Nintendo quietly brings classic franchise to an end, for good

Nintendo has a wealth of franchise under its belt and many of them thrive today. However, like many publishers and developers, they are known to leave some languishing.

While games characters like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Link get a good outing quite often, it seems Nintendo is happy to leave some series in the past.

Nintendo is slowly embracing their back catalogue through Nintendo Switch Online

According to journalist Imran Khan, the latest franchise to end is Punch-Out.

The series started life in arcades and was quickly ported to the NES as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!.

After a huge amount of success, the sequel appeared on the SNES as Super Punch-Out!!, and several characters have appeared in subsequent Nintendo games ever since.

As Khan tells it, another entry is very unlikely after the Wii entry to the series - which saw a lot of success - was derided for it’s stereotyping of characters, which received a lot of backlash.

He tells the story of chatting with a developer who said that the backlash wasn’t expected and the team at Next Level Games were shifted from another entry over to Luigi’s Mansion 3 and other titles.

That Nintendo were quick to shift the developers and end a potential sequel tells us all we need to know.

The developer who spoke to Khan admitted that Nintendo believed that their other games had “much, much higher sales potential.”

Of course, the decision could be reversed at any point, however, Nintendo aren’t in need of a new instalment to the series as their sports games only feature Mario line-ups nowadays.

You’d imagine that an audience would welcome a new Punch-Out!!, particularly due to the wealth of boxing games available for fitness regimes on the Nintendo Switch eShop.

Fans will have to settle for small cameos and nods to the past, which seems more the style of the Japanese developer of late.