It seems as if we couldn’t start 2025 without some bad news. According to a post on ResetEra by industry pundit Imran Khan, Nintendo’s Punch-Out series may effectively be dead. In a thread reminiscing about the rather excellent 2009 Wii Punch-Out, Kinda Funny Games Host Imran Khan recounted a story he had with one of the people close to developer Next Level Games.
“The story I was told, and bear in mind this could just be the perspective of one person and no one else, was that there was significantly more backlash against the characters of the Wii game than they expected,” Khan writes. “And this team spent a lot of time assuring Nintendo that they weren’t leaning into bad stereotypes that would get called out this time, so everyone just kind of furrowed their brow and called it done. Especially since other games from that team had much, much higher sales potential.”
That last one is the real kicker more than anything. While Punch-Out Wii was a sales success, it only moved 1.27 million units. Next Level Games’ next project for Nintendo, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the 3DS, would wind up selling over 6 million copies and its follow-up, Luigi’s Mansion 3, would shift over 14 million. Whether or not Punch-Out wasn’t politically correct is hardly relevant when sales just weren’t there to justify the development of a new one.
Khan even suggests as much further down in the thread. “I guess it’s less ‘We can’t do it without stereotypes so let’s not bother!’ and more a World Warriors problem where they can’t fully cut from the past without people rioting,” Khan states. “That and other games from the studio sell like 14 million copies more, so why bother?”
One of the biggest titles on the NES thanks to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, the series was a staple of Nintendo’s early days in the home console market. Having spun off from arcade cabinets, Punch-Out took the relatively simple idea of “boxing” and adapted it into a lightning-fast memorization game that tested players’ reflexes.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
