The Nintendo Switch 2 nearly had a very different name, in what would have been a 30-year throwback.
Following on from the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, Nintendo has revealed more information about the development of the Nintendo Switch 2 in a series of developer interviews. In the fourth and final part of that series, Kouichi Kawamoto, producer in Nintendo’s entertainment planning & development department, explained how the Switch 2 got its name.
“There were a lot of ideas for the name, and we really struggled to find the right one,” he explained. “We even considered ideas like ‘Super Nintendo Switch.” That, clearly, was a reference to the naming convention between 1983’s Nintendo Entertainment System, and it’s 1990 follow-up, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. But while the Switch 2 certainly isn’t the only other console to borrow from its predecessor’s name, Kawamoto explained that there was a very specific reason why it couldn’t be ‘Super’ in the same way as the SNES.
“Super NES, which came out after the NES, couldn’t play NES games. Since Switch 2 can play Switch games, it didn’t feel right to use the same naming convention as Super NES. Switch 2 is a new system with improved performance, but we’d like players to get their hands on it not to focus on the specs, but rather to think of it as the latest system developed by Nintendo.”
So there it is – it’s the Nintendo Switch 2’s backwards compatibility that means it had to change its name away from the iconic NES and its successor.
