The Nintendo Entertainment System brought gaming home. Before Nintendo, video games were just a nerdy fad. After Nintendo, Mario was an icon as known as Superman, and Christmas trees were held up with stacks of games and the console itself. Living rooms became the new social area for teenagers, gathered around the tube for another try through King Koopa's Castle.
With such a great product to ignite video game culture, it's no wonder Nintendo is alive and kicking today, and competing fiercely with two other companies! But only months before the NES launched, the video game industry had almost died, washed out of American soil.
Retailers and consumers alike were sour on video games. Atari had cornered the market and went wild, mass-publishing any scrap of code it could get to resemble a game and fit into a shiny box. Hundreds of titles went out, and only a handful were worth playing. With no video game magazines to give unbiased reviews, consumers could only purchase and pray. They lost. Atari's bank account won.
Things were bad, but the one game to shatter the industry's spine would be a movie-based game: E.T. on the Atari. Allegedly programmed by one guy in only six weeks, millions of copies were shipped to launch with the fabulous family movie. Families went right from the theater to Toys "R" Us and then went right to the garbage dump after five minutes of playtime. Literally. Almost.
E.T.'s first run sold moderately on package design, but word of mouth spread fast, and millions of unsold copies are currently buried in a New Mexico landfill. After that, consumers decided they'd taken enough flak. Sales plummeted, and stores saved precious shelf real estate by moving games to the bargain bins.
But that holiday season, Mario came to dinner. Stores were awfully pessimistic about how this game system would perform better than the last? That Mario guy is cool, but how will it sell?
To promote its system, Nintendo took a large financial risk, offering to re-purchase any unsold consoles at the end of the holiday season. Retailers couldn't refuse the offer, but in the end, it didn't matter.
Mario, man. Joyful news spread from living room to schoolyard and back to living room, and then to shopping cart. Everyone wanted to play Mario. He was cool. He was hip. If you had a Nintendo, there was a reason to hang out at your house. An "in" key to socialization, and a whole lot of fun. And you didn't just play video games, you played NINTENDO. There was no other. Sales soared, and dozens of third party developers entered the game, padding the system with gaming history's best franchises. Mega Man, Contra, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior they all began on the ol' 8 bit NES.
Though new companies like Sega would steal a bit of the pie, fighting solidly with iconic characters and titles of equal quality, Nintendo was not dethroned. Furthermore, Nintendo's expanded territory into handheld gaming, powered first by Tetris and later by the original, addicting, and social-friendship-endorsing Pokemon series kept gamers addicted and loyal. Sega CD and 32X came and went; the SNES beat them all. New installments of historic franchises set up camp on the 16 bit cart format.
It wasn't until Sony dug a surprise foothold that Nintendo's sales began to slow, and oh man, did they slow. The PlayStation, using the newest CD-ROM format delivered exactly what gamers craved; sharp graphics, clear sound, and domestic development teams for lower overall prices. Nintendo countered with their cartridge-based Nintendo 64but games were trickier to develop for and pricier to produce, which publishers passed onto consumers.
Friendly developers left in a hurry. Developing on a format almost considered archaic compared to these newfangled CD's sent Squaresoft to Sony, producing everyone's favorite RPG, Final Fantasy 7. Street Fighter's next installment hit the PS1 as well, and new types of games like Parappa the Rapper and Dance Dance revolution made good use of the sound-friendly media format. Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima's cinematic masterpiece of espionage gaming, battered the sales charts and took home consoles with it.
The N64 years were rough, but by no means did Nintendo die. Their tried and true killer appsMario, Zelda, and Pokemon kept them afloat while fabulous in house developer RARE brought us Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie and Conker; enough games to please most. Super Smash Brothers wasn't quite Street Fighter, but did the job well enough, and a pair of exclusive, niche RPG'sOgre Battle 64 and Paper Mario-kept sales afloat.
Naturally, Sony followed the PlayStation with the PlayStation 2, a more powerful console that sported a DVD player the new thing at the time. So Nintendo countered with the Gamecube. Hoping to reclaim its lost fan base, the cube included four party-friendly controller ports and a more powerful GPU than the competitor, but sold far, far less consoles than Sony.
It appeared Nintendo had been too little, too late. A few developers came back, some porting their titles to Gamecube and PS2 simultaneously, and Capcom took advantage of the cube's powerful guts to break ground with Resident Evil 4, even if it was ported later to the PS2. But Nintendo's stigma of kiddy games got the best of it, and with millions more PS2 consoles in living rooms than Gamecubes, developing solely on PlayStation became a wiser choice for massive revenue.
Still, the cube did not fail. Hardly soaring, it still moved smoothly on the wheels of the trump franchisesbut with the Xbox and Playstation 2 holding the console market, the future for Nintendo was quite uncertain.
Until, of course, the Wii.
Today, the Nintendo Wii is creaming the sales charts. A year and a half after its launch, the console is still difficult to find on store shelves for longer than fifteen minutes. Microsoft's Xbox 360 is doing well by catering to core gamers with gory shooters and awesome online multiplayer, but the Playstation 3 lags far behind. Sony has experienced a bit of developer reverse; Devil May Cry 4 went multiplat, and Dragon Quest 9 moved exclusively to Nintendo's touch screen handheld, the DS. Yet the PS3 has so much more hardware power the graphics are leeter and the sound is sweeter how in the world is the Wii doing so well?
When Nintendo told the world the Wii would use motion sensitive controls, we collectively gawked in horror. Few believed it would work, but like a true master of the arts, Nintendo proved us wrong. While we waxed the car in the stupid circular motion, Nintendo ooed and ahhed us with new installments of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, and the great Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The Wii is cheaper to purchase than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and third party developers have made some awesome and truly unique games with the smooth "Wiimote" controls, which are easy and fun to adapt to.
Wait. Fun? Games are fun, and not serious business?
Nintendo is securing their future with the development of fun games. Not just violence or online multiplayerno, Nintendo's titles are first and foremost FUN to play. You're guaranteed to enjoy yourself once you boot up that Wii. And since developers know there are more Wiis purchased than PS3's or Xbox's, the console is their first choice for quality titles.
But aren't other developers making "fun" games too? And isn't fun a matter of personal choice?
Of course. The Xbox 360 and PS3 both have their share of awesome, awesome games but for now, the Wii sails far ahead. Nintendo has been the most successful this generation because they've never forgotten what video gaming is really about; good ol' fashioned enjoyment and thumb-blistering entertainment.
With the Nintendo DS filling our pockets and the Wii next to our TV sets, Nintendo's future is certainly, certainly strong.