We’ve talked a lot about Nintendo’s success, especially during the Switch period (and in our Nintendo podcast!)., as there have been NUMEROUS titles, both 1st and 3rd-party, that have crossed the million-seller mark on the system. For most people, that would be viewed as a big success and prove that Nintendo did a lot right. However, in the eyes of one Shigeru Miyamoto, it’s not quite so simple. Instead, he noted in a recently translated interview that for a game to be a “big hit” for Nintendo, it needed to sell well over a million units.
He even joked with Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi that if it only took a million units to have a “big hit,” there would be about “30 million” big hits already in the gaming space. He also noted that:
“If we can have one big hit every three to five years, we’ll be fine. In that sense, if all our employees think about “creating a big hit” every day, we’ll be fine.”
That’s a very interesting perspective, as just in the last year or so, Nintendo has definitively had multiple “big hits” based on selling many millions of its titles. Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros Wonder, the Super Mario RPG remake, and possibly Paper Mario TTYD fit that mold. And there might be more in the future before the Switch 2 arrives. Only time will tell.
