Nintendo of America's President Reggie Fils-Aimé recently spoke in an interview about Super Mario Run, and at the same time he also addressed the issue of shortages of the NES Classic, claiming that higher demand than anticipated was the reason behind them.
"Every day there's more going into the retail channel," he reassured fans. "The overall level of demand is certainly greater than we anticipated, that's why we're suffering through the shortages out there in the marketplace."
In the interview he also answered a question regarding whether NES games would be coming to mobile. "Candidly, no, without a fair amount of modification. And this hearkens back to the questions that we received maybe five years ago saying, 'Nintendo, when are you going to get into mobile?' And at the time, it was positioned as, just take all your legacy content and just put it on mobile. The fact of the matter is, to make a great mobile game, you can't do that. You need to think about the input device. You need to think about, how is this going to be sticky?"
"We saw the NES Classic as an opportunity to engage with millennials, gen-Xers, boomers, people who had played those games back in the day, but life had gone by, and they had somewhat walked away from gaming. It was a great way to re-engage them, and our belief is that by re-engaging them, it creates an opportunity for Super Mario Run, it creates an opportunity for our 3DS business, it creates an opportunity for Nintendo Switch, because all of a sudden they're recognising what they knew 20 or 25 years ago: they love Mario. They love Zelda. They love all of our classic IP, and they're re-engaging with it right now."
What do you think of the NES Classic, if you got your hands on one?