New story in Technology from Time: Shuntaro Furukawa Is Ready to Take Nintendo to the Next Level

It’s a modern day ritual practiced by some of the most passionate fans on the planet: gathering to observe the reveal of new video games. In June, some of the devoted assembled to pay tribute at Nintendo’s Rockefeller Center store. Many wore Nintendo t-shirts, hats and other swag. The most hardcore dressed as their favorite characters, including one devotee in full-blown Luigi garb. They were there to watch a livestream of the company’s latest “Nintendo Direct,” a slickly-produced video announcing upcoming games and more, and get hands-on time with just-announced titles like Link’s Awakening, a remake of a 1993 classic.

These Nintendo diehards in part explain how the Kyoto-based company is thriving despite the naysayers who were forecasting doom just a few short years ago. Ostensibly a video game company, Nintendo is really an intellectual property company, converting people’s seemingly endless love of its characters into profit. Its rebound is also thanks to the Switch, a hybrid console and mobile device that has resurrected Nintendo’s hardware business, and, by extension, the rest of the company. The Switch is the exclusive home of some of today’s most well-reviewed games, and fans love that they can carry it around with them on their commutes or vacations. Nintendo, arguably stronger than ever and with a stock price flirting with its five-year high, is now looking for yet more ways to tap its deep bench of intellectual property (IP), from a theme park to a feature-length film.

At the helm during this transformative period is Shuntaro Furukawa, who in 2018 became Nintendo’s sixth president. At 47 years old, he brings a different generational perspective than his predecessor, Tatsumi Kimishima, who was 68 when he stepped aside and became an executive advisor. Having grown up with Nintendo’s earliest video games, Furukawa shares the nostalgia that many middle-aged gamers feel for the company’s creations. Furukawa, who joined Nintendo in 1994 in the accounting department and later worked at Nintendo of Europe in Germany, tells TIME that he’s committed to a strategy that has both helped and hurt the company in the past: A steadfast commitment to experimentation.

“Above all else, I base my decisions on the development leader’s way of thinking,” says Furukawa in a rare interview with Western media, and who spoke with TIME mostly through a translator provided by the company. “Nintendo is Nintendo because of our games, characters and IP. So giving our teams the freedom to experiment with new ideas is something I strongly agree with. Expansion can’t happen without the freedom to try something new, and the courage to step into unfamiliar territory.”

NintendoShuntaro Furukawa, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd., photographed at Nintendo’s global headquarters in Kyoto, Japan, on Oct. 10, 2019.

Back in the mid-2010s, Nintendo was in dire straights as it became clear the company’s flagship console at the time, the Wii U, was failing. With a “second screen” embedded in the controller, the system was a curious experiment, but a lack of compelling third-party games and confusion about the product dampened sales. But the surprise success of 2016’s Pokémon Go, an augmented reality smartphone game made in collaboration with Niantic, injected new life into the company. That set the stage for October of that year, when Nintendo unveiled its latest big release: the Nintendo Switch, essentially a tablet that players can drop in a dock to play games on the TV, or take with them on the go.

If the Wii U showed how Nintendo’s experimentation can go very wrong, the Switch is showing how it can go very right. Bolstered by game of the decade contender The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the console was an instant hit. Nintendo has sold nearly 37 million Switch units; by the end of 2018 it was the fastest-selling console in the United States. “They’re having a fantastic year,” says NPD analyst Mat Piscatella. Looking at the Switch and its built-in screen, you can see what Nintendo was trying to do with the Wii U, which, if you were feeling generous, you might call ahead of its time.

Nintendo is well-poised headed into this holiday quarter. While the Switch is nearly three years old, next-generation consoles from rival companies like Microsoft and Sony won’t hit store shelves until next year at the earliest. The new Switch Lite, a slimmed-down mobile-only version of the console, plus hotly anticipated games like Pokémon Sword/Pokémon Shield and Luigi’s Mansion 3, should help. “They do try to be innovative on the hardware front, but at the end of the day, it really is their software and their IP that makes them successful,” says Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation. But what happens when those new competitors arrive, with their superior graphics and other high-end specs? And what about games-streaming platforms like Google Stadia, which could obviate the need for consoles entirely?

NintendoThe Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

Furukawa’s plan can be summed up in a single word: Entertainment. While other game companies have focused on pushing the underlying technology as far as it can possibly go, Nintendo is content to produce or promote games that are just plain fun. Furukawa says this thinking dates back through the company’s considerable ages. (Nintendo was founded as a playing card company in 1889, the same year Benjamin Harrison was sworn in as the 23rd President of the United States.) “Not just streaming, but any kind of new technology, whether that is going to be appealing to the consumer or not really depends on the quality of the experience that we can provide,” says Furukawa. “Nintendo continues to search for new ways to enhance the fun that people can have through their gaming experience.”

The best case in point here is the ridiculous, and ridiculously fun, Untitled Goose Game. While the game was created by Melbourne-based developer House House, Nintendo has promoted it heavily, and it’s only available for Switch and PC. Set in a countryside village with delightfully cartoonish graphics, players take control of a mischievous goose whose raison d’etre is to cause as much chaos as possible. Says House House’s Jacob Strasser of the Switch: “It’s the nice, friendly console. Its whole aura is one of friendliness, and it feels more inviting to non-gamers, or non-traditional gamers or players. When it came down to the decision of where we would launch, it felt like the right emotional fit.”

NintendoThe Nintendo Switch.

Speaking of whimsy: The unsung hero of the Switch system are the controllers, which, Nintendo being Nintendo, are called “Joy-Cons.” While they can be used like typical gaming controllers, their internal components — accelerometers, gyroscopes, infrared sensors — allow them to be used in all manner of bizarre, fun applications. Nintendo Labo, for instance, allows gamers to build their own controllers out of cardboard — yes, cardboard — using the Joy-Con as the “smarts.” And with the company’s new fitness-focused Ring Fit Adventure, gamers put the Joy-Con in a ring-shaped workout accessory to break a sweat while playing.

Nintendo has also fully embraced smartphone gaming, with offerings like Fire Emblem Heroes and Super Mario Run. Nintendo is still figuring out the best way to make money this way — its games have different pricing structures, and some have been more successful, both critically and financially, than others. “In terms of monetization, that’s something that we decided on an app basis,” says Furukawa. “It’s something we decide looking at the game content of each app, as well as the IP used and the player that we’re targeting. We also look at how we can best have the players enjoy the game, as well as how they would be comfortable in spending money.” Nintendo made $92 million from smartphone games in the most recent quarter, below some outsiders’ expectations but up 10% year-over-year.

For the foreseeable future, video games will lie at the core of what Nintendo does. But under Furukawa’s watch, Nintendo is seeking other, intriguing ways to make money. Construction at Super Mario World, a Nintendo-themed area of Universal Studios Japan, is set to be completed before the 2020 Summer Olympics get underway in Japan; a new Mario movie is in the works (Nintendo must be careful to avoid repeating the disaster that was 1993’s Super Mario Bros., which made $20.9 million at the box office on a budget of more than double that); and a new Nintendo megastore is scheduled to open in November. “For me, Mr. Furukawa is a bridge creating the connection from the past to our future,” says Doug Bowser, President of Nintendo of America (and a very good sport about all those jokes). “Always keeping us focused on our north star to be a company deeply devoted to originality while constantly exploring new opportunities to share our iconic characters and our deeply immersive worlds with everyone around the world.”

A company built around adored intellectual property that’s in the theme parks, movies and merch businesses? That sounds a whole lot like Disney, the M&A-obsessed pop culture behemoth that, under CEO Bob Iger, has gobbled up everything from Star Wars to Marvel. Asked if the Mouse House is a model for Nintendo’s future, Furukawa doesn’t bite. “We’ve never tried to imitate any other company,” he says, later adding that “the idea of using our IP in things like theme parks or movies is simply an extension of the philosophy we’ve had all along.” And to be sure, Nintendo’s strategy is less about acquisitions and more about in-house creations. But, wandering around Nintendo World, with its shelves upon shelves of Mario t-shirts, stuffed Yoshi dolls and other Nintendo paraphernalia, the comparison to an Orlando gift shop is unavoidable. Nintendo may never become quite as dominant as the house that Walt built, but for many of its fans, it has at least the same power to inspire nostalgia and joy — and convert those emotions into big dollars.

New story in Technology from Time: The Outer Worlds Makes Doing the Right Thing Both Fun and Impossible

I’m in a secret corporate lab dodging dinosaurs and hunting for the formula to toothpaste — not just any toothpaste, mind you, but diet toothpaste. A cream that could suppress the hunger of workers across the colony, driving down the costs of feeding them. But there are complications. The key ingredient is the stomach acid of a raptid — a monstrous lion-sized dinosaur. The raptids have escaped their pens, slaughtering dozens. Also, some of the test subjects have gone blind. But never mind that — my main concern is getting the formula. I’ll worry about the ethical implications of its creation and use after I take care of the raptids. That’s my job, as a freelancer in The Outer Worlds.

The Outer Worlds is a first-person RPG from Obsidian Entertainment out Oct. 25 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. In the distant future, humans are a space-faring species, and a cabal of corporations have exclusive rights to colonize a system of planets called Halcyon. The Hope was a colony ship, originally part of the first wave of settlers, that was lost along the way. I played as a character from that vessel, awoken after 70 years of cryo-sleep by a mad scientist who wanted my help taking down the corporations and waking up the other survivors.

I created a smooth-talking character who snuck around most combat situations and persuaded other folks into his way of thinking. Shortly after waking, I took control of a ship and put together a crew of ruffians and miscreants, including an adorkable mechanic, a morally conflicted vicar, a lethal cleaning robot, and frontier doctor as quick with a gun as she was with a scalpel. The Outer Worlds lets players craft their own character and handle situations the way they’d like. There’s room to be a gunslinger, a brawler, and ghost and everything in between. Hell, you can even turn the mad scientist into the authorities if you want.

Developer Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind such weighty games as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, and Pillars of Eternity, knows how to create morally complicated narratives, and that shines through in The Outer Worlds. The game builds on everything that’s good about Obsidian’s work while falling prey to its typical problems, including gameplay and design that sometimes feels half-baked.

You can’t talk about The Outer Worlds without talking about Bethesda’s Fallout. Obsidian’s founders worked on the original Fallout games before Bethesda purchased the license and launched the series into mainstream success with Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. The Outer Worlds initially feels like another Bethesda Fallout game — it’s a first-person RPG with a combat system that lets the player slow down time, it satirizes a specific moment in American culture, and it gives players a variety of methods for tackling any problem.

But The Outer Worlds is defined in the ways it deviates from Bethesda’s formula. Where Fallout satirized mid-century American culture while exploring anxiety about nuclear weapons in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, The Outer Worlds is a space-western telling a story about class struggles. It’s art nouveau where Fallout was art deco and Gilded Age where Fallout was Cold War. Instead of an open world, The Outer Worlds delivers a streamlined and well-designed series of explorable planets. It feels smaller, yes, but cultivated. Fallout 4 was massive, but much of the content was simply another empty building full of loot. In The Outer Worlds, everything feels deliberate and placed. Every building is dripping with lore, every open door has something compelling behind it.

Many of the features in The Outer Worlds feel like direct responses to the persistent problems and complaints players have about Fallout. Here, companions never block a doorway so you can’t leave a room, while their weight simply adds to a big pool, making inventory management easier. There’s a ton of loot, but there are also vending machines everywhere, so I never felt compelled to make lengthy trips back to town to offload my spoils. There’s even a perk that lets players fast-travel if they’re encumbered, a persistent problem in the Fallout franchise.

The Outer Worlds’ combat isn’t great, especially for characters focused on stealth and conversation. I could slow down time, a side-effect of the cryo-sleep, to briefly pause combat and adjust my aim, but fighting never felt quite as good as it did in Fallout. I’d sneak through as many combat encounters as possible, but eventually someone would see me and force me into a fight, which never felt fun.

The story is where The Outer Worlds really shines. This is a space western — think Firefly — set in a world where corporations run everything. The frontier is managed, and people who try to live outside the system don’t live long. If you’ve read a western or seen Deadwood, you know what to expect: corporate interests bad, working folk and cowboys good. But the narrative is never that simple. An early quest forced me to choose between diverting a power station’s juice to a budding independent colony or an existing company town. The people of the company town weren’t evil, and the game made sure I understood that cutting off its power would probably kill some of them. The town’s manager was bad at his job, but not evil. And the longer the game goes on, the more complicated things get.

The Outer Worlds doesn’t tell a simple good-versus-evil story that substitutes corporations for the evil. It’s more complicated than that. There are no binaries, just competing interests. The game reflects that by letting the player build their reputation with each faction, both good and bad simultaneously. As I played and I did something that angered or frightened a faction I’d done a lot of work for, it didn’t tarnish my good reputation, but increased that faction’s fear of me instead. They’re separate meters, allowing factions to hold complicated feelings about my character.

After I found the diet toothpaste formula, I gave it to the scientist who created it and had a stern talk about the emptiness of his life and the need to stand up to his corporate overlords. He seemed to listen. I could have kept the toothpaste for myself and sold it to a data broker I knew. A colleague of mine accidentally shamed the scientist into committing suicide, but reloaded the game because he felt bad about it. That’s the joy of The Outer Worlds: the diversity of outcome and the complicated nature of the choices it gives you. I always tried to do good, but I wasn’t always sure that I had. Often, I let my feelings lead, and sometimes they’d get me into trouble.

That never happened with Fallout.

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If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

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New story in Technology from Time: ‘No One Who Is 18 These Days Believes That War Is Easily Won.’ With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Gaming’s Most Successful Franchise Grows Up

It’s nighttime in London, and you’re with a group of counter-terrorism agents advancing on a house. Intelligence reports suggest there’s a cell of assailants inside who carried out an attack against the city. Your team breaks down the door and moves from room to room, killing anybody who poses a threat. But it’s not just armed men you find. There are children here too, scattering in the crossfire. Upstairs, you open the last door to find a woman who begs you not to shoot. When you pause for a moment, she lunges for a gun. It’s her or you.

This is a scenario in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the latest installment in one of video gaming’s most successful franchises. When the game’s millions of fans fire up this version, they’re going to find something very different from past games: a single-player campaign that’s a gripping and emotionally difficult depiction of life on the front lines of the global war on terrorism. It’s a major departure for the franchise and, for publisher Activision and developer Infinity Ward, a big risk too. Will players who look to video games for escapism want to grapple with the moral and ethical quandaries posed by real conflict? Or will they prefer to stick with cartoonish shooters like Fortnite and Overwatch, which ask only that players sit back and have a good time lobbing digital rockets and grenades at one another?

Modern Warfare’s creators are betting that adult gamers are ready for a more mature take. “No one who is 18 these days believes that war is easily won,” says Jacob Minkoff, who led the story design at studio Infinity Ward. “They want a war story that represents their experience living in a world that has been at war their entire lives.”

Activision has plenty riding on whether Minkoff is right. Call of Duty has been among the world’s best–selling video games since the original title, set in World War II, came out in 2003; it’s now a multibillion-dollar franchise. The games have rarely asked players to think too hard about the ramifications of never-ending global warfare. They’re more like action movies: characters inexplicably survive sniper attacks, airplane crashes and even entire buildings falling on top of them.

But in Modern Warfare, out Oct. 25 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, the story takes center stage, tackling heady themes like the question of terrorist vs. freedom fighter, the gray area in which modern Special Forces operate and the idea of national sovereignty.

In a step forward for the male-dominated world of first-person shooters, one of the story’s protagonists, Farah Karim, is the female leader of a group of fighters seeking to protect their homeland. While Karim lives in the fictional country of Urzikstan, she evokes the all–female Kurdish Women’s Protection Units active in northern Syria. In a flashback to her childhood, we watch through her eyes as her town suffers a chemical-weapons attack, forcing her family to flee. The first-person view— with the camera low to the ground to simulate a child’s perspective—makes it all the more powerful.

“You have people who never chose to be soldiers but who are forced into the role of soldier to fight for their homes,” says Minkoff. “Very early on, we decided that we wanted to tell the story both from the perspective of professional soldiers and civilian soldiers—what they fight for and the challenges they face.”

Activision/Infinity WardFarah Karim, a character in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

While other Call of Duty games take players from the invasion of Normandy straight through the fall of Berlin, Modern Warfare players won’t come away with a sense that they have “cleaned up the whole global war on terror,” says Minkoff. Rather, the point is to say something meaningful about the complexities of modern war. “No villain sees themselves as the bad guy,” says Taylor Kurosaki, studio narrative director at Infinity Ward.

How Call of Duty players respond to this year’s incarnation, with its ambitious, decidedly more adult approach to its subject matter, could show a path forward for this lucrative business as it comes under the cultural microscope once again. The game has been a favorite topic of concerned parents and pundits alike as debates continue to rage about the connection, or lack thereof, between video games and real-world shootings. A game this realistic and gruesome could bolster the case for those who have criticized the influence of violent games. But by tackling these themes, Modern Warfare might be doing more to illuminate the true horror of terrorism and gun violence than to glorify it.

New story in Technology from Time: You’re Gonna Break a Sweat Playing Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure

Exercise and video games don’t usually go hand-in-hand. Sure, exercise has fallen victim to “gamification,” turning steps and reps into points and percentages to compare against friends. But video games themselves have remained largely low-intensity, save for the efforts of some, like Nintendo, whose Wii Fit fitness game sold millions of copies. Now, Nintendo is back at it again with Ring Fit Adventure ($79), another attempt from the company to get people up and active while they’re playing.

In the spirit of Nintendo’s past exercise-related games, Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch comes with an amusingly absurd adventure game along with even more absurd accessories: a large, rubber ring and a strap for your legs. I decided to use this as an opportunity to get into the exercise habit, starting with dragging my butt out of bed in the early morning, putting on some shorts, and literally strapping a controller to my body. You’ll need two Joy-Con controllers to get the party started: one to insert into the leg strap that goes around your thigh, the other to insert into the Ring-Con controller slot.

Nintendo

The Ring-Con itself is an oddity, looking more like an infomerical exercise gimmick than a game controller. Part controller, part rubber resistance band with hand grips, the Ring-Con is able to measure your force as you push and pull on it. While you can’t adjust the Ring-Con’s resistance level, you can pick between three game difficulty thresholds, so even your not-so-active friends can get a few fun minutes in.

The “adventure” part takes the form of a turn-based role-playing game that you mostly control with your entire body rather than buttons. As what I assume is some sort of animated supermodel, you inadvertently release a very angry, very buff dragon from its prison, forcing you to track it down and stop it from wreaking havoc.

You’ll go from level to cartoonish level, collecting coins and taking out enemies in your way with physical exercises. It’s not exactly exploratory; you follow a predetermined route in each level, explored by you jogging in place (or squatting up and down if jumping in your apartment isn’t feasible). You can use those coins to buy stat-boosting athleisure, and unlock treasure chests with goodies like health-boosting smoothies. The more engaging bit comes in the form of the fights.

Nintendo

Both exercises and monsters are color-coded, giving you a quick way to figure out the most effective way to dispatch your enemies and avoid losing the fight (you can follow the moves of your Clippy-like helper, Tipp). The turn-based role-playing game uses exercises as moves to attack and defend. Squats throw kicks, presses throw punches, and your abs are a shield against enemy strikes. The end of each level will present you with a breakdown of all your performed moves, calories burned, and offer to scan your heart rate using the Joy-Con’s IR sensor.

The best (or worst) part of a game dependent on motion controllers? It’s hard to fake it. And in Ring Fit Adventure, every rep counts. You’re going to feel that overhead press right in your chest as you squeeze the Ring-Con above your head. Those squats are real squats. Get too lazy and your attacks do less damage, lengthening your fight and putting you at risk of losing.

Aside from the adventure part, there are some actual exercise elements you can pick and choose from. A selection of a dozen mini-games will have you parachuting through hoops, sculpting vases, and crushing robots until you’re ready to grab a glass of water (for the more competitive, you can choose to add your mini-game score to a worldwide leader board). It’s easy to play with a group, too, so you can all look ridiculous as you try to get your butt as close to the floor as possible.

You can build exercise playlists or pick from Nintendo’s included offerings, which focus on particular regions of the body with exercises and some mini-games thrown in for some targeted entertainment.

Other elements, like an offline workout mode (the Ring-Con will record certain exercise activity even when the console is off) and a workout reminder alarm bring Ring Fit Adventure back to the realm of health and wellness, and make you feel not so bad for firing up some video games at 5 a.m.

If all this sounds like exactly something Nintendo would do, you’d be right. The company is on a mission to change how we interact with games, and wants to make them more engaging, active, and beneficial than just slouching on the couch. To say it has succeeded with Ring Fit Adventure might be an overstatement, of course. But it’s an exciting, engaging concept from Nintendo, one that puts its competition to shame when it comes to advancing what gaming is, and what it could be. As for the whole working out part, there’s no harm in adding a few reps and squats to your morning routine, especially if you know you’ll trounce your last high score. It’s a great addition to Nintendo’s lineup, one that makes me wonder what weird gadgets and ideas it’s cooking up behind closed doors.