Nintendo is getting its own animation studio, Nintendo Pictures

Some interesting news out of Nintendo this week, as THR reports that the Japanese game company has just acquired a new animation studio, soon to be rebranded as Nintendo Pictures. Specifically, the Mario makers have picked up visual content company Dynamo Pictures Inc., with the intent of re-launching it this October as an in-house animation studio.

Adaptations of video games have become increasingly big business in recent years, as films like Detective Pikachu and the Sonic The Hedgehog movies have managed to shake off at least a little of the stigma usually attached to the form. (Sony, meanwhile, took a similar swing with Uncharted, and is clearly banking on its The Last Of Us adaptation at HBO to break some of the game adaptation curse.)

Although Nintendo has never been shy about licensing out its games to outside studios to turn into TV or film—from the live-action/animated hybrid Super Mario Super Show, to the Super Mario Bros. movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, to the upcoming Illumination animated Mario feature, just to pick one plumber-based franchise from the company’s deep catalogue—it’s never gotten seriously into producing its own content.

Not that the acquisition of Dynamo Pictures necessarily means that there’ll soon be infinite Zelda movies rolling off the shelves indefinitely, mind you; the studio mostly produces CG for video games as well as TV shows. so it’s just as likely that the company launched Nintendo Pictures to bolster its own game production, more than to craft that Metroid movie you’ve been dreaming of. That being said, THR notes that the studio does intend to “focus on development of visual content utilizing Nintendo IP,” which certainly sounds like fans of the godawful Donkey Kong Country animated series from the 1990s might finally get that sequel their perverted hearts have been pining for lo these many years.