Mario Kart with Edward
Last week I preordered a Nintendo Switch 2. Not because I needed one. Because Edward is back, and Edward has two kids now, and we both want the same thing. To sit in our own living rooms, on a normal weeknight, and play a quiet round of Mario Kart the way we used to when nothing in our lives was complicated.
That's the whole reason. It's not about hardware. It's not about new releases. It's a console I bought to feel something specific again.
The Nintendo stock I own is down about fifteen percent since I bought it.
I check it the way you check the weather. Not often. Not anxiously. Just enough to know.
I understand why it's down. Nintendo's hardware is older than the competition. They take their time with new platforms. They do the same trick over and over, in a way that some people find quaint and others find lazy. Nobody really needed more than the first hundred and fifty Pokémon, and we now have a thousand of them. There are flashier companies on the market. Companies that move faster, talk louder, raise more capital, ship more often.
I don't think any of that is wrong. I just don't think it matters as much as it looks like it matters.
Nintendo is older than most people realize.
The company was founded in 1889. That is not a typo. They started by making hanafuda playing cards by hand in Kyoto, and they kept doing that for about sixty years before they tried anything else. After the cards came taxis, instant rice, love hotels, a vacuum cleaner, and a small fleet of failed experiments most people have never heard of. None of it worked. The cards kept paying the bills.
Then in the 1970s they wandered into electronic toys, and then into video games, and the rest is a story you already know.
What that history tells me is not that Nintendo is brilliant. It tells me that Nintendo is patient. They have outlived every console war pundit who ever wrote them off. The ones who were certain the Wii was a gimmick, certain the 3DS was the end, certain the Switch would flop. None of those takes aged well, and most of them came from people who didn't know that Nintendo had already survived ninety years of trying things that didn't work before video games even existed.
A hundred and thirty six years of figuring out what's next is not nothing.
There is a man who walks around Nintendo who looks exactly the same as he did twenty years ago.
Shigeru Miyamoto created Mario. He created Zelda. He created Donkey Kong. He has been giving small calm interviews about creative direction since the original NES, and he hasn't aged in any of them. He is in his seventies and he still shows up to corporate events holding a guitar or an ocarina or whatever the joke is that year.
I don't think Miyamoto is immortal. I think he is a hint.
A company that produces and protects a person like Miyamoto has a different operating system. They are not optimizing for next quarter. They are optimizing for the next Mario. They will wait years on a game if the game needs years, and they will reuse a character for thirty years if the character still works, and they will refuse to charge fifteen euros for a horse armor cosmetic even when the entire industry is doing it.
That kind of restraint is rare. It usually shows up on a balance sheet decades later, in a way investors who only look at one quarter never see.
Speaking of the balance sheet.
Nintendo sits on an enormous pile of cash. They have been famously, almost embarrassingly conservative with it for as long as I have been paying attention. No acquisitions for the sake of acquisitions. No leveraged buybacks. No bets they cannot afford to lose.
When the rest of the industry overextended on metaverse spending and crypto experiments and live service shooters that died on arrival, Nintendo released a small console with a hinge and sold a hundred and forty million of them.
I am not saying they always make the right call. They do not. Their online infrastructure is mediocre, their pricing is sometimes infuriating, and they treat fan projects with a cruelty I will never understand.
But the trade I am being offered as a shareholder is something like this. A company that has survived two world wars and six recessions, that owns the most valuable intellectual property in gaming, that sits on a fortress of cash, that operates on a creative timescale measured in decades rather than quarters. And the market thinks it should trade fifteen percent lower than it did a few months ago because the new console hasn't fully proven itself yet.
I am fine with that trade.
The Switch 2 will arrive in a few weeks. Edward and I have already agreed that we will start with Mario Kart.
It will be a small and very ordinary evening. Two grown men in two different living rooms, holding plastic controllers, throwing red shells at each other for an hour.
The stock can do whatever it wants in the meantime.
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