The past year was, as the company put it, a "transformational" period for Nintendo. But no one would have ever predicted just how transformational.

In many ways, Nintendo at the end of 2015 isn't all that different from Nintendo at the start of 2015, in terms of its position within the game industry. Sales of the Wii U home console continue languishing even after a much-needed injection of critically acclaimed games. The portable 3DS appears very much on the decline, with dwindling hardware sales and game schedule that hasn't impressed.

It's depressing to think that Nintendo is facing greater and greater struggles to continue to produce its own trailblazing game hardware. Throughout its history, Nintendo has constantly been ahead of the game, introducing so many of the play control features we now take for granted on game platforms, pushing forward with novel ideas that expand what we can do with games in a way that it wouldn't be able to if it was not in the hardware business. It's been able to create unique software like Super Mario Maker that wouldn't function nearly as well on a generic hardware device (or wouldn't be made at all in a more competitive environment). A game industry without Nintendo hardware is a lesser one, so when Nintendo starts to struggle with the fundamentals of the business, it's worrying.

The idea that this game release or that one will improve the company's short-term outlook is very much over at this point. What's needed to alter Nintendo's trajectory are big moves that aren't made in a day. To that end, 2015 was about positioning itself to become a different company. Its huge moves were about signaling significant changes in how the venerable game maker approaches its craft. As the year comes to a close, the pins are set up. All that's left is to roll the ball and pray.

Nintendo kicked off 2015 with Amiibos. Lots and lots of Amiibos. When the interactive figurines based on popular (and unpopular) characters sold out instantly, Nintendo wasted no time announcing more and more variations. Of course, what people wanted was some communication about if and when sold-out figures would return to stores, not an announcement of new ones they'd have to camp out for. With print runs incredibly low and some people getting more than $100 for figurines that cost $12.99, the first half of 2015 saw a lot of camping and disappointment until Nintendo took serious action to deflate the Amiibo bubble.

But selling millions of Amiibos didn't do much to juice sales of games and consoles. January saw the release of the New Nintendo 3DS model in the US alongside a game fans had long sought, a portable remake of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The New Nintendo 3DS has a significantly better stereoscopic 3-D effect, a second analog stick, and more power. But a year later, Nintendo has barely tapped these features. Just one game, Xenoblade Chronicles, capitalizes on the increased processing power. Small wonder the system has had little effect on flagging 3DS platform sales.

Nintendo

The year started strongly for Wii U. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse was one of Nintendo's first games in years to make great use of touchscreen controls, and featured a gorgeous Claymation-esque aesthetic. (If you're a new Wii U owner and missed that, it's well worth going back for.)

The Transformation Begins

You'd be forgiven for thinking Nintendo would spend 2015 sort of puttering along with low-volume hardware and largely overlooked games. That's how it's spent many a year in the past. But it wasn't even April before Nintendo dropped a bomb and said it would do the one thing it had said it would never do: bring its games to smartphones. To show it was serious about "aggressively" entering mobile gaming, Nintendo struck a major financial bargain with Japanese mobile firm DeNA. But it didn't say much about the content it might create, other than saying it didn't want to aggressively monetize content to land big-spending "whales."

Apparently eager to keep reporters from saying Nintendo was abandoning consoles, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata took a moment to say a dedicated gaming device called NX was in the works. Here, too, the company offered scant details. Still, Nintendo's stock jumped, which was kinda the point of the announcements.

Bad news soon followed the good: The Legend of Zelda for Wii U, a game announced in January 2013, wouldn't land this year as planned and wouldn't appear at E3 Expo. Zelda delays aren't unusual—we'd predicted the delay as soon as Nintendo announced the 2015 release date—but people expected it to be at E3.

Even before E3 started, another announcement: Nintendo is working with Universal to create theme park attractions. This is something the company had never explored, and it all was of a piece with Amiibos and smartphone games: Nintendo owns some of the most recognized characters in the world; why not put them in more places where people can discover them?

Nintendo

Nintendo rarely adds characters to its legendary roster, which made Splatoon, released in May, a breath of fresh air. The game is another transformational title for Nintendo, a paint-splattering twist on the multiplayer shooter genre with squid-child characters loved by fans. Wii U was slowly building a library of must-have games.

E3: Nintendo Puts On the Brakes

The annual E3 Expo is all about getting players excited for the future. Nintendo's press briefing followed Sony's, which featured a series of rapid-fire announcements of some seriously huge games. Surely Nintendo had big Wii U and 3DS news. Days earlier it had announced that the legendary 8-bit game Mother was finally coming to the US as a Wii U downloadable game. Dropping that news early, and keeping Zelda under wraps, left people wondering what it had in store for the big day.

In short: Not much. Nintendo announced just two new Wii U games, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival and Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, both of which arrived for the holidays and were criticized for thin gameplay. Wii U fans awaiting a new high-definition Metroid Prime game instead got a portable, multiplayer spinoff that went over like snow cones in December. (Federation Force could actually turn out great when it ships in 2016, but the reaction was not good.)

Tragedy Strikes

Iwata had not attended E3, saying work was keeping him in Japan. What happened next was tragic: Although appearing to be in reasonably good health, Iwata died on July 11 after a brief fight with bile duct cancer. Iwata's death was more than a blow to Nintendo and a loss to all who knew him. The gaming world lost someone who was actively, passionately, and thoroughly engaged in reimagining the medium. He was simply irreplaceable.

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

It's quite sad he wasn't around to see what happened next: Super Mario Maker, released in September, was classic Nintendo brilliance. It wasn't the fact that the game allowed you to create Mario levels, but the fact that the creation software was so well-tuned that it was great fun spending hours meticulously doing so. The game, released to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., reintroduced the classic gameplay to a new generation. And it's a piece of software that finally makes good use of the Wii U's GamePad touchscreen controller—one I doubt will be equaled during the rest of Wii U's life span.

A New Nintendo

Just days after Mario Maker's release, Nintendo announced plans for the company's path forward without Iwata. Longtime employee Tatsumi Kimishima, whose roles had included CEO of Nintendo of America, would take the top slot. Nintendo veterans Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda would become "fellows" advising Kimishima. The company went further, consolidating many game development teams into single units. This was another way that Nintendo would be a far different company at year's end; Nintendo was significantly shaking up its entire organizational structure.

Kimishima's big debut came during an analyst meeting in October where he announced Nintendo's first smartphone app: Miitomo, a communications game using the popular "Mii" avatar characters. It is reminiscent of successful projects like Animal Crossing and Tomodachi Life, with some twists only mobile gaming make possible. Still, it did not go over well with investors, and Nintendo's stock dropped significantly.

While Nintendo would wait until 2016 to discuss more about smartphone games and NX, it still needed to update Wii U and 3DS owners on their future. Satoru Iwata had always hosted the Nintendo Direct livestreams, and it took a few months for the company to regroup and deliver another. When it came, Nintendo didn't make any major announcements. It didn't seem like the sort of presentation that suggested that 2016 would be a big year for Wii U and 3DS. The company did commit to releasing The Legend of Zelda next year, and to releasing a high-definition remake of Twilight Princess early in the year. Beyond that, the company offered incremental updates, giving the impression that Wii U and 3DS will soldier on as everyone waits for something big.

What To Look for in 2016

As the year comes to a close, the predominant question is whether NX, the new game platform, will appear in 2016. The Wall Street Journal reported in October that Nintendo delivered NX development kits, suggesting things are moving along swiftly. If NX can indeed make it out this year, it could be a turnaround for Nintendo if and only if the hardware is designed in such a way that consumers want to buy it and fit it into their increasingly device-loaded lives. This is not impossible, just difficult.

If the prevailing wisdom—that NX will somehow combine Nintendo's portable and home businesses into a single platform or even device—turns out to be true, this will be a benefit to Nintendo. It's currently trying to maintain two wholly separate game platforms in an increasingly difficult environment, when there's simply no reason to: The home and portable consoles should play the same set of games, perhaps with minor differences. This will let Nintendo, for instance, develop one single Mario Kart game and satisfy all of its customers, instead of doing what it did this generation, which is to have to create two of every game (or make split-the-baby decisions about which of its divided userbases gets which game).

But more than that, if NX can play Wii U games on the go, that's adding a tremendous amount of value to an already-existing library of software. With PlayStation Vita almost a non-entity at this point, Nintendo has the "dedicated gaming portable" market almost entirely to itself, and that seems like a better avenue to pursue with NX at this point than the home console biz, which is currently dominated by a resurgent Sony and Microsoft.

If Nintendo does plan on releasing the NX in 2016, it had better start talking about it soon. And it really, really should be firing on all cylinders for a 2016 holiday season release. The idea of Wii U and 3DS going through another Christmas with this bare-minimum software support is disheartening. This year was tough enough; 2016 without NX would be simply brutal for Nintendo. Mobile games will be a bright spot, and certainly Nintendo's name cachet will cause its early apps to have fairly huge launches. Nintendo is promising five mobile games in the first year, and I would expect it will try a variety of different game genres to see what works best. In other words, 2016 is the year you're most likely to see your mom playing a Nintendo game again.

The Nintendo that emerges from 2016 will be even more radically transformed, but as I've said in the past, whether you like the transformed Nintendo is still up in the air.