WarioWare, Inc. is one of the most important games of all time

Nintendo’s back catalog is so absurdly rich that when it comes to launching the new Game Boy and Game Boy Advance collections on Nintendo Switch Online, it can afford a mix of cult oddities, entries big and small in popular series and a Hall of Famer like Game Boy tetris, while still saving big for later. But even for this company, there’s nothing that can touch the prophetic influence and punk rock abandonment of one of Nintendo’s boldest designs of all time: WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!

It’s not as if Nintendo invented the idea of ​​an anarchic minigame compilation with this 2003 GBA release that would later spawn a small series and cult obsession. Konami’s similarly surreal and goofy Bishi Bashi games with competitive minigames like Jump for the Meat first appeared in arcades in the late 1990s. But WarioWare has taken the idea to a formal and aesthetic extreme that, depending on one’s perspective, has either reduced the entire concept of video games to its purest essence or broken it completely.

The idea is simple: survive a gauntlet of “microgames” that speed up as you advance. What makes it exceptional is that Nintendo’s developers – WarioWare, Inc. was developed by a small team in Nintendo’s in-house R&D1 department – no kidding, really, when they used the term “micro”. The games last no more than three or four seconds, and their rules are reduced to a single verb: Evade! Shoot! Jump! Country! Prize! Input! detonate! Sniff! You have split seconds to analyze the instruction and visuals, figure out the required input (either directions or a tap of the A button, or both), and execute. Of course, you’ll become familiar with them over time, but each game comes in many variations of speed, length, and timing to keep you on your toes.

There’s a radical compression here of the usual conversation between player and game that’s quite exciting to experience: a synaptic snap that happens in the space between the word, the graphics, and the insistent tick-tock soundtrack. WarioWare reduces the process of experiencing, learning and mastering a new game to literal seconds. The player acts on a mixture of instincts and patterns learned throughout his life playing: when to knock, when to hammer, when to dodge.

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

You can imagine this concept being combined with a strict, minimalist visual style, but Nintendo is going hard in the other direction. WarioWare, Inc. is intentionally messy, ugly, and inconsistent to look at: a postmodern mishmash of wireframes, silhouettes, unfinished programming art, stock photos, and wildly contrasting illustration styles. The game laughs at Nintendo’s usual perfectionism, scrawls game ideas like graffiti over so many digital bricks, and tries out some of the company’s own hits duck hunting To The Legend of Zelda, like loops on a hip-hop track. Some of the ideas — which the designers jotted down on individual Post-It notes — are pretty childish, like the anime lady sniffing snot on a long, dangling string. There’s even a mock fighting game pitting a huge, muscular Mario against a Bowser who looks like a depressed kaiju. Nothing is sacred.

Wario, as Mario’s selfish, lazy, and incompetent front, is a perfect mascot for all this downcast anarchy. The imagination of WarioWare is that he’s decided to get into game development as a get-rich-quick scheme, and you’re playing the half-assed products he and his weird friends have created. Each suite of microgames is framed by a strange story, starring Wario’s pals like Jimmy, the flip-phone disco king, or Dribble and Spitz, the cat-and-dog taxi drivers, and those cutscenes pay off often with no consequences whatsoever. (Hey, Dribble’s passenger turned out to be a merboy!) None of this makes sense, but the beat, marked by swishing windshield wipers or the pumping decibel meters of a boombox, keeps going.

The improbable part WarioWare – unlikely but absolutely necessary – is that it be as perfect as it is wild. The jokes land with the same metronomic precision as the player returns a tennis ball or reaches out to Wario’s hand to catch a beer sliding across the bar. The game is relentless, exhilarating and its timing is impeccable. As the 3D era of gaming reached its peak and games began to snow in complexity, this brilliant work of contrasts decided to tear them apart instead. Here you can anticipate Nintendo’s back-to-basics casual campaign with the Wii and DS, as well as the bite-sized, one-tap ethos of the smartphone revolution to come. WarioWare, Inc. predicts, parodies, and surpasses these trends without breaking stride—giving a delightfully life-affirming middle finger to everything pompous and overconfident about video games.