But one thing that stood out is the distinct focus on the hardware itself, not just the software. Nintendo has been keen to focus on the big improvements and specifications, highlighting the fact that this is a bigger and better Switch.
Amidst the buzz of it all, we got to sit down with Nate Bihldorff, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Publishing at Nintendo of America. A fan of snowboarding and Rhodesian Ridgebacks (we asked him about his favourite dog - it breaks the ice, trust us!), Nate's been working with Nintendo since 1998, where he started as a playtester on Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He's helped localise titles such as Paper Mario, Animal Crossing, and various Mario sports and RPGs. Most importantly, he's voiced the Shy Guys since Mario Golf: Advance Tour.
Nate has been a big part of the Nintendo Switch 2's production, and we wanted to peel back the layers. We spoke about the analogue sticks on the new controllers, the use of Mouse Mode, why Welcome Tour wasn't included as a pack-in game, and why Nintendo is throwing a lot of weight behind its key mouse showcase game.
Nintendo Life: So we want to talk a little bit about some of the software coming to Switch 2. Donkey Kong Bananza looks insane, in a really positive way. Can you talk about who is developing the game and how long it's been in the works for?
Nate Bihldorff, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Publishing: I can talk about neither of those things. [Laughs] Right now, we really want to focus on the game itself as opposed to who's developing it. Of course, as we get closer to launch, you're probably gonna learn more and more about that game as we roll out other information.
As far as how long it's been in development, that one, you probably have to go straight to the devs for it. By the time it hits product development and publishing, which is my department, they're obviously well underway on it.
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeWe do the localisation work in Product Development & Publishing and we get some earlier looks at it. Honestly, I’m a massive Nintendo nerd, so the second I get a whiff that they're working on something, even if we're not ready to go into active development, I'm banging on the door and asking if I can get a ROM. Which most of the time I'm completely rebuffed. But by the time the localisation team is getting it, typically that's sort of a year, year and a half prior to release, depending on the size of the game. But in terms of exactitude, you'd have to wait until you get some time with the devs themselves.
Talking about the size of the game, it's often times not just about the text but also about increasing the voice recording in games that are a little bit heavier on voice.
It was really nice to be so surprised by this! It wasn't how we were expecting Donkey Kong's direction to go.
What was funny to me was – and of course I've played a ton of Donkey Kong before, and he is of course a very good match for destroying things, he basically started out by destroying a construction site – I realised how therapeutic it was being able to break everything, but also I guess I just really love destroying everything that I play in Nintendo games. I'm the guy who breaks every brick I can reach in a 2D Mario game, regardless of whether or not I need anything. It's like a Mario power, if I already own the coins, I'm still gonna destroy it. Like Zelda, I'm breaking every pot.
Speaking of breaking things, when we played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which now has an enhanced frame rate on Switch 2, we were trying to see if we could throw a bunch of bombs in an area or start a fire to break the frame rate. Were you able to find any instances in those games where the frame rate does drop down, because Tears of the Kingdom in particular had some issues here and there but it looks great now.
I haven't to be honest. And believe me, the first thing I did when I booted up the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild is I went to the Korok Forest, because I knew the area previously had been the heaviest processing load. And as I walked around, all this foliage is finally being able to get rendered. I still think it's an absolute wizardry that the Switch hardware was able to still run it well. But there's no question that that was the area that saw the biggest performance hit. I saw no dips.
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeI will say, nothing's perfect, I think, especially with Tears of the Kingdom. The amount of stuff that you can do in that game is impossible to predict because of the access they've given you to building things. I mean, the mechs that people build that go striding through the environment and launching a gazillion missiles. There probably are still gonna be ways that you can go beyond the stress of the system, but I haven't found any.
When we were playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, we noticed how you can play in handheld mode with Joy-Con, and you can switch to gyro, and then you can also switch to mouse mode, very seamlessly. Do you know if in Metroid Prime 4 or any future Nintendo games, if Nintendo is planning to implement mouse mode situationally?
I can't speak to any specifics as far as upcoming games, but I will say one of the things I love about the system is that versatility. We have a ton of development teams in EPD, a ton of development partners across the industry, who are going to be developing for this system, and having such a robust set of tools that really can expand or contract depending on how any developer wants to use them creatively is super important.
I'm like you, the idea that I can be playing and then all of a sudden the game senses when I do this and all of a sudden I'm in mouse control in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, that's awesome to me. But it's not necessarily something that every dev is gonna want. It may well be that somebody wants to only have a mechanical pause menu to do that, just so that people don't accidentally do it. Maybe you have frenetic gameplay where you're swinging things all around and you don't want the game all of a sudden to sense that.
Depending on the type of game you're making, depending on the vision of the developer who's working on it, whether it's an internal team or an external one, that's what excites me the most. The Switch was already a very versatile machine in terms of the tool set that it gave devs. Switch 2 is even a level beyond that. I'm extremely excited to see just what all these creative devs can do with those tools.
It seems like Nintendo is taking Drag x Drive very seriously, with 18 playable kiosks at the [NYC] Switch 2 preview event. Is there something hidden beyond that game? Like how we saw Blast Ball way back in 2015, which wasn't originally shown off as a Metroid game. Is there something else that we can expect to see from Drag x Drive, or is that all the game?
What you're seeing is certainly the core gameplay. But of course, in typical Nintendo fashion, there's more game beyond that, which you'll see as we get closer to launch. But in principle, yeah, three-on-three, primarily it's a basketball game, but showing off something that's completely unique.
Image: NintendoTo be honest, the first time that I played that game, I was in love just because I was like, "This is very visceral." And it also was something that I really had to learn because I wasn't immediately good at it, and I'm used to being immediately good at games. Not to be too arrogant [laughs] but it's my job. I play games for a living, and so I was assuming I was gonna be awesome, and I wasn't, I was terrible. And so getting good at it was important.
But it made me start thinking, "Are there dual mouse games out there?" It's not like this is something that would have been impossible to do on PC, and I have no idea whether or not there's already this sub-genre, and this is just gonna be something that slots in, or whether it's brand new. But yeah, first and foremost, it is gonna be a three-on-three basketball game that is, I think, going to take quite a bit of skill level to really master.
It's an impossible experience at a show like this, but once you actually have the system in your hands, one important point to note is that people are gonna be able to adjust mouse sensitivity based on what they want to do in the settings on a system level. So it's the type of thing where if you're feeling like, "Oh, I wanna play on my legs, but I'm not getting enough runway on here," you're gonna be able to adjust that sensitivity so that smaller motions could work or that larger motions can work on a system level.
Same thing with Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. I'm not actually a keyboard and mouse first-person player. I'm terrible at it, but I actually got really comfortable playing that game by adjusting the settings where, I'm playing on my knee, and I got my other Joy-Con on the side moving around, but I used small motions and I was just fine tuning shots. That again just goes back to the tool set.
For some people it's just gonna be gyro aiming and they're gonna like to fine tune it there. Some people are gonna like to do it on their legs. Some people are gonna have some awesome rig at home they're gonna have set up at home with a perfect mouse table and they're going to be excelling at it that way. It really is going to be able to fill out whatever particular set up people want to enjoy.
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeLet's jump off the sensitivity stuff then and talk about the stick of the Switch 2 Joy-Con because it feels so different to the original Switch's analog stick. So is it a Hall Effect stick? Were you inspired by the Hall Effect stick?
Well, the Joy-Con 2's controllers have been designed from the ground up. They're not Hall Effect sticks, but they feel really good. Did you experience both the Joy-Con and the Pro Controller?
Both!
So, I like both, but that Pro Controller, for some reason the first time I grabbed it, I was like, "This feels like a GameCube controller." I was a GameCube guy. Something about it felt so familiar, but the stick on that, especially. I tried to spend a lot of time making sure that it was quiet.
I don't know if you tried really whacking the stick around but it really is [quiet]. I'm thinking back to my Smash Bros. days, where you just whack it. [The Switch 2 Pro Controller] is one of the quietest controllers I've ever played.
Speaking of the sticks more, we know the original Nintendo Joy-Con had many issues with stick drift, and Nintendo's not alone in that. PlayStation has lots of issues with its DualSense controllers as well. Do you know if that's been taken into consideration with the new Joy-Con and Pro Controllers, and how that was handled to remedy that?
Really, every time we put out a new hardware, whether it's a new system or an accessory, [Nintendo is] designing from the ground up to be the best possible experience for our consumers, whether it's the immediate effect of the Joy-Cons that you're playing, how they're interacting with the game, or durability. They take it and rebuild it so that we can give the best possible experience.
With the Pro Controller, those new 'GL' and 'GR' buttons, are there any plans to have them have specific purposes in any games, or are they always just gonna be customisable?
If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that developers will take advantage of every last thing you give them. So there is no question in my mind that we will have developers who specifically assign something to [the 'GL' and 'GR' buttons]. Probably because it just feels really good for that particular game.
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeI think out of the gate, we'll probably see them more for use with customisation for individual people just because at this point you have so many buttons on that controller that if you're a developer who literally is using every single last one of them, you probably have an incredibly complex game. You'll probably see different developers approach it in different ways.
Even the Steam Deck with the extra buttons on the back, sometimes it's like, "What do I need to do with these?"
For me, personally, one thing I'll automatically reassign there is clicking in sticks. I've never liked that. It's because I'm such a stressful gamer that I probably apply too much force to those things anyways. I'm the guy who is all of a sudden crouching. It's because I've jammed in the left stick. So I'll probably go into those buttons to remap.
The beauty of it is that you're going to be able to map your controller preferences by game and by profile. So once you have that thing perfect, the next time you boot that game up, you're booting it up as you, it's going to have your profile saved. It's going to be just like the experience that you want.
Do you know if the NES, SNES, N64 controllers for Switch will be fully mappable as well now? Because Switch 1 wouldn't allow that if we remember right.
I'm not aware of any limitations on it at all. I think in general on the system level, you're always going to be able to remap a control function. We have so many different controllers, it may vary a little bit. But my understanding is that on the system, [you'll] be able to do whatever you like.
Okay, going back to publishers, will they be able to choose if they want to charge consumers for a Switch 2 Edition upgrade for their games? For example, Sega just announced Sonic x Shadow Generations for Switch 2 and on other platforms such as Xbox and PlayStation, the upgrade is free. Some developers choose to charge a fee for upgrades like this so is that up to the publisher here too?
Yeah, absolutely. And I do think you'll see probably a variety of experiences on the Nintendo Switch 2, depending on which game you're playing. There are probably going to be some passive upgrades that are simply a patch that is free and gives you a better experience, whether it's loading times or performance. You may see something where the developers put more effort into it and that will be reflected in a commensurate price.
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeMaybe that's again just simply performance stuff or you could see significant modes added because in addition to being able to take advantage of extra power on the machine, they also maybe had some ideas that they wanted to add on some extra value for the consumer. So I think you'll see a variety of prices, definitely.
Bouncing off that, can we go into Game Key? We've seen Square Enix deciding to opt into Game Keys with the HD Remaster of Bravely Default. Is that all going to be exclusively for third parties, or are there plans for Nintendo to use it themselves?
I don't know of any specific roadmap for who's going to be using Game Key and in which ways. I'll go back to what I was talking about when it comes to tools; it really is just another way that we can have games on our platform.
Obviously, there's a finite amount of memory on a game card, and if you happen to be a publisher who has a game that's bigger than that, that would still be a way of you being able to get a retail version of your game onto the system. Probably the only way. Game sizes have gotten really big, so [Game Key] is just providing another avenue.
The Switch lasted eight years. We really want to future-proof [Switch 2] and make sure that people can be publishing games on it, and I think that'll speak to that.
With Welcome Tour, was it ever considered to be a pack-in with the Switch 2 or could we see this come as a Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack bonus or something like that down the road?
I have no idea. It's funny, Nintendo games take off on a winding path. They almost all start out as the germ of an idea. Donkey Kong Bananza probably started out with somebody just breaking something as Donkey Kong, and that ballooned into a massive game. So I don't know the particular path they took or how they discussed it, where it's ended up being an actually pretty robust experience.
On the [show] floor, there's a lot of shiny objects where that one is a much more mellow and you're learning about things, so it may not be the one you spent the most time with. But there's a robust experience there.
Have you gotten to spend much time with it and if so do you have a favorite feature or minigame?
I like the minigames to be honest! I'm not going to speak specifics because I don't know exactly what they're showing on the floor, and I don't want to tell you about a minigame that you didn't see. But I've been working with Nintendo a long time. I've been working on the system for quite a long time as well. And I learned things. Literally, as we worked on the text of the game, as we're translating it, and we're seeing each message, and then we're playing the ROM. I thought I knew this thing inside and out, and I absolutely didn't. There's all kinds of fun facts in there.
Image: NintendoHopefully we're not giving away any massive industry secrets in there as people are tunneling through the guts of this machine and finding out every last secret of it but it's actually really fascinating stuff and then it shows you what you've learned by actually demonstrating what you're doing so there's a lot of fun to be had there.
So this question doesn't come with annoyance or frustration. We're huge Mother/EarthBound fans, and Mother 3 released on Nintendo Switch Online in Japan a year or two ago. We want to stop asking this question eventually.
[Laughs]
We really would and we imagine you and everyone at Nintendo would probably love to stop fielding it, too. So is there anything that you can say for people holding on to hope of this game maybe coming to the West someday? How does Nintendo feel about Mother 3?
I mean that's...that's certainly not something that I can answer for Nintendo because I would imagine that there's a variety of opinions out there. I would really actually throw it back in your court a little bit more broadly. When it comes to classic games that were only released regionally: Do you think that it would be something that people wanna see?
In terms of having games that previously were locked behind language, we've had actually a couple of those come to our system untranslated. Are those still things that you think fans enjoy playing even though, ya know, they'd always heard about this game and they may not be getting the full experience but we've had a Japanese version of it on our system. Do you still think that there's value in that?
We seem to see a lot of interest when Starfy came to Nintendo Switch Online.
That's right. That was the example that I was giving.
You guys must have the best gauge of player interest, but we put together a documentary about EarthBound and Mother a few years ago and it reached a large, heartfelt audience, and it was surprising! That's also just one of the reasons we don't want to give up on it is because we know so many people would love to play it someday.
Well, thank you for telling me. I'll take it back.
Thank you!
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeThis interview has been edited for clarity.
Thank you to Nate for taking the time to speak to us about the Nintendo Switch 2, which finally has a release date of 5th June 2025.
We'll have plenty more to come on the system in the coming months, so let us know in the comments what you learned from our chat with Nate.
