Changing The Game: Why Nintendo Needs An MMO

mmorpg.com:

For those of us old enough to remember, Super Smash Bros first came to the Nintendo 64 back in 1999.  At the time, it was revolutionary because it combined 12 characters from 9 different Nintendo franchises for a new fighting game experience.  It featured a great commercial with different Nintendo characters frolicking in a meadow until they started beating each other up.  This ushered in a whole new franchise for Nintendo that nowadays draws on all of their IPs and even some 3rd party IPs like Street Fighter and Metal Gear Solid .

A few years later, Square Enix and Disney would take this formula and recreate the magic by releasing the wildly popular Kingdom Hearts on the PS2.  Kingdom Hearts still lives on with a mobile game and a fourth installment of the main franchise in development.  What makes Kingdom Hearts so endearing is the same cross-pollination that makes Super Smash Bros. so successful.  With a huge catalog of Final Fantasy and Disney characters and worlds to explore, the draw of Kingdom Hearts is easy to understand.

Nowadays, everyone has an MMO, including Star Trek, Star Wars, DC Comics, and Lord of the Rings, just to name a few. There has been a lot of speculation that MMOs are on the decline in recent years, but it doesn’t have to be this way.  The genre is really just one great release away from completely revitalizing MMOs as we know them.  

That’s why I think it’s time for Nintendo to pull from their bag of tricks an already tried and true method for creating something magnificent — a crossover of IPs to create an MMO that has never been tried before. Make no mistake, it would be a risky move, but it could lead to an absolutely phenomenal game in the MMO space that has never been attempted.