Splatoon is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, May 28, 2025. Below, we examine how it reached outside the realm of video games for its unique blend of inspirations.
It is easy to understand Splatoon as a riff on prior video games. It's a multiplayer shooter produced in the years after competitive shooters started to dominate online play. But it subverts type, offering something tuned for children and families, rather than teens and young adults. Its cartoon style and emphasis on objectives other than "kill" or "hold this position" set it apart from most other games of its ilk. But Splatoon's originality goes deeper. It proves that the strangest and most exciting ideas emerge when you look outside of regular avenues of video games, like wildlife, pop music and street fashion, and borrow what you can from them.
Nintendo didn't start development of Splatoon with the intention to make a family-friendly multiplayer shooter. Former CEO Satoru Iwata said in an interview the developers wanted to create "a new kind of game, without worrying about trying to fit into existing game genres." From that initial seed came 70 ideas, which the team narrowed down to Splatoon. Its unique flavor comes in part from that wide-open approach. To be fair, this is an interview for promotional purposes, conducted by Nintendo employees with an active stake in making the best impression possible. Who knows how much of this is the unvarnished truth? But it is still striking how little video game terminology shows up and how many of the design questions raised are ones of intuition and common sense.
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