Nintendo's Expansion Pack trailer is its most-hated video ever

The rollout of Nintendo’s first online “expansion pack” has been met with the world’s deepest sigh from its legions of fans. As if the $50 price tag for a small selection of readily-available Nintendo 64 games wasn’t enough, those games also run like hot garbage. We like to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt, generally speaking, but it’s difficult to quantify this situation as anything but a total mess. That’s how most of the public feels about it, too, if Nintendo’s YouTube channel is any indicator.

The initial Expansion Pack trailer is now officially Nintendo’s most-disliked video ever. More than 121,000 people have hit the thumbs-down icon below the video, while only 17,000 people have given it the thumbs-up. At the time of this writing, the video had received a total of about 1.1 million views.

This Metroid Prime: Federation Force trailer previously held the most-disliked title, Video Games Chronicle notes, but that video never even hit 100K downvotes. And it’s been on YouTube for more than six years now. The Expansion Pack video was only uploaded on October 15. That rapid hate streak is kind of impressive, in a certain light. Right?

An unmitigated disaster — This Expansion Pack could’ve been the Switch Online update revolution we’ve been waiting for. At first glance, it really did seem like bringing N64 and Genesis games to the Switch would be a savior of messianic proportions. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and the details here are, indeed, devilish. The Expansion Pack’s $50 price tag is a lot to ask for games like Yoshi’s Story and Dr. Mario 64, especially when so many third-party retro gaming consoles are available with enormous catalogs.

Now that the Expansion Pack is out in the world, we’ve also discovered the rather debilitating problem of the emulation being overwhelmingly bad. As in unplayable unless you have the patience of a minor god kind of bad. You’d think Nintendo, the company that actually created the Nintendo 64, would be able to emulate it well. Apparently not!

Don’t expect big changes — Nintendo is one of the world’s most beloved brands, and in many regards, it’s gotten to that point by giving fans what they want. In other regards, Nintendo is maddeningly stalwart to the beat of its own drum. You need to look no further than the company’s always-lagging console hardware to understand how it operates.

Public outcry in the form of a hundred thousand or so downvotes isn’t going to force Nintendo’s hand. Nintendo only makes moves that Nintendo wants to make. Sure, we’ll probably get a few dozen more N64 and Genesis games, but Nintendo will release those on its own schedule, not when fans want them. As for the gameplay problems…well, cross your fingers that they’re just growing pains.