Nintendo just reissued one of the most important games of all time
Nintendo’s back catalog is so absurdly rich that, when launching the new Game Boy and Game Boy Advance collections on Nintendo Switch Online, it can afford to offer a mix of cult curios, major and minor entries in popular series, and a hall-of-famer like Game Boy Tetris, while still saving plenty for later. Even for this company, though, there’s nothing to touch the prophetic influence and punk-rock abandon of one of Nintendo’s most daring designs ever: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!
It’s not that Nintendo invented the idea of an anarchic minigame compilation with this 2003 GBA release, which went on to spawn a minor series and cult obsession. Konami’s similarly surreal and silly Bishi Bashi games, featuring competitive minigames like “Jump for the Meat,” first appeared in the arcades in the late 1990s. But WarioWare took the idea to a formal and aesthetic extreme that, depending on your perspective, either boiled the entire concept of video games down to its purest essence, or broke it completely.
The idea is simple: survive a gauntlet of “microgames” that speed up as you progress. What makes it extraordinary is that Nintendo’s developers — WarioWare, Inc. was made by a small team within Nintendo’s in-house R&D1 department — really weren’t kidding when they deployed the term “micro.” The games are no more than three or four seconds long, and their rules are boiled down to a single verb: Dodge! Shoot! Jump! Land! Pinch! Enter! Detonate! Sniff! You have fractions of a second to parse the instruction and the visuals, figure out the input required (either directions or a tap of the A button, or both), and execute it. You get familiar with them over time, of course, but each game comes in many variations of speed, length,
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