This Week in Bad Pop Culture Ideas: The SNES Classic

We were spoiled for choice among bad pop culture ideas this week, but we’re going to go old school and follow up on Nintendo’s latest retro mess.

At this point, yours truly is ready to pretend that the entire previous week did not happen just in general. Setting aside the current weather emergency in Texas thanks to Harvey (here’s the Huffington Post on what you can do if you want to help), pop culture was basically a wasteland of badness.

From James Cameron having feelings very loudly about Wonder Woman (look, I made my feelings known when he decided to talk about The Force Awakens) to Taylor Swift’s wackadoodle “Look What You Made Me Do” (and that’s charitable; yes, I listened to the song; no, I did not like it; let’s not get started on the music video) to the Netflix remake of Death Note (which I refuse to watch because I’m not a masochist, and apparently I have made the right decision per Uproxx’s roundup of reactions. Just go watch the first half of the original anime, which is also right on Netflix) … yeah, it has not been good this week. I’m pretty sure I’m missing at least two or three more terrible ideas.

Well, we can bring that count down by one, because I have found one more terrible thing that happened this week in pop culture, and it is courtesy of a regular guest in this column: Nintendo!

I feel it necessary, before I go deep into what happened this time, to emphasize that I am, in fact, a Nintendo fan. I was a launch adopter of the Switch, I’ve already made jokes about my amiibo problem, and I talk about Fire Emblem Heroes more than is probably actually healthy. I point out these issues not because I want to make Nintendo feel bad, but because it deeply disappoints me that the company still falls on its face when it comes to its newfound love of releasing smaller versions of its old consoles.

Fundamentally speaking, my fellow FanSider, Brandon Crespo, is right in that Nintendo really needs to get its act together. Here’s his point in his discussion of what’s gone on with the SNES Classic:

"“We understand if Nintendo is scared to pull the trigger and develop more units than it should. However, it’s a proven fact that fans want these products.”"

Which is a point that I also touched on for Culturess back when the rumors started surfacing that the SNES Classic was happening.

Put a pin in all that. If you haven’t read his work, I’ll quickly sum up what’s gone down before circling back and trying to divine why Nintendo’s so concerned.

So here we are, with pre-orders of the SNES Classic already snapped up, but with the added snafu of Best Buy and Amazon casually putting up its pre-orders … at a ridiculous time. Pay close attention to the timestamps:

Now, that’s not Nintendo’s fault. The retailers likely made the call to try and avoid the general overload of tons of people rushing to the site to have even the tiniest chance of grabbing one. Did it matter much? Nope.

In discussion with fellow FanSiders, before I’d read Brandon’s article (although I’m citing it here) I speculated the following as to Nintendo’s motivations, reprinted here, grammatical issues and all:

"“the issue on the table, I would think, is that Nintendo is worried about reaching the tipping point where they make too many. Nostalgia is an almost infinite pool basically, but it’s not completely infinite and it would also not look good for them to have these things on the shelves for long periods of time that is like the [Animal Crossing] amiibo.”"

To explain the amiibo reference (told you I had a problem), look no further than Best Buy, which is now selling most of that collection at extraordinarily low prices. As for nostalgia not always selling? Transformers: The Last Knight, anyone?

On thinking more about this, I think this is a reasonable assumption. When writing about the NES Classic, I pointed out that Nintendo resurrected video games in the United States. We would not be sitting here talking about gaming if Nintendo had not made that little gray box cool in the ’80s. And part of what contributed to video games taking a nosedive in 1983? Oversaturation of the market. 

Next: 50 Star Wars: The Last Jedi fan theories (and their possible validity)

Unfortunately, I think that Nintendo has too much of an eye on its past, even more than what would justify its making retro consoles tough to find.