esoteric style, the company has announced a range of cardboard accessories to turn the Switch into anything from a piano to a fishing rod, or even a pair of remote controlled cars.
Nintendo Labo, which goes on sale in Europe on April 27, is a continuation of the game design philosophy that the firm debuted with 1-2-Switch. While Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo’s platform rivals, focus steadfastly on what happens on-screen, the Kyoto-based firm is doubling down on its fascination with what happens off-screen.
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“A lot of the history of gameplay, up until this point, has been people looking at a screen, not necessarily seeing the facial expression and the body language of the person next to them,” Yoshiaki Koizumi, deputy general manager of Nintendo’s planning and development division, told me shortly before the Switch launched in March 2017. “That became a very important, fundamental concept for us moving forwards on Switch: how to preserve that, how to bring people back to that kind of experience.”
The answer? Cardboard. Labo will be available in two versions at launch: a Variety Kit with cardboard parts for making remote-controlled cars, a fishing rod, house, motorbike and piano; and a Robot Kit, which lets the player don their very own wearable, cardboard robot suit. As Shinya Takahashi, general manager on the same team as Koizumi, told me: “We don't necessarily view this as a gaming machine; we view this as a tool for play.” For Nintendo, Labo is sort of full circle: when the company was founded in 1889, it produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. Now, it’s manufacturing boxes of cardboard toys that you plug a games console into. Go figure.
NINTENDO LABO UK PRICE AND RELEASE DATE
PRICE
No UK prices are confirmed yet, but the Variety Kit will retail for $69.99 in the US and the Robot Kit will cost $79.99.
RELEASE DATE
April 27 in the UK and Europe. The US will get Labo kits a week earlier on April 20.
