The first console I ever owned was an original NES, and I still have it, carefully packed away in my closet for my children to marvel in pitying awe at on some future date. Yet, back in the early nineties, it was amazing to me. I poured hundreds of hours into Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, The Legend of Zelda, Pac-Man, Metroid and other games before gleefully catching up with my peers in the era of the Super Nintendo. While Sega consoles and both the Playstation and Xbox brands have all had plenty of love from me over the years, there is still nothing quite like the joy of picking up a handful of Nintendo’s best first-party titles on a brand-spanking new console.
And that feeling of pure joy, escapism at its most refined, is exactly why Nintendo has the fanbase it does. Due to a glut of console options and poor-quality games leading into the early eighties, the home console industry in the United States and other developed countries collapsed almost overnight. The field once pioneered by American companies the likes of Atari and Magnavox, generating billions in revenue through arcade and home console hits for more than a decade, simply ceased to exist during the Video Game Crash of 1983. Many believed the concept of home video-gaming as a whole was dead and gone, a fad as quick to pass as the arcade craze years earlier. Then, a little-known company from Japan decided to release their Family Computer, rebranded as an entertainment system, in North America just before the holiday season of 1985.
This company, of course, was Nintendo, and we’re still living in the world it helped build. By guaranteeing quality standards for games and restricting how many titles were released over the course of a year to prevent over-saturation of the market, the company remade an industry, brought it back it life, and gave us a legacy many are still enjoying today. As gigantic as the Playstation and Xbox user-bases are, they exist in large-part because Nintendo showed them how to build a true and lasting fanbase in the first place. Even when facing a financial failure, such as the lackluster run of the Wii U, Nintendo has shown time and again it can innovate, remain at the top of its creative game and give us experiences the likes of the versatile Switch, innovative DS, quirky original Wii and sublime Gameboy with a confidence few companies possess.
That said, Nintendo has made plenty of mistakes along the way. While the original and Super Nintendo consoles were incredibly successful, the popularity of the Sega Genesis cut into the sales of the latter system. By the time the Nintendo 64 rolled out, Sony had already effectively dominated the market and crushed the Sega Saturn with its first Playstation console. In deciding to use cartridges instead of CDs for its game storage, and retaining stricter quality policies than Sony held, Nintendo effectively ensured its rival won over a majority of third-party support and maintained sales far above that of its own system. This trend has been largely upheld in the console generations since.
At the turn of the century, Nintendo and Sony, alongside newcomer Microsoft, launched fresh consoles into the multi-billion dollar a year industry. Competition was fiercer than ever, yet by making several of the same mistakes with outside developers and lacking meaningful online support, the Nintendo Gamecube wound up being the lowest-selling console of the three, despite having an amazing first-party lineup. Fortunately, Nintendo learned several valuable lessons from this, deciding to innovate and connect with fans on their own terms with their next effort. While still lacking the online features of its rivals, the Wii and its motion-tracking technology proved a breakout success for Nintendo, being the first home console from the company to move over 100 million units and outsell its Sony counterpart.
Towards the end of its life, however, the Wii suffered from a lack of support and innovation, while the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were picking up and maintaining momentum. In terms of hardware, the Wii was a glorified Gamecube, so its internals couldn’t keep up with the graphic and performance fidelity of its fellow consoles. So, while it technically won the sales contest for the generation, the Wii left its successor hanging while Sony was busy making sure the Playstation 4 avoided the early mistakes of its predecessor.
Next, enter the Wii U. The poorest-selling console in Nintendo’s history by a notable margin, the successor to the mighty Wii was an exercise in how to develop and release a successor console the wrong way. Launched too late, with a needless primary accessory alongside an ineffective marketing campaign while once again failing to boast the online features, third-party support and processing power of its rivals, the system was pretty much doomed from the start. In the age of huge Switch success, its easy to forget Nintendo was bleeding money just a couple of years ago. The one bright spot for the company during this time was its 3DS handheld console, the most reliable business niche for the company.
Since the original Gameboy launched in 1989, Nintendo has been effectively untouchable in the handheld console space. Many challengers have come and gone, from Sega’s Neo Geo to Sony’s Playstation Portable, yet none have truly destabilized the Big N’s dominance of this market. The Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS and 3DS have all been massive success stories, and this is where the Switch finds itself positioned perfectly. The 3DS is a seven year old system, and has seen several iterations. The Playstation 4 and Xbox One are well established and unlikely to be displaced this far into the console cycle, so Nintendo took a page from the Wii U gamepad’s playbook and pushed the concept further, to huge success.
Giving us the best of both worlds, you can now take your beautiful home-console with you, while Nintendo combines its preeminence in handhelds with innovation in it’s home console space. We are now given the first true hybrid console, where core Pokemon titles exist alongside full Zelda titles you can take with you on the go. If you want to play your games on the TV, pop it on the dock, if you’re leaving and know you have a wait, click the joy cons on and be on your merry way. This is Nintendo at its best: simple, flexible, fun. And better yet, they don’t need to split development time and resources between two different systems. It’s all under one roof now.
I was playing my NES classic with my wife the other day, and it hit me just how much of my gaming life has been guided by the expectations laid down when I was barely able to speak or walk. Whether a given Nintendo console was successful or not, they have always, every single time, released amazing games for their systems. Quality is their standard, pure entertainment is their calling card, and it has been from the beginning. Whatever the future holds for our beloved Japanese friends, one thing is all but guaranteed: we should have years, even decades more, of quality games, systems and experiences ahead of us. That is a future worth buying into.
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