New patent, trademark point to Nintendogs returning, but for mobile

Ah, Nintendogs, now there’s a name we haven’t heard in a while. The mega-franchise was last seen with Nintendogs + Cats on the Nintendo 3DS, where it didn’t quite hit as hard as it did on the DS. Now it looks like, maybe, possibly, Nintendo is doing something with it again.

During the week, a new patent was released from the United States Patent and Trademark Office suggests something may be happening. Now while it doesn’t say “New Nintendogs”, it does have some illustrations showing a user using their smartphone to place a dog in AR space. These patents are usually very broad and general, so Nintendo could have just used a dog because – that’s what the person creating the patent wanted. The next part is where it gets interesting.

On the same day the patent was filed with the United States government, a trademark for “NINTENDOGS” was filed here in Australia. Both of them were filed on November 5th 2021. This trademark was spotted by Vooks alumni Oliver Brandt over on news.com.au

This capitalised NINTENDOGS is different from the existing “Nintendogs” (lowercase), and Nintendogs + Cats trademark. The newer trademark is slightly different from the latter, with them being Class 9 and 41 trademarks. The newer one is just Class 41, a “game services provided online from a computer network”. Class 9 trademarks specifically are video games. It’s possible that this new Nintendogs if it does exist, isn’t classified as a game and more a video pet or similar, especially as it’s now mobile.

There’s a lot of conjecture there, but the patent, the trademark existing and being filed on the same day, get us – something.

We’ll let you know if anything official is announced.