Nintendo snags Luigi’s Mansion developer Next Level Games

Nintendo has purchased Next Level Games, makers of the last several Punch-Out and Luigi’s Mansion games. What could this mean for Nintendo?

Big news from the world of Nintendo. They announced recently that they have picked up Vancouver’s Next Level Games and absorbed it into their overalled folds (which was supposed to be a Mario pun and in retrospect sounds very disgusting the more I think about it.).

If you’re unfamiliar with NLG, that’s okay. A lot of their games were based on Nintendo properties over the last two decades to the point where you’d be alright to have confused them for actual Nintendo titles.

Some of the big games NLG were responsible for were the last two Luigi’s Mansion games (Dark Moon and 3), Metroid Prime: Federation Force, Punch-Out for the Wii (along with the bizarre Doc Louis one-off) and the Mario Strikers line of soccer games for both Gamecube and Wii.

While it’s not entirely certain what this means, it is definitely fun to speculate what this could mean so let’s do that.

Obviously, a lot of the buzz is about Mario Strikers as, for some reason, the Mario franchise has been cutting back on its sports titles pretty heavily in the last few years which is a shame. Mario Superstar Baseball for the Gamecube and Wii was amazing. The Mario Soccer games were incredibly fun. And I still throw in Mario Golf on the Game Boy Advance just because of how solid that game was. Hopefully, this brings about a return of these as I miss them.

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Another one is the Punch-Out franchise. As someone who regularly uses the Fitness Boxing games and thought ARMS was really fun, I can’t help playing these without wondering where Little Mac ran off to.

As for the other two games, obviously, we’ve been getting a wealth of Luigi’s Mansion titles so this probably won’t change, although I really hope the next one is closer to Dark Moon because I loved the idea of completely new mansions as opposed to having to constantly backtrack to the same stages over and over again.

As for Metroid Prime: Federation Force… well …we don’t talk about Metroid Prime: Federation Force.