 Hey, everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. Our stories, we got three of them for you, are down below in the timestamps. We are on our road to 80,000 subscribers, so if we can hit 80,000 before January 1st, or at least by January 1st, I wanna do something special for you guys, so let's see what happens with that goal. We also are giving away three copies of Pokemon Legends, Arceus. There is a viral sweep link down in the description and or the pinned comment for you to enter for that. We're not announcing that one until later in January, but still, it's gonna be there for you guys to enter. Yeah, we have a lot to get into today, so let's just get into our stories. Well, I'm pretty excited for these ones. So our first story is actually a bit of a somber one. Masahaki Yamura has passed away, if you guys don't know who he is. He was 78 when he passed away, so at the age that you might expect him to. But the thing is, he was actually basically the godfather of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, so very important in the grand scheme of the history of video games. But I wanna read a summary of what he did at Nintendo, so you guys could fully appreciate basically his contributions to our childhoods or the current new memories we're making, maybe on things like the Nintendo Switch Online service. So the Famicon, which is the system that would become the Nintendo Entertainment System in the West was the brainchild of Yamura, who joined Nintendo as an engineer from Sharp in 1972 at a time when it was tentatively exploring the possibilities of electronic entertainment. One of his first roles was to help Nintendo's range of location-based light gun games. When Nintendo Research and Development II was created, Yamura was placed in charge and he was instrumental in the development of Nintendo's Color TV game systems, the company's first tentative foray into the realm of domestic video games. These were very basic gaming systems that had been relatively crudely built in titles. Yamura began to work on the Famicon in 1981, following a demand from Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamuchi, that he created a device capable of playing arcade games on a TV. But with games that came on interchangeable cartridges, combined sales of the Famicon and its Western counterpart, the Nintendo Entertainment System was 61.91 million units and 20 million of those were in Japan alone. Development of the Japan-only Famicon Disk System and the Super Famicon Satellaview, as well as the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System Zapper. It wasn't just hardware that Yamura had a hand in. During his time with the company, he also served as producer on several titles, including Ice Climber, Clue Clueland, and a trilogy of sports titles with soccer, baseball, and golf. Yamura retired from Nintendo in 2004 and became a professor at Ritz Muchen University in Kyoto and the organization broke the sad news of his passing today. I just wanted to bring up the story so we appreciate basically an unsung legend in the industry. Like everyone knows, basically, who created like Pong back of the day. Obviously we know for Nintendo Shigeru Miyamoto and the Uwuchi family's contributions, Sakurai and all of the above. But sometimes we don't appreciate the unsung people that he hasn't been at Nintendo in some time because he hasn't been at Nintendo in some time. I think a lot of people today just weren't even aware of who he was anymore. So I just wanted to recognize him. Obviously my thoughts and prayers go to his family. Hopefully they're doing well with his passing. He seemed to live a pretty full life doing things that he enjoyed. Obviously giving it to end his career as a college professor. So credit to him and his family and thank you so much for the contributions you have made to both my life and my childhood and millions and millions of others. And you know what? I hope that there's a lot waiting for you in your next life. So next up we have sales from Japan for last week. And this is an oddball one for me because on one hand, Nintendo is basically slapping the competition or basically proving there is no competition to Nintendo Switch in Japan. On the other hand, I don't know that it's really a good thing what's happening, but let's just get into the sales numbers from Femitsu for last week. So the Nintendo Switch OLED sold 99,195 units. The base model Nintendo Switch sold 53,752 units. Switch Lite sold 49,990 units. The PlayStation 5 was next with 7,391 units. The PlayStation 5 all digital was right after that at was at 1,596 units. Xbox Series X at 435 units. Xbox Series S at 198 and PlayStation 4 at something like 80. And the big thing about this that I don't like is that the combined sales of Nintendo Switch were at 200,000 units. That's incredible. But Nintendo for the first time in the history of sales charts in Japan owned 99% of system sales. This is insane to me. It's incredibly great for Nintendo, but also a lack of competition in Nintendo's home country where Nintendo pays a lot of attention could lead to a lack of innovation. I know it feels weird saying Nintendo lacking innovation, really? But yeah, that's what happens when a company owns a market. If they own a market in a monopoly style way which is what's happening with Nintendo in Japan through no fault of their own, by the way, it's not their fault Sony's not giving Japan units. It's not their fault that Sony has basically abandoned the Japanese audience. And it's also not their fault that Microsoft's unable to make headway into Japan in a more meaningful way. So none of it's Nintendo's fault, but still a lack of competition is usually a bad thing in every single industry. And while Switch is the number one selling unit, at least like here in the US, PlayStation 5 took over sales for a month. And we all know Xbox Series is doing really well this holiday season. So it's one of those situations where there's a lot more competition for Nintendo in other territories. And while Japan is obviously not the only market that Switch matters in, Nintendo's home country is there and they pay the most attention to that market. So I do worry about a lack of competition could be for the future of Nintendo. We've obviously had a really light game slate release for the last two years from Nintendo. Would that have existed if there was more competition in their home country? I don't know. Nintendo also dominated the top 10 chart yet again, which they've been doing almost on a weekly basis for like the last year at least in Japan. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond Shining Pearl was actually back at number one with 160,000 units, roughly around two million copies of the game it sold in Japan, which is about half the sales of Sword and Shield currently. So we'll see if it can catch up to that over time. But yeah, I don't really want to go over that entire video game sales chart because it's just getting kind of samey week over week. There's nothing like incredibly notable that happened in the software sales chart. It's just Nintendo dominates it again, which is no surprise. So our very last part of this video is just something I wanted to highlight and feature. Something I think is really interesting. It's fan created, but it's fan created in a way that really tickles my fancy because it's related to Zelda. So there's been a lot of Unreal Engine 4 kind of remakes or remasterings or whatever you want to call them of games like Ocarina of Time and also like Mario 64 and stuff like that. But a lot of this stuff has been going on for over a decade. So we don't really talk about it too much, but today a YouTube user actually put up this video and this is actually Ocarina of Time's Kakariko Village in Unreal Engine 5. Now you might go, won't Nintendo shut down this project? After all, they did shut down a similar thing that happened with Mario 64 when a whole level was recreated in Unreal Engine 4. And to that I say, actually no, Nintendo is likely not going to touch this. The reason that level was taken out is because it was fully playable in a very similar way to the original game. You could destroy enemies. You could obviously play through the level and complete the level. That's not the case here. This is more so just an environment recreation which Nintendo considers fan art. So since this is considered a fan art kind of thing, yeah, now I obviously don't like everything about this Unreal Engine 5 thing. In particular, Link's model I think could use some work. But I mean, it's a fan project. The Bruxivitz that really meant to showcase Link is meant to showcase the actual world of Kakariko Village in Unreal Engine 5. And then obviously imagine the possibilities of Nintendo possibly using Unreal Engine 5 in any sort of game moving forward. Now I don't think Unreal Engine 5 will realistically be used on Switch, at least the current Switch, maybe a Pro, maybe a Switch 2. But yeah, I just really like these fan projects and I really wanted to highlight this one. Full Link's down in the description to the full video and the full explanation of how he did it. You can actually see a little bit of how he created the world and also him thanking his patrons for allowing him to get a beefy enough computer to actually be able to fully create stuff in Unreal Engine 5. Because it's not a easy engine to work with if you don't have the hardware that can handle it. So yeah, I think it looks incredible and I just wanted to feature that today. Anyways, folks, I am with Andy Roblojans from Nintendo Prime. One last thing before we go, we have launched our Hypersponsibly merch line. We have some of it in studio now. We got a few pieces. It's obviously gonna be extremely hard to Hypersponsibly with the game awards tonight, which by the way, we are gonna be live streaming our own little pre-show beginning at 5 p.m. central time. And then we'll be here for the entire event. I mean, I personally will be dipping out for like a 20 minute, half hour period to put my kids to bed, but Eric will be here to help entertain you guys and react to things and I'll still be watching it on my phone to make sure I don't miss anything. Hopefully like Nintendo's big announcements don't happen conveniently in that period, but I'm not available. But sincerely, I wanna thank you guys for all of your support. It's been amazing. If you didn't catch our podcast last night, I encourage you to go check it out on the Nintendo Prime podcast channel. In fact, I'll put a link in the pinned comment for you guys to go watch it. We happen to have Tim Getty's on from Kind of Funny Games. It was a really amazing conversation and it's a great like precursor to the game awards tonight because we did talk about the game awards there. So if you're looking for some game awards height, but also game awards responsibility and also maybe a little bit of insider information on Jeff Keely and how much he really cares about this video game industry, I suggest you really go give that podcast a listen. Anyways, folks, I am Nathan DeRubblejans from Nintendo Prime and I'll catch you guys in the next video.