The “The [Nintendo Game] Game” Post
On May 7, 2024, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa (sort of) announced the successor to the Nintendo Switch system. An unequivocal success for a company that desperately needed one in the mid-2010s, the Nintendo Switch system will be remembered for its stunning library of Wii U ports exclusive titles, including the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild game and its sequel the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom game, the Super Mario Odyssey game, the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game, and more recent additions to the library like the Pikmin 4 game and the Super Mario Bros. Wonder game.
What? Why are you looking at me like that?
Yes, for some reason, this clunky, vaguely uncanny “the [game name] game” wording is Nintendo of America’s official standard for referring to their first-party titles. From what I can tell, it follows from the more reasonable convention of “the [game console] system”, but it’s obvious how these two things are different, right? No other entity, human or corporate, talks about media like this. Other game companies don’t advertise “the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth game” or “the Tekken 8 game” in any official capacity. You don’t overhear your coworkers talking about “the Game of Thrones show” and “the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie”1. The only counterexample that comes to mind is the Hannibal Buress joke where he talks about “the Yeezus album”, and that guy’s whole deal is saying stuff weird! Yet for years, Nintendo has inexplicably clung to this nomenclative practice, and I hardly ever see anyone talk about how strange it is. How can someone hear a phrase like “the Mario Kart 8 Booster Course Pass DLC for the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe game” and not get a chill down their spine?
The History subheading
The first question I have here is “why?”, but the second is “when did this start?” The latter’s easier to answer without access to industry spokespeople or an uncle who works at Nintendo, but that doesn’t make it easy to answer, because the history of this terminology is all over the place. For example, if you search for “the ARMS game”, you’ll find this post on Nintendo’s site announcing “a demo for the ARMS game is now available”. So that means Nintendo was already using this template when ARMS came out, right? Well, no; looking into the matter further, that demo released nearly a year after ARMS itself, and I couldn’t find any materials from the initial release calling it “the ARMS game”2. Likewise, it takes minimal effort to uncover official sources referring to “the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild game”, but upon closer inspection, all of these are retroactive references, primarily from the Tears of the Kingdom marketing campaign. Whenever Nintendo made this change, it was after the Switch launch, not alongside it.
I was already starting to lose my mind after this preliminary research, so it was a breath of fresh air to find unambiguous, contemporaneous proof of a turning point. Splatoon 2 wasn’t called “the Splatoon 2 game” until well after release, but by the time Kirby Star Allies came out the following year, Nintendo was putting “the Kirby Star Allies game” in official communications. Anyone with a concerningly thorough knowledge of Nintendo’s 2017-2018 release schedule will know where I’m going with this: in between these two, the only first-party Switch title on the docket was a little game called Super Mario Odyssey. Sure enough, three weeks before Odyssey’s release, Nintendo released the game’s most comprehensive trailer yet, and…well, see for yourself:
Shouldn’t it be “The Odyssey spaceship”?
This is, to my knowledge, the first instance of Nintendo referring to a Switch game in this way. YouTube descriptions for earlier trailers just call it Super Mario Odyssey like a normal person would3, meaning we can safely place the institution of this guideline sometime between September 13 and October 6, 2017 (potentially earlier, if you take that footnote into account). There we go! Case closed.
…if you’re talking about written copy, that is. See, I first noticed this bizarre tic of Nintendo’s in their Nintendo Direct presentations (I’ll refer you again to “the Mario Kart 8 Booster Course Pass DLC for the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe game”), but Direct announcers weren’t saying “the [game name] game” at all in 2017. Or in 2018. Or even in the first several months of 2019. As late as February 2019, Nintendo’s spokespeople were only ever using “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” to refer to the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game (dang! now they got me doing it!), but in an April Direct featuring the same announcer talking up the same content update over the same graphic, it’s now called…I mean, do I even have to say it?
You have no idea how thrilled I was to discover this. I saved the image as “smokinggun.png”.
So that’s another date to jot down: April 16, 20194. We still don’t have anything close to the complete story here, but we can narrow down two watershed moments for this peculiar branding exercise…if we’re only talking about Switch games. You might have guessed from my careful wording a couple paragraphs ago that I’ve been burying a lede here. While I’ve always associated it with the Switch library, there are instances of “the [game name] game” in Nintendo of America promo copy from well before the console launched. It’s been around since before the Switch was announced. But be warned, fellow truth-seekers: you will find only ambiguity and anticlimax past this point. Let’s talk about Kirby: Planet Robobot first.
Lookin’ sharp.
Kirby: Planet Robobot appears to be the earliest-released first-party Nintendo game to have received the “the [game name] game” treatment. I’m mincing words here because, although the Play Nintendo site has two separate instances of “the Kirby: Planet Robobot game” in plain view, you should know by now that nothing is that simple in Nintendo Land. Play Nintendo (a site I would’ve been obsessed with in elementary school) has been up since 2014, but not everything currently on the site was originally published there—for example, the “Robobot Yourself” photo editing “game” first appeared on the standalone Kirby: Planet Robobot site in May 2016, and while the original page features some charmingly obnoxious mouse-over menu effects, guess what it doesn’t feature? Guess what was added years after the fact when the site materials were brought under the Play Nintendo umbrella? You get one guess!
With Planet Robobot out of the running, that leaves us with two more pre-Switch games that might have started this trend. I already buried one lede, and the end of this investigation is in sight, so I’ll come right out and say those games are Paper Mario: Color Splash and Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World, the latter of which takes the crown of “first game to be referred to in a really weird way that seemingly only I care about”. I present to you:
End of the line.
The original version of this press release isn’t on any Nintendo sites anymore, but several blog posts mercifully include it verbatim, and I find it highly unlikely that they’re all quoting each other. This marks December 20, 2016 as the first (currently) recorded instance of “the [game name] game”. So! There we have it. This long, winding, maddening road has led us to…a mostly forgotten 3DS remake of an only slightly less forgotten Wii U game. I did warn you it’d be anticlimactic.
Small addendum: at first, I thought Paper Mario: Color Splash was the nexus point, since it was released earlier than Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World, and both the US Walmart and Best Buy websites reference “the Paper Mario: Color Splash game”. However, archived versions of those sites from as recently as 2022 don’t say anything of the sort. And the full description only makes the source more dubious, opening with “Relax with Wii U’s version of the Paper Mario: Color Splash game,” which sounds suspiciously like a machine translation despite its appearance in a semi-official capacity. Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait. Hold the phone. Awkwardly literal translation…is that what’s going on here?
The “Why?” subheading
No, I don’t think so. (I did warn you it’d be anticlimactic!) I know next to nothing about Japanese grammar, so I can’t speak to the prevalence of this construction in Nintendo’s home country, but if Google Translate is to be believed, Nintendo shop pages and Directs that use “the [game] game” in English don’t say any such thing in Japanese. Whatever’s going on here, all signs point to it originating with Nintendo of America. That brings us back to the question I’ve been avoiding answering all this time: why?
Like I said, I don’t have an uncle who works at Nintendo, so I can only speculate. But when you think about it (and I’ve thought about very little else for a week), it’s not too complicated: corporations have to set certain internal standards, and sometimes those standards don’t make sense from the outside. They often don’t make sense from the inside! I’ve spent this whole post saying this convention only applies to first-party Nintendo games, but that’s not strictly true: I found a reference to Bandai Namco’s “the Disney Magical World 2 game” in my trawls through the Play Nintendo archives, and third-party developers closely associated with Nintendo (notably Intelligent Systems) are also slapped with the branding on occasion. So it’s clear some folks at Nintendo of America are just as confused about these guidelines as I am. And that’s relatable! If you’ve worked in any kind of corporate job, you’ve almost certainly had to use some inane nomenclature passed down from the top, whether it’s calling your coworkers “team members” or using whatever bespoke drink sizes the suits decided would make the menu pop 12% more. Who cares if no one talks like that in real life? It’s your job to talk like that. My personal takeaway from this journey—this odyssey, if you will—is that no matter how much their games mean to me, Nintendo is still a corporation, and no matter how effectively they maintain their veneer of guilelessness, they’re going to operate like one at the end of the day.
That’s why, from here on out, I’m exclusively referring to them as “the Nintendo corporation”.
thanks for reading
I originally wrote “the Barbie movie”, but after a second of thought, I realized people do actually say this. I submit that when they do, they are in fact saying “the Barbie movie” rather than “the Barbie movie”, but I’d rather not split hairs like that in the main post body. Sets a bad precedent.↩︎
With one exception: Google offers up a defunct Toys ‘R’ Us UAE listing with copy reading “Reach beyond your imagination with the ARMS game for Nintendo Switch.” This anomaly re: smaller games markets was a common theme, actually: for example, while Nintendo predictably never applied the convention to the Ubisoft-developed Mario + Rabbids games, I did find “the Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle game” on Algerian and Zambian storefronts, and “the Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope game” in Kuwait and the Philippines.↩︎
I should note the same is true for the Kirby Star Allies launch trailer, which dropped in early 2018. My assumption based on the myriad of other discrepancies is that the marketing department was given a transitional period for the change, and the Nintendo of America YouTube channel was a late arrival to the new standard. Or maybe some folks just didn’t get the memo. Or—hear me out—it’s possible Nintendo has never been a paragon of consistency.↩︎
With the same caveat about a transitional period. It took a bit for the Super Mario Maker 2 Directs to catch up, for one; the initial overview on May 15 doesn’t use the cursed phrasing, but subsequent major update announcements are full of “the Super Mario Maker 2 game”.↩︎