While considering the fate of old acquaintances and high school best friends, did you ever stop to wonder what ever happened to Nindies – Nintendo's brand for indie game showcases before "Indie World" replaced it? No need, I'll tell you: it was one day painlessly throttled for legal reasons.
"They definitely do not care anything about what independent developers think, so that was not it," says Krysta Yang while explaining why Nintendo ditched the Nindies brand on a recent episode of the Kit & Krysta Podcast. Instead, she and co-host Kit Ellis – both former Nintendo marketing leads – say the developer's legal team decided, after years of Nindies, it had to go.
"'Nindies' was created by that team, the [Publisher and Developer Relations] team, and they ran with it," remembers Ellis. "They did as much as they could with it, and everybody loved it. They made t-shirts, and [...] they made a logo. They made all this, but they got the tap on the shoulder from the legal team, like, 'You can't do this anymore.'"
"You're not supposed to, like, combine the brand word," says Yang. Like, "Wiimote was bad. You can't say Wiimote," she adds gravely, because "'it dilutes the brand,' in the words of legal, making it so that you cannot defend your brand later on for some sort of legal dispute."
Ellis remembers the person who originally came up with the Nindies name was acting like "a pitbull" once it was threatened, though Yang explains he was ultimately "slapped hard by the big palm of legal. [...] He was licking his wounds for a long time. And then he left the company."
I'm convinced Nintendo might be gearing up for a Mario Kart World DLC announcement as it prepares to spotlight a Donkey Kong Bananza character it's been refusing to publicly acknowledge since launch.
