Along a pristine sandy shore, a woman casts her fishing rod out into the sea and waits. She’s dressed in a stripy swimsuit with cute red boots and star-shaped sunglasses. For her, every day is beach day.
She is, of course, a character in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the second most popular video game – with 48 million copies sold – for the Nintendo Switch. (Mario Kart 8 is first.)
Animal Crossing has little in the way of a linear story. Players are entertained by endless low-stakes side quests such as fishing, farming, fossil hunting and helping out friends on the island – all to the tune of calm guitar, e-piano and drums.
Above our fashionable angler, a neatly tied present floats inland on a parachute, ready to be knocked out of the sky with a slingshot. A fossil peaks out from a tuft of grass nearby. Butterflies socialise in the morning light. And the island’s anthropomorphic inhabitants are chattering away in a high-pitched gibberish.
There are no threats here. Even the home-extension loans are interest-free.
[ Can Nintendo’s Switch 2 re-energise a stagnant gaming industry?Opens in new window ]
In a recent episode of Kit & Krysta, a gaming podcast hosted by two former Nintendo employees, Krysta Yang said the game “saved our lives”.
It’s a common sentiment: Animal Crossing was the breakout video game of the Covid pandemic, reaching women, men, casual players and hardcore gamers in equal measure.
Released in March 2020, just in time to provide a much-needed antidote to the lockdown anxiety many were feeling, it cradled players when they needed it most and spawned an online community when corporeal ones were taken away.
Its impact shows the difference between a good game and a great game – something Nintendo has achieved time and again. (At one point in the late 2000s, almost every livingroom seemed to have Wii Sports or Mario Kart on the television.)
With the much-hyped release of Nintendo’s Switch 2 next week, gamers are nostalgic for its predecessor, now the highest-selling games console of the last 20 years.
“Nobody really saw it coming,” says Stuart Dempsey, chief executive of GamerFest, Ireland’s biggest gaming event. Following highs in the 2000s with the Nintendo DS and Wii, the Japanese games company appeared to lose its edge with the release, in 2012, of the Wii-U, a commercial and critical flop. “So to rebound like that,” Dempsey says of the release of Nintendo Switch in 2017, “was absolutely incredible.”
When The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – then the latest in a long-running adventure series – was released alongside the Switch, it was immediately clear fans had their hands on something special. At the Game Awards in 2017, the jubilation on the faces of its creators when Zelda won game of the year was not only a heartwarming moment, but it also heralded the beginning of an era when Nintendo was back on top.
I’m speaking to Dempsey just outside the RDS in Dublin, where thousands of attendees are wading into the main hall dressed in handmade costumes, videogame-themed hoodies and all manner of merchandise.
The Switch ‘was the first time a console had ever felt that portable to me. They’d tried it a few times, but that was when the magic happened’
— Digital artist Katie O'Kane
The event features virtual-reality demonstrations, game developers testing their latest projects on willing guinea pigs, and traders selling artwork, figurines and second-hand games. The legacy of Nintendo properties is pervasive here, almost every stall including some reference to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda.
“The Switch was a gamechanger,” says Dempsey. “It [is] such an innovative console. They’re not reinventing the wheel this time, but nonetheless I would expect it to do very, very well.”
The Switch gives players the option to play games through their television or use it as a hand-held console – though, importantly, the system gives users more processing power in their pockets than ever before.
“Covid was actually a massive catalyst” for online gaming, says Dempsey. “Because you had young people stuck at home with no opportunity to hang out together, gaming online became a really important outlet for them to keep in touch and socialise.”
Nearby, we see this community out in the open. Some excitable teenagers in military khakis and Spider-Man masks hold up airsoft guns in a sort of Mexican standoff – a reference, no doubt, to a classic Spider-Man meme. We should give them some space, I suggest. Their weapons “all get checked at the door”, Dempsey says reassuringly.
[ Sales of Nintendo Switch top 100m, surpassing Wii’s lifetime figureOpens in new window ]
It’s nostalgia that comes up again and again when speaking to fans about what made the Switch and its games so special. And though the Switch 2 will come with a bigger screen, more storage and better performance, its biggest titles will feature the same old titans that have fronted Nintendo for years.
Some cosplayers catch my eye. Devlyn Marcos and Matthew O’Donoghue are dressed as two such titans, Mario and Luigi. O’Donoghue, being the taller of the pair, is aptly dressed as Luigi. He has pre-ordered Switch 2; he says he’s most excited about being able to play his favourite childhood games, from Nintendo’s GameCube era in the early 2000s.
“It’s a nostalgia thing for me too,” says Amy Quinn, a long-time Nintendo fan who owns the video-game reseller Retro Ralph Gaming. “It’s the stuff I grew up with really. I’m going back to the same characters with new stories. The old classic games like Mario, they keep you entertained for hours on end. The new ones on the PlayStation 5, for example, you play them once or twice and it’s not the same.”
She’s holding off on pre-ordering the new console, hoping it will come down in price over time. (Nintendo Ireland has priced the Switch 2 at €469.99 – that’s without any games – at the time of writing.) In front of Quinn are stacks of video games, with not a Switch box in sight. They still sell very well, she says.
Katie O’Kane is selling her artwork at a nearby stall. The digital artist has pieces inspired by a range of Nintendo video games, including The Legend of Zelda. Tears of the Kingdom, the latest game in the series, is her favourite. “There’s so much to it,” she says. “You can pick it up and get lost for a few hours.”
“Nintendo has always been about taking games wherever you go, in your pocket,” she says. The Switch “was the first time a console had ever felt that portable to me. They’d tried it a few times, but that was when the magic happened.”
Travis Mack, owner of Retromania, Ireland’s largest reseller of retro Nintendo portable consoles and games, says that while other game companies chase the teenage or adult markets, Nintendo make games for all ages and genders. “They didn’t exclude anybody,” he says. “They tried to push their console on everybody, and it worked. It literally is the biggest impact of a console in the last 20 years.”
Mack says the backwards compatibility of the new console, which means users can play their old games on the new system, has been such an appealing feature that the usual trading in of old titles in advance of a new console launch isn’t happening – to his apparent frustration. Gamers are, however, selling their old console to afford the new one, he says.
Mack will travel to Wexford next week for a midnight launch of the Switch 2 at the Retro Gaming Store, where he will get together with some friends and play Mario Kart World, Nintendo’s flagship title for its new console.
The Switch 2 comes at a critical time for the stagnant gaming industry. As Nintendo projects a growing confidence in its supply chain, overcoming fears that US tariff chaos would hinder its rollout, the gaming-market analyst DFC Intelligence recently increased its year-one sales estimates for the Switch 2 from 15 million units to 16 million. It expects 100 million units to be sold globally by the end of the decade.
“The Nintendo Switch 2 is arguably the most important product launch in video game history,” DFC said earlier this month, adding that it expects it to be the fastest-selling console system ever.
Since Grand Theft Auto VI – widely considered the most anticipated video game of all time – was delayed from its 2025 release date to May 2026, much more is at stake for the industry this year than Nintendo’s bottom line. DFC says the Switch 2 “has the potential to lift a video game industry that has been grappling with product delays, rising costs and economic uncertainty”.
If the industry finds itself in the doldrums today, DFC expects sails to be raised high in the coming years and for hardware and software sales records to be broken. All eyes are on the Switch 2.
“It’s bringing a bit of Japan to the rest of the world,” Mack says. “Japan have been the masters of portable gaming. On trains, people are playing games. On planes, people are playing games. They’re bringing their culture over to us and are embroidering the whole family unit.
“The only downside to the first Switch was that it was underpowered. The new Switch, though, is taking care of all of that.”
Nintendo Switch 2 is available in Ireland from Thursday, June 5th
