The Nintendo Switch has many positives going for it. Prime among them is that it’s a boon for indie games. Nintendo was a bit slow on the uptake with the indie market, but now, they’re the go-to place for the titles, even doing better than Steam in some cases. That’s why developers from all over are moving games to the Switch. Or, they’ll start production on one system and then move it to the other. Such is what happened with Golf Story, the unique golf-themed RPG that has done very well on Switch.
Andrew Newey, who worked on Golf Story, noted that the game was originally meant for the Wii U, Nintendo’s previous console. In an interview, he revealed when the switch to Switch happened:
It was just a few months. I do remember we had already made some menus on the GamePad. The idea was that the GamePad menus would exist independently to the rest of the game. So if you were playing a round of golf, you could access the various menus on the GamePad screen, check out your missions, see detailed round analysis with stats like strokes gained putting etc.
There was even an idea of a persistent virtual pet on the GamePad that you had to care for whilst attending to your tasks in the game. It would have been the pinnacle of GamePad multitasking productivity.
So clearly they put a lot of thought into the Wii U version, but given the success of the game on Switch, it was clearly the right move. But even then, they didn’t get to use all the ideas they wanted to, such as:
A really long, par 20 hole that you would get to use the long driver on.
One of my favorite ideas was a Crazy Taxi style mini game where you drive around picking up molerats in the RC car. The small boats at the beach that you can hit balls at were going to be driveable too.
Golf Story is available now on Nintendo Switch.
