Damn, it’s quite the time for buyouts isn’t it? Indeed, with Microsoft recently buying Activision-Blizzard, Sony buying Bungie and Nintendo buying Next Level Games, it seems like the last year or so has been packed to bursting with companies buying third parties to bolster their resources for game development.

And it seems the trend isn’t stopping either. Nope, just out of the blue, Nintendo have acquired a company called SRD too, with the aim of bringing their work in house.
But don’t expect anything too massive of a change. Why? Because despite their ‘independent’ status, SRD has actually working with Nintendo for a very, very long time.

So long in fact, that they’ve actually been credited for their work on the original Donkey Kong, and were the people who ended up making the prototype that’d become the original Super Mario Bros. Since then they’ve also assisted with just about every major Nintendo game of note (sometimes as the main programmers behind the project), worked on Game Builder Garage for the Switch…

And even had their main offices inside Nintendo’s HQ. So while they technically weren’t a subsidiary before, they were close enough they may as well have been.

Regardless, Nintendo owns them now. Or will do when the deal officially clears on April 1st 2022. Seems the Nintendo empire just keeps on growing…

Source:

Notification of Nintendo Acquiring SRD (Official Document from Nintendo website)