"We wanted to make a new game and a new play experience."

Splatoon features a single-player campaign and a one-on-one local multiplayer mode, but the real heart of the experience is the online play. Here, two teams of four compete with one another to take control of a level. This is done by spraying ink: each team has a color, and whichever manages to cover more of the map by the time the round ends is the winner. As you play, you can upgrade to new, better weapons — including a particularly satisfying giant paint roller — and gear that makes you faster or gives your guns a bit more punch.

One of the defining aspects of the game is its unique sense of movement. The characters in Splatoon are sort of were-squid creatures, able to transform from a humanoid to a squid at the push of a button. In human form they can shoot guns and navigate tricky jumps, while squids can speed through like-colored ink to surprise enemies and refill your ink reserves.

According to Nogami, this unique, somewhat strange set-up is part of the reason why Nintendo decided to build a brand new franchise, instead of simply creating something like Super Mario Paintball. "We started from a point where we wanted to make a new game and a new play experience," he explains. "And once we started to decide on the elements — from the characters to the world — we realized that this was going to be its own thing, and not, for example, something in the Mario series."

Splatoon represents a number of important shifts for Nintendo. Not only is it a brand new franchise in a genre that's new for the company, but it is also the most online-focused game Nintendo has ever made. The company has been infamously slow to adapt to the internet, and while games like Mario Kart 8 have dabbled with online play and DLC, Splatoon is the first major step — Nintendo even has a schedule of free, post-launch content planned, to keep players interested with new maps and gear.