When Nintendo first announced the Wii, its latest home video game console, many predicted the upcoming pun-inspiring named machine would end up in the video game console hall of fail along with the Apple Bandai Pippin, Atari Jaguar, and Nintendo's very own Virtual Boy. Many, believing that the Wii was dead on arrival, placed an obituary in the newspaper, gave it a eulogy, dug a grave and were ready to bury it before it was even released. Too bad the Wii decided not to show up to its own funeral.
The success of the Wii was spurred greatly by its innovative controller, a concept that also made Nintendo's first major console success, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, Famicom in Japan) well...successful. After nearly eighty years of being exclusively a playing card producing company, and spending about a little over a decade doing everything from owning a "love hotel" chain to dabbling in the Japanese toy industry, Nintendo entered the video game console industry in 1974, when it gained rights to be the Japanese distributor of the Magnavox Odyssey video game console. The next year, the company expanded into the arcade industry, but returned focus on the console industry in 1977 with the Japanese only release of the first of six Color TV Game home video game consoles. But it was not until the decade of big hair and...more big hair that Nintendo finally hit its stride, starting with the release of the Game & Watch series of handheld LCD video games in 1980.
Right on the heels of the success of the Game & Watch, Nintendo took that prosperity to the next level with the release of Donkey Kong in arcades in 1981. The Big N continued to build on the momentum created by Game & Watch and Donkey Kong by launching the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan in 1983.
Two years later, a redesigned and renamed version (now dubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES) of the Famicom was released in America. Sporting photo-realistic 8-bit graphics (if the photo is of someone made of massive pixels); the NES was launched in a dying video game market here in the states. However, channeling its inner Superman, the NES single-handedly saved the American gaming world from imminent destruction.
One strategy Nintendo employed was developing a different type of controller than the type used by other consoles of the past. Nintendo decided to ditch the usual concept of a joystick altogether and use a unique and innovative method of control: The D-Pad (Direction Pad). Oh, and that game about the plumber and the princess and mushrooms and all that probably had something to do with the success of the NES too...probably.
By 1989, the House of Mario had conquered the home console market in both America and Japan, and ended up doing the same to the handheld market with the development of the Game Boy. In the face of technologically superior competition, the Game Boy still crushed all its rivals. Not only did the Game Boy become a pop culture icon, but it also unleashed several other entertainment juggernauts into the world. Pokmon and Tetris, just to name a couple, all originated on the diagonally 2.6 inch, black and green LCD screen of the Game Boy.
After saving the video game world from certain destruction, Nintendo was definitely the Superman of the gaming industry, so it was perfectly befitting when they named their next console the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom in Japan). Exhibiting all the superpowers of Superman (except x-ray vision, heat vision, ice breath, super strength, super speed, flight, and the ability to display every single one of its muscles through spandex), the 16-bit SNES (launched in 1991) won the fifth generation console war by selling forty-nine million units. Speaking of Superman, the very, very, very less-than-stellar game incarnation of that property for one of Nintendo's later consoles (the Nintendo 64) was symbolic of a nearly ten year slump of not so successful console releases following the SNES.
Because of the massive success of the Game Boy, Nintendo requested the Game Boy's father, Gunpei Yokoi, to beget another "son". Born in 1995, the new "Boy" quickly became the red-headed step-child of Nintendo. And with the monochromatic display giving another meaning to "red eye", the color red seemed to be a prevalent characteristic of the Virtual Boy.
The year after the launch of the Virtual Boy was a busy year for Nintendo. For the first time, Nintendo released a handheld and home console within the same year. Picking up where the original Game Boy left off, the slimmer Game Boy Pocket continued to reinforce Nintendo's portable supremacy*. Unfortunately, their next home console did not fare as well.
In spite of having another innovative controller, being the exclusive console home to the masterpiece called Super Mario 64, and being the first console to use 3-D graphics, Nintendo's next console, the Nintendo 64 could not defeat the almighty Sony PlayStation and its optical disc format. Deciding to finally embrace the optical disc format (albeit in a smaller way), Nintendo released the N64's successor, the GameCube, in 2001. Despite being the cutest console by a mile, the GameCube was boxed out by console making newcomer Microsoft and the undisputed champion of the gaming world PlayStation 2. Still though, Nintendo continued its handheld dominance through the releases of the Game Boy Light (Japan only) and Game Boy Color in 1998, followed by the 32-bit Game Boy Advance in 2001. Refusing to letup, in 2003, a more portable and brighter screened version of the GBA, the Game Boy Advance SP was released, superseded by the original Nintendo DS and its remake's (Nintendo DS Lite) launch in 2004 and 2006 respectively. In between of the two DS's, Nintendo also launched the last of the Game Boy line, entitled the Game Boy Micro, in 2005.
Realizing that there wasn't room for three console makers that catered exclusively to a single market, Nintendo decided to engage the untapped casual gamer demographic. It was all or nothing going with this risky move, but the Wii's sales numbers pretty much answers the question whether it was a good strategy or not. With the Wii finally bringing back the home console glory Nintendo hadn't had in over a decade, the 2008 release of the Nintendo DSi brought back the handheld console glory they had not possessed in a whole ten minutes.
As of 2009, there has been confirmation of yet another version of the Nintendo DS, ensuring the continued reign of Nintendo as handheld king. But what is more remarkable is the fact that the doomed to fail Wii managed to do just the opposite of that, becoming the best selling game system in the world. Nintendo is once again the king of consoles, but with competitors set to take its throne using a similar method Nintendo used to get that throne, the former playing card company must continue to innovate if it plans on staying sovereign.
* Even though it had "Boy" in its name, the Virtual Boy was not part of the Game Boy line of consoles.