So last week's Nintendo Direct, they announced some really amazing looking amoebo, but then we were kind of shocked by how expensive they are. So how did we get from Mr. Mario, that was 1299?

The original amoe? The original amoe. Let me do it for you again. Let me do it. I'll be doing this for the rest of my life. A moment of silence. Pour one out for you doing this for the rest of your life. But how did we get from a $12.99 amoe to a $50. Wow. Amibo, which is the price of the Kirby Air Riders, swapable Amoebo. It's wild. It's kind of shocking because we've come a long way. Amibo have been around for over 10 years now. Yeah. And going into this Switch 2 generation, I think we were wondering, like, well, what is the role of Amoe going to be? Are they even going to be caring about Amibo? Yes. And it seemed like a little bit of a trickle going into it, and then, bam, we have this Nintendo Direct where Amiibo are playing such a big role in the presentation. And yeah, they look really cool. They look really nice. I'm intrigued by some of these, but then you do get the sticker

shock when you look at the price tags. It's like, oh, wait, this is like half the price of a game

or almost the same price as a game. And it's like, what's going on here? And how did this happen?

Or more expensive than some games? Which is a crazy thing to think about. And, you know,

you and I were at Nintendo. We actually worked on the original launch for Amibo.

And the original strategy, the original, like, intent of these, oh, my gosh, it's so different

from where these AmiBos started to where they are now and what purpose it is, you know,

fulfilling for Nintendo Nintendo that we really

wanted to talk about.

That's a really interesting history. It's true. But it's like, how did we get here? And is that okay? I mean, it feels pretty expensive. Yeah. And then there's, you know, the consumer, there's the fan reactions that we're talking about and that we're now part of. but if you're, if you are Nintendo and you're talking about, like, what is the business purpose for this product line?

What, what is the business purpose for this product line? What, what is this helping

us to achieve? Why does this exist? It's a very different situation now than it was 11 years

ago when the first Amoebo came out. And we should say, we have a big video that we did last

year on the 10-year anniversary, the untold story of Amoebo.

If you're curious about the origins of some of the behind-the-scenes stories that we have working on that, you should check that out.

Right, right.

But yeah, let's go back to 2014, where it all began, and let's talk a little bit about why did Nintendo make these in the first place?

They had kind of three big reasons of why they started Amoe at all.

First of all, this was happening during the very hard times of the Wii U

and the slightly less hard times of the 3DS.

Frankly, a bit of a down time for Nintendo.

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