There is now a newer rumor about the next upcoming Nintendo console, this time from a Japanese Twitter user.
Twitter user Tamakichi, who has the handle segamega99, made the following tweets in the span of a few days.
Now, we won’t wager to attempt our own translation of these tweets as this writer does not read and write Japanese. Reddit drew attention to these tweets and summarized them for us.
Basically, Tamakichi made two claims. One is that Mario, Zelda, and Splatoon could be available for the next Nintendo console upon launch.
Now, given that Splatoon 3 had just released last September 8, 2022, and it took five years to develop, it seems highly unlikely that Nintendo would have a Splatoon 4 ready for the next hardware’s launch date.
Subsequently, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom is set to release this coming May 12, 2023. In other words, it’s only a few weeks away.
So if the rumor is true, Tamakichi is likely not talking about new games for these franchises, as much as they are alluding to backwards compatibility with the Switch library. That would be in line with the backwards compatibility that the other current generation consoles, the Xbox Series X|S and the PlayStation 5, offer.
But to humor Tamakichi, it is possible that a new Mario game is in development, and that it is exclusive to that next Nintendo console. Thanks to Mario’s versatility, there have been new Mario games for each year of the Nintendo Switch’s lifetime. But this potential Mario launch title would more likely be either a Mario platformer or Mario Kart.
Mario Kart 8, of course, dates all the way back to 2014, and an entirely new game is long overdue. In terms of platformers, the most recent 3D release is Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury in 2021 and the last 2D release is Super Mario Maker 2 in 2019. It’s more likely that that launch title could be a 2D Mario game. Possibly, this new Mario game will be tied in to the recent Super Mario Bros Movie.
The other rumor from Tamakichi is that the next Nintendo console could be releasing close to the release window of the PlayStation 5 Pro. Tom Henderson over at Insider Gaming has been tracking rumors on new potential PS5 SKUs for some time now. It was only last month that he reported on a real PlayStation 5 Pro being in development at Sony.
If this rumor proves true, then the PlayStation 5 Pro could be releasing in around the same time as the next Nintendo console. I should note that as best as we can tell from the translation, Tamakichi did not refer to this as a Nintendo Switch 2 or Nintendo Switch Pro or Nintendo Switch Plus.
That does open up the possibility that Nintendo has given way to the idea of a handheld console combo to Valve and other smaller console makers, and moved on to a new risky, but potentially successful, game console idea.
Of course, as always, we have to take these rumors with a grain of salt. That these tweets have driven interest at all really goes to show you that gamers really want to see Nintendo make a new platform.
