Strange days yesterday, when a press release from Nintendo Europe turned up. It said "stop using the red Nintendo logo". Seemed...odd. People were confused. Today, Nintendo have responded. Speaking to CVG, a Nintendo UK spokesperson has said the news is "two years late", citing the use of white, black and grey logos on Nintendo products and publications in recent years. Well, no shit! We're not blind. We know there have been grey logos on Nintendo stuff for a few years now. Bit hard to miss them. The point was that Nintendo were now specifically telling people not to use the "old" red logo. In other words, we were interested in the death of the red logo, not the inception of the others. And, on a purely symbolic, reading-too-much-into-it level, everything that entailed. For years, no, decades, Nintendo were red. Sega were blue. Seems simple, seems shallow, seems stupid, but that's the way it was. Kids grew up divided along those lines, that growing up made an impression, and people ended up identifying large international companies with a colour scheme. Heck, it's the same today. The Xbox brand is green. In the grand scheme of things, changing that colour isn't important. It's not going to affect game sales, it's not going to affect hardware sales, it's not going to result in angry fan petitions being dropped in a bag of flaming dog crap at Cammie Dunaway's house. But it's still enough to make people a little misty-eyed for a part of their video game upbringing, small as it may be, that is now no more. So rather than blithely dismissing this as "oh, old news", Nintendo, know we couldn't give a shit about your new colour scheme. Or how long you've had it. Just give us a minute to mourn the old one.
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