Why Hasn’t Nintendo Adopted Achievements?

Some years back, as a casual remark in a place that I don’t remember, I said that Nintendo has a problem with using ideas that they didn’t come up with in-house. “Not Invented Here Syndrome” I may have phrased it. I forget the context too. It may have had to do with their refusal to use rollback code in internet multiplayer gaming, but there are other time where it’s seemed that there are things that are solved problems everywhere else, that Nintendo still has trouble with.

One of these things has been Achievements, a platform-recognized system where a player’s accomplishments are registered and stored, that can be observed outside the game and shared with others. Achievements began with the Xbox 360, and were soon after implemented by Valve in Steam, as “Awards” by Sony in the Playstation ecosystem, and even by fans playing games and romhacks in emulators as RetroAchievements.

One company that’s always avoided using them, despite being the oldest major console publisher still in operation, is Nintendo. They’ve avoided any cross-game recognition of skill or accomplishment, even though they’ve come close multiple times. Several of their games offer in-game recognition of accomplishments, in the form of “Stamps” or “Trophies” or “Stickers.” Super Mario Galaxy would post images on the Wii message board when the game was completed. When Miiverse was a thing, players could share messages with earned stamps from some games. But none of these systems had sharing outside of their respective games or individual consoles. None promises any account-level recognition.

Why is this? Nintendo’s games are enormously popular, and many players have rued the absence of any support for an achievement system, and to this day show no signs of starting one. Why? It seems like such an obvious thing. Everyone else does it. It would probably heap more value upon Nintendo’s bottom line, so why not?

As it turns out, it goes back to their Not Invented Here Syndrome. The person at whose fee the blame trail ends is unknown, but the evidence is there, in an episode of the Kit and Krysta show, available as a podcast with excerpts on Youtube. Hosted by two former Ninendo employees, who ran a periodic show that was promoted for a time on the Switch’s News channel, they tell the story of what happened when another employee brought up the possibility of offering something like achievements at a meeting. The recounting is in this Youtube video (4 1/2 minutes), with the important bit starting around 2:07:

From the transcript (there are some minor errors):

“I remember I think you were in this meeting too this was like a pre E3
meeting somebody pretty high ranking got absolutely eviscerated in a meeting by another person who is very high ranking because they were they were suggesting doing something things in the style of micros why don’t why don’t we do like Xbox does this thing really well why don’t we do that and this was like a really like packed full meeting I’m and this person was like a senior director this person got eviscerated in that meeting of like we do things our way this is the Nintendo way we cannot simply follow the path of what Xbox like it was just like it went on and on I was like it was like a 20 minute lecture […]

so there you go yeah they definitely don’t want to do like copy their competitors but they also have that sense of like no everyone’s equal we’re equal opportunist gamers right I think they also see this as like this is not a pure way of experiencing a game like you rushing through it or like only focusing on this thing like that’s not how you should play a game I kind of agree with that cuz we did some dumb stuff get those achievements that’s true and then they also like want you to play that game in a very specific way so they don’t want you to use a different system to like do it your way because they want they’ve built this game specifically in the way that they think that you’ll enjoy it the most and they’re going to want you to do that[…]“