http://www.gamesradar.com/us/wii/ga...409112833629059
Anywhere you look in the world today, you'll see evidence of Sony's continuing downfall. It seems like every time someone from Sony opens his mouth, we want to twist our own heads off in disbelief. Can't that damn company go one day without embarrassing itself?
But if you think Sony's too cocky, arrogant and detached from the consumer base, you apparently weren't around for Nintendo's heyday. It was once just as influential, bossy and jerkish as Sony is today, and then some. Imagine a company with total control of an industry, where its word is law and no one can stand up against its decrees. Then imagine it falling from power so hard that companies practically lined up to walk on its back.
These are the mistakes that led to Nintendo's downfall. Sure, it's a lovely time for the company now, but if history repeats, Sony will fall, leaving someone else, possibly Nintendo, to get fat and lazy all over again. And by our reckoning, even its current console powerhouse is a possible misstep in the making.
7 - Creating the Wii
Can the same magic that made the DS an international phenomenon happen with a console? Nintendo's betting on it. Betting it all, really.
Because what do you do next? Five years from now, when the PS4 and NextBox show up, they're going to jump in hardware power again. And then Nintendo's left with a machine that looks two generations old instead of one. The motion controls, now considered somewhere in between "the best damn thing that's ever happened in the world" to "gimmicky stupid childish nonsense," will be super played out and exploited. Unless there's some other gameplay innovation on the horizon, Wii could be viewed as a fad, susceptible to the same fickle emotions that killed snap bracelets, pet rocks and Sega. And if Nintendo bites the bullet and gives the machine a visual kick in the pants, well there goes its whole mantra that graphics don't matter. There's just enough steam with this idea to last one generation, and none after that.
Today, the Wii is insanely popular with almost every audience. But if this wave of good vibes ever ends, Nintendo's gonna be stranded. Casuals will be tired of Wii Sports, with no interest in shelling out $50 for a Wii Sports 2, and the typical gamer will me more interested in playing something with a normal controller, one you don't have to clear the room for.
Sure we love Super Paper Mario and can't wait to see Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but do either of these games have anything to do with the Wii Remote's primary function? Nope. And most third party games that find their way onto the system have control setups that baffle even the most hardcore of gamers. Hold B while flicking up to swing a punch? Please. Nintendo better have some crazy unique ideas coming up or we'll have to start clutching our DS systems even closer.
6 - The Virtual Boy
"Eye Advisory: Virtual Boy is for players 7 years and older" - Virtual Boy box
No list of mistakes would be complete without mentioning the world's favorite piece-o-crap gaming device. Launched in 1995, just as the SNES was fading and a year before the N64 would arrive, this "portable" machine was stricken from memory the moment it hit the shelves. For some reason, Nintendo thought people would actually want to strap their heads into a clunky headset that only displayed red visuals on a black background (and caused incredible eye strain after moderate use). The faux-3D images looked like a Game Boy trapped in a crimson-laced Tron nightmare, never once offering the supposed "32-bit" processing power promised on the box.
It was ugly, It was heavy. It was uncomfortable. It was confusing. It was almost 200 damn dollars. Within a year you could find these things for $25, games for $10 and eager merchants desperately trying to get this abomination out of their stores. In a way, the Virtual Boy was the true beginning of the end for Nintendo's unquestioned dominance, the first bizarre misstep in a series of horrible mistakes. Some came before, sure, but they were obscured by the fact that Nintendo was the only game in town. In '95, Sega had chewed up half of the audience and Sony was ready for the rest - a product as ill-conceived as the Virtual Boy couldn't have struck at a worse time.
Virtual Boy's creator, the late Gunpei Yokoi, resigned from Nintendo following this disaster. It's a shame he left (or was forced to leave, as some surprise), as Yokoi is also the father of the gazillion-selling Game Boy. Who knows what other joys he could have brought to this world if he hadn't left the company?
5 - An ongoing battle against online gaming
"Customer's don't want online games." - Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, 2004
"More than six million people are Xbox Live members." - Microsoft press release, 2007
While this quote from Japan Economic Foundation may sound inaccurate today, what with Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection and all, but three years ago the company couldn't have been more anti-online. While Sega Saturn offered a modem, Nintendo never even approached the idea with the N64. A few years later, Dreamcast had a modem built in, the Xbox shipped with broadband support and PS2 rolled out its own way to take the system online. What did GameCube provide? A half-assed broadband adaptor that supported Phantasy Star Online games with zero first-party backing. If you wanted to game online, you did not play with Nintendo.
The rationale, for the time, wasn't without reason - most Japanese players got online in public places, not their homes. Even though the rest of the gaming world goes the other way, Nintendo was more concerned with its homeland than appealing to any other audience. Fair enough, but this led to Microsoft dominating the market with the attractive and easy-to-use Xbox Live.
And once Nintendo finally embraced online gaming, what did we get? Horrendous 16-digit Friend Codes that must be traded before you can play another person. Oh, and these codes aren't system specific - there are different codes for every game you buy. Who needs clever, easy to remember Gamertags when you've got a string of forgettable numbers to trade with each new title? Maybe they're safe for kids; maybe they're total pains in the ass too.
Even with the Wi-Fi Connection going strong on DS, there's still very little effort being put into Wii's online presence. When was the last time you sent a message to someone? Why do we have to wait six months before playing one damn Wii game online in the US (and when we do, it'll be Pokemon Battle Revolution )? If Nintendo had just embraced online gaming when it was in its infancy, it could be the one monopolizing the internet gamer community. As it is, that crowd belongs entirely to Microsoft, and with PS3's Home on the way, we need more than some cutesy Mii people running around to convince us of Nintendo's commitment to one of the fastest growing aspects of modern gaming.
4 - Censorship and the unshakable "kiddy" image
If you're trying to sell video games to kids in the '80s, the last thing you want to be seen as is "uncool." But for a while there it seemed like Nintendo was going out of its way to look and act like a parent desperately trying to protect his children from the outside world yet also appear hip and "with it." Initial censorship, like removing overt religious icons or scenarios from Japanese games, made sense. Scantily clad women would often receive a few extra strands of clothing, that's nothing too crazy either. But the constant badgering of third parties to remove references to Hitler or words such as "devil," "death" or "hell," had to be grating. Even more so when Nintendo's main rival, Sega, didn't seem to really mind a lot of the same content. Sega also left the precious blood in the first home port of Mortal Kombat - Nintendo saw fit to force publisher Acclaim to replace the blood with sweat.
With this one act, the thought that Nintendo was a little too family friendly came out into the open for all the playgrounds and college dorms to see. We can't rip off someone's head in the Super NES Mortal Kombat? Fine. See you at Matt's house. He has a Genesis.
Once Mortal Kombat II came to the SNES, the blood was a go, due to the verbal and sales thrashing Nintendo received. But this problem isn't about lost sales, it's about perception. After this point, it wasn't "cool" to like Nintendo anymore. All the fanatics of the '80s were ga-ga over Sonic the Hedgehog, and all the mushroom-eating plumbers in the world couldn't make the company seem as edgy as Sega. To top it all off, once the videogame violence topic hit congress, Nintendo brought its own version of MK to prove how "safe" its version was compared to Sega's uncensored Kombat. Essentially, Nintendo was tattling on Sega. If there's a better way to simultaneously look like an asshat and make the other guy appear cool as hell, we'd love to hear it.
Nintendo, once the epitome of cool, was surpassed by Sega, then by Sony and astonishingly fast by Microsoft (the Xbox went from non-issue to major player in about a month). And whenever it tried to cover this image up with the "in your face" ads of the "Play It Loud" era, kids across the country were smart enough to tell the difference between real cool and real stupid.
3 - Pissing off the third parties from day one
There's no denying that Nintendo brought the videogame industry back from the brink of disaster. You also can't deny how much it used this leverage to lord over anyone who wanted to use the insanely successful NES to make money. If you could get a game published on the first Nintendo system, you had it made. But first you had to jump through whatever hoops Nintendo laid out for you. And you did it with a big fake smile on your face.
First you had to place an order for Nintendo-made cartridges - minimum of 10,000 - and Nintendo makes money off of each sold cart. Then you had to submit your game and all its related aspects (commercials, artwork, all of it) to Nintendo for approval. If it wanted to, Nintendo could censor whatever it liked.
The best part is the strict limit Nintendo placed upon its software rivals. No matter how many games you'd like to sell, you could only produce five games per year on the system. The thought was, if you can only make five per year, they're bound to be good, right? Not a bad idea... unless you're trying to make back the costs of buying all those blasted NES carts. Oh, and you couldn't release the game on any other platform for two effing years. That kinda stung too.
As game prices rose in the mid-'90s, Nintendo was able to put out its own games at reasonable cost - meanwhile, third parties, still paying cartridge royalties, had to bump their prices up to break even, causing another rift between the money Publisher X gobbled up versus the vast riches Nintendo usurped. With a near-90% stranglehold on the videogame marketplace, anything the company wanted, it got. Until congress got wind of this, that is.
After a hailstorm of bad press and allegations of monopolistic practices, Nintendo was more or less forced to ease up on its restrictions. Publishers could freely put their games on rival platforms (ensuring the Genesis' success) and could also finally control their gaming orders and inventory. But the point is, it took the actions of Washington to make it happen, and once it did, software publishers were all too ready to hand out their once-exclusive titles to someone else.
Cut to today, when Nintendo's allegedly not giving third parties access to its all-important Mii code, or info on how to take a Wii game online. The past two Nintendo platforms, N64 and GameCube, started strong with third parties, then fell flat after the first two years. Will the Wii be any different?
2 - Pretty much everything involving the Nintendo 64
Remember those pricy cartridges we mentioned earlier? Imagine having to continue paying for them in a time when Sega and Sony both went to CD, an immensely cheaper medium that also allowed much greater storage capacity. That's what publishers had to deal with during the entire run of the N64 (1996 through 2001). As the rest of the gaming world switched to an established format, Nintendo stuck to its proprietary-formatted guns, ensuring slightly higher prices for games and lesser quality sound for an entire generation. Count how many memorable soundtracks there were on the PlayStation. Then look at the N64. Pretty grim, eh?
But it wasn't about sound, obviously. Developers wanted to use these fancy new 3D graphics to tell stories, to show players worlds that just weren't possible on the Genesis and SNES. The N64's power was fine, but the limited storage space and high price of an N64 cart prevented games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII from even being possible on the system. Squaresoft was once an all-Nintendo publisher, giving the company its valued Final Fantasy series exclusively. Once Square jumped ship and ran to Sony and its lovely CD format, the console war was already over. Hello cutscenes, hello CD-quality music, hello beautiful presentation.
But before the war had even begun, Nintendo was pissing people off. Instead of courting as many third party developers as possible, it tried to focus on a small number of hand-picked developers to keep its system afloat. Nintendo actually had the balls to call it a "dream team," basically saying to everyone else, "if you you're not part of our clique, oh well." As a result, the bountiful support Nintendo enjoyed on the SNES was drying up, and its own titles were trickling out too slow to pick up the slack.
We're still not done. The N64's controller was the most ghastly thing the world had seen since the Virtual Boy. Yeah, the analog stick was revolutionary, but did you look at the rest of this beast? Did you ever see a non-gamer or even a casual player try to hold it after playing a PlayStation game? It was painful. Hell, even us seasoned gamers couldn't get over the plastic trident, clearly designed to work with Mario and Zelda alone. Third parties had a constant battle to map controls that made sense onto the controller. It was especially unfriendly to fighting games, so no Tekken, Street Fighter or Soul Edge for us. Even more titles lost to Sony.
Then there's the 64DD, a laughable add-on that answered a question nobody ever asked. The re-writable discs were yet another Nintendo-owned property it could charge for, and its key titles were... wait a second, there were no key titles. Let's just move on. It's like Nintendo didn't watch add-ons kill Sega a few years earlier.
The N64 may have spawned some of the best games ever made, but honestly, how many systems can make the same claim? Sure we adore Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007 and Super Mario 64, but most of the other titles are crap. This entire console generation was like watching a king get quartered in front of the entire village. And you know what? Our number one mistake explains why it's all Nintendo's fault.
1 - Opening the doors to PlayStation
If there's one moment in time that forever changed the videogame world, it's the day Nintendo stabbed Sony in the back in front of the whole world.
Multimedia isn't much of a buzzword these days, but back in the early '90s, it was everything. Entire libraries could fit on a disc, symphonies could finally sound crystal clear and even educational games could be played all off of one disc. CD-ROM supporters wanted this medium in as many hands as possible, and Nintendo was the best possible way to get it there.
Electronics superstar Philips decided to ally itself with Nintendo and bring a CD attachment to the Super NES. With Nintendo's clout, Philips' CD tech could reach millions in record time. It seemed like a mutually beneficial setup - except for the fact that Nintendo had already signed a contract with Sony in 1988 for pretty much the exact same thing.
This contract had Sony creating a "Play Station" that would feature an SNES cartridge port and a CD slot for new, enhanced games. Problem was, this contract gave Sony complete control over any CD-based games that touched the system, Mario included. Once Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, realized that he would not have the final say on something with Nintendo's name on it, he demanded a solution that put Nintendo back in the saddle. The result was announcing the new partnership with Phillips during the 1991 CES trade show, despite the fact that Sony had just announced the Nintendo-powered Play Station the night before.
This slap in the face was unheard of for several reasons. First, a Japanese company ditching another for a foreign rival was unspeakable. Second, such blatant disregard for contracts made the company appear like a power-hungry monster, always trying to get its way regardless of who it has to humiliate or crush. Third, how the hell did Yamauchi's signature get on that Sony contract in the first place? Nintendo had made its vast fortune on licensing games, so hearing that it gave Sony the rights to any and all future CD titles was appalling.
The three giant companies did finally work out a crazy ménage a trios agreement, but wouldn't you know it, the whole deal fell apart. Nintendo went its own way, Philips carried on with its terrible CD-I system and Sony, while briefly considering abandoning the venture altogether, decided to make the Play Station a standalone system that played Sony-branded games. Thus, the PlayStation was born. Nintendo effectively created its own worst enemy.
Sony's CD resources led to the defection of Square, countless exclusives that Nintendo never saw and for the first time ever, a sound beating at retail. Sega's own inept ability to provide gamers with quality products essentially left the whole industry open to Sony's powerful charge. After a bit of back-and-forth in 1995 and 1996, the PlayStation jumped ahead in 1997 and has been on top ever since. It's crushing blitz forever buried Sega and put Nintendo on perpetual defense, a position it never once had to consider.
So now, the publishers and developers of the world had a viable alternative to consider. No more expensive cartridges, no more Sega bumbling its tacky add-ons, no more insane restrictions. Games became part of pop culture, and the PlayStation went on to become one of the best-selling objects in electronics history. If Nintendo had merely tried to rework that original Sony contract (something Sony probably wouldn't have gone for anyway), things could have been much different.
But, after all the ludicrous profits of the '80s, the slow and steady downfall of the '90s, and the gradual regaining of trust and cool factor going on today, the company is poised to be back on top again. The DS, a seemingly mental design decision, turned out to be the clear winner of the current systems. And Wii, well, if the momentum lasts, Nintendo's got nothing to worry about. Let's just hope it remembers its own history and steers clear of any more jerkholish moves.
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
