The Nintendo Switch turns one

I got my Switch exactly a year ago today, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours (and dollars) on games for Nintendo’s newest console. But unlike every other console I’ve owned, I’ve bought exactly one physical game for the Switch — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — which I preordered alongside my Switch so I’d have something to play when it first came out. I know I’m probably late to this party, but the Switch feels like the first console to truly make the case to, uh, switch away from physical games for good.

A lot of that has to do with how I use the Switch and its portable nature. I take my Switch with me basically everywhere — on the train to work in the morning, plane rides, weekends at my parents’ house — and having all my games with me to play whenever I want is a great addition. The ability to play Zelda anywhere is good, but the ability to play Zelda and Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania and Splatoon 2 and Rocket League and Stardew Valley and Celeste and Overcooked and Mario Kart and Tumbleseed anywhere is even better.

The Nintendo Switch turns one year old today, and last week on Circuit Breaker Live, we looked back at some of the most interesting accessories for Nintendo’s new console that have come out this year.

There’s a bunch of interesting stuff out now that you’ll want to pick up for your Switch. You can swap out that terrible kickstand with a sturdier aluminum one, for instance, or add on a pro controller for more comfortable long gaming sessions. Charging is also a super interesting place for Switch gear, since the console uses a standard USB-C port. There are full out charging cases for recharging on the go (an important thing for the portable Switch), giant USB-C battery packs that are almost too big to take on a plane, and portable chargers that are far easier to carry around than Nintendo’s own.

I think the first time that I ever used a Nintendo game console was an SNES plugged into a TV parked on the sidewalk outside an electronics shop in Ginza, Tokyo in the spring of 1991. In fact, I think this may have been the first time I had ever used a video game console of any kind, period. Though I had played arcade games and was the proud owner of a Game Boy, I don’t remember ever playing on a proper console prior to that trip to Tokyo. If I had, it was literally a very forgettable experience.

Yet I vividly remember standing on that sidewalk and being enthralled by the most futuristic video game I had ever played: F-Zero. At the time, it seemed so fast and intense. Even though I grew increasingly frustrated by my constant crashing, I still remember how excited I was playing that game. It was like being on a day trip to the future.

For more than a decade, Nintendo’s overall hardware strategy has been easy to understand. The company doesn’t compete on power; instead, it creates accessible and attainable consoles that are really good at playing Nintendo games but not much else. Sometimes this works out well, like when the Wii rode the motion-control craze to more than 100 million units in sales. Sometimes it doesn’t work out at all, like when its follow-up, the Wii U, became Nintendo’s worst-selling console ever.

But even when this strategy does work, Nintendo’s consoles have never been able to keep everyone happy. They tend to have trouble attracting third-party developers, and they’re rarely technically impressive. One year into the Switch’s life cycle, however, it’s clear that Nintendo has been able to overcome this perennial deficiency. It’s not that Nintendo’s strategy has changed — the Switch is still far less powerful than the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One — rather, the world around Nintendo has changed, and the company has been able to leverage this to devastating effect.