Mario to the rescue? The mustachioed plumber is going to become a toy figure — no surprises there — except that this is going to have NFC technology.
Kyoto-based Nintendo are calling this “Nintendo Figurine Platform” or “NFC Featured Platform”, or NFP for short, and it will debut at E3 in LA in June in an attempt to build up interest in Nintendo’s consoles in the wake of the Wii U disappointment and three years in the red.
A series of toy figurines will harness the Wii U GamePad’s near-field communication (NFC) features. Like the Skylander game series, the NFP toys can read and write game data across different titles.
It seems like a step backwards in some ways for the troubled game company. Normally you move on from the small toys you play with as a kid for the more visceral excitement of a video game. But Nintendo has tried this before with Pokémon Rumble U and toys with NFC for the Wii. Mario is also an impossibly popular character and maybe even older “kids” will like to have a toy of him around, especially if he is performing some connectivity function.
Mario won’t be alone. Nintendo is planning a range of NFP character toys from the end of the year. You can “customize” your own NFP but storing your game data in it, watching it “grow and develop”. Could this catch on? We’re not sure.
NFP will be usable for multiple Nintendo games and the company is also going to install a NFC reader-writer on the 3DS, so you can use the NFC toys not only with your Wii U (assuming you have one).
