Nintendo’s latest Creator’s Voice video promoting the Switch 2 contains an unexpected surprise: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paying tribute to former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata for being the visionary behind the original Switch hardware’s success. The head of the $3.3 trillion graphics card company said the Switch 2 is the next chapter of that vision, hyping the launch of Nintendo’s next console in a mini-stump speech just two days out from release.
I still remember the day Iwata-san shared his dream with us,” Huang said. “He wanted to create something no one had seen before. A console powerful enough for big cinematic games but small enough to take anywhere. It sounded impossible but that vision became the original Nintendo Switch. We lost Iwata-san before the launch but his clarity, his purpose, it still inspires our work every day.”
Iwata passed away after more than a decade as the head of Nintendo in July 2015 from cancer, just two years prior to the launch of the original Switch. NES Golf, one of the first games he ever worked on, was hidden in the original hardware as a tribute to the executive and developer that would only unlock when the console date was set to the day of his death. Nintendo has been tight-lipped about that easter egg, and rarely reflects on its own legacy and the people who created it in a public setting, making Huang’s mention even more striking.
The Switch 2, like its predecessor, runs on a custom Nvidia chip. While the tech last time around was repurposed from smartphones, the processing unit this time around appears to cater much more closely to the needs of a gaming machine, with the inclusion of DLSS, variable refresh rate, and other processing techniques aimed at boosting performance and visual clarity even on moderate specs. “Switch 2 is more than a new console, it’s a new chapter worthy of Iwata-san’s vision,” Huang said.
.