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I Took My Nintendo Switch To A Bar, And I Was Surprised By What Happened

This article is more than 6 years old.

The Nintendo Switch, at a real-world bar.

Credit: Dave Thier

A thought crossed my mind as the hour wound toward the happy on a sunny Friday afternoon. I had expressed a certain sentiment many times in articles here at Forbes about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the Nintendo Switch. It goes something like this: "You can do things with this that you could never do with a console before, like bring it to a bar and play Mario Kart with a stranger." I realized I had been making this statement based on theory alone, more hypothesis than anything else at this point. And as a professional journalist, the burden should be on me to seek proof that this statement was not total nonsense. I steeled myself, located the Joy-Con attachments that would allow for two-player Mario Kart, and headed to a real bar, in the real world, where real people would be drinking.

The first setback came moments after sitting. Despite the bar opening at 4:30, happy hour did not begin until 5:00, which struck me as somehow untoward. Lacking the imagination to come up with a new order, I got the happy hour old fashioned at full price. Shortly after I set up my Switch, the waitress knocked it off its flimsy kickstand when getting some menus. Easily remedied by moving the thing over a few inches, but worth noting. Undeterred, I booted up Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and started playing. I opted for no sound, because I'm not an animal.

At this point, a problem reared its head. You can't just sit there not playing the Switch: without action, the tablet doesn't have much draw. But if you sit there playing Mario Kart you quickly become that guy playing videogames alone at the bar, no matter how normal and not weird at all you're trying to look. I played the length of a Grand Prix, hoping someone might get curious. This did not happen, but I managed second. Casting my eyes about it what I imagined to be a friendly fashion did not have much of an effect. Happy hour was upon us. I played another Grand Prix.

It was time to force the issue a bit: a group of guys next to me looked affable enough, and I noticed an eye or two wandering over to the tablet. "Anybody want to play some Mario Kart?" I asked them, enticing them with a coy wave of the second Joy-Con. Mild smiles. Maybe if it was an (insert pre-Gamecube Nintendo console here), said a couple of them. I tried to note that it wasn't really that different, again waving the second controller in hopes to show how few buttons there were and how much like an old Nintendo controller it was. But worse than being the guy playing videogames alone in the bar is the being the guy actively trying to force other people to play videogames with you in a bar. A very professional journalist only tries so hard to contrive narrative situations.

And so at this point, I found myself at a crossroads. It became clear that if you come to the bar alone with a Nintendo Switch, you're likely not going to get anywhere on the multi-player front until you hear five all-important words. I had ordered a second old fashioned before I heard them.

"Is that a Nintendo Switch?" my new friend Chris asked. An opening.

Chris was part of the group of other guys, as it turned out, a bunch of them up from Tampa for the NFL Draft. Chris was interested in the Nintendo Switch, Chris liked videogames, Chris had begun the conversation and had fond memories of Mario Kart. Even with this, it took a bit of cajoling to actually get him to pick up the second controller, but we got there. And it worked! The bar sucked into the tiny screen in front of us and we realized, cocktails in hand, the dream of the Nintendo Switch. One race in, the second race had become a foregone conclusion, same for the third after it. All I needed now was a hip rooftop party and the desire to attend one.

At this point, the game had changed. I was no longer the weird guy playing videogames alone in the bar, we were two people doing something apparently social and likely not serial killers. Chris' cousin Sam came over and played a few rounds. In the middle of the third round, Casey came to wait for her friend: she got a few races in before they arrived. After that, one of the off-duty bartenders came by and we closed things out with a two-player Grand Prix. My performance had been improving, but the random challengers always seemed to best me. A small price.

The key finding was that yes, people will play videogames with a stranger in a bar. But it's not so simple -- I only got people to play with me because they were curious about the Switch and had heard about it before. I doubt it would have worked with some Bluetooth iPad controllers. The real special sauce here, however, is Mario Kart itself. Millions have played it, at some point, over the years, the stuff of hazy childhood memories. You only need to know three buttons, all of which are pretty intuitive. It's easy to understand, easy to hop in and play and instantly recognizable: it's hard to imagine this working so well with Super Bomberman R, either. On top of that, the smart steering system -- enabled by default -- does an excellent job of allowing you take control while also preventing race-destroying mishaps. It won't net you first by a longshot, but it will let you play more complicated levels with less preparation. It takes the edge off.

On a technical level, the afternoon was smooth sailing. Nobody found the controllers too small, though two people kept pausing it accidentally. A certain hunch was required to see what was going on in the split-screens, and further investigation will be required to see if bar rigors can support four players huddled around the tiny windows. Three hours would mean a lot of Mario Kart, so battery issues didn't come up. The kickstand, like I mentioned earlier, is trash. But the bar didn't ask too much out of it, and it served our purposes handily.

Most importantly, every single person I played with said that they had heard about the Switch, thought it was kind of weird, and had been wholly converted by happy hour Mario Kart. This is what Erik Kain wrote about in his "secret weapon" piece a while back: that the most effective marketing for the Nintendo Switch is inevitably the Switch itself, out there in the world, drawing attention. Now if only people could actually buy one.