What did Nintendo do to lose the top spot in the gaming industry -- and what might be keeping them from getting it back? Games Radar's Brett Elston lists his top seven Nintendo screw-ups, and I agree with... some of them. I certainly don't truck with his thought that the Wii is a mistake, or that Nintendo's belated entry into online gaming had any net negative impact on the company.
I tell you what.
Go read Brett's piece, and then you can read my list (below), and tell me who wins. Please vote for me.
6. Virtual Boy. This has to be on the list, but to be honest it's not as if it was that big of a disaster. They cut their losses quickly and didn't try to force it down people's throats for very long. It's not as if customer loyalty to Nintendo was affected that much. Still, it never should have been released at that price and at that level of tech. It also turned head-mounted gaming displays into a taboo, which I think is unfortunate.
5. Snubbing Sony. Even if Nintendo had given away a little too much when they made the deal that would make PlayStation a Super NES CD-ROM add-on, they would have lost a lot less than they did by telling them to hit the curb back in 1993.
4. Creating a hostile environment for developers that made them want to jump ship to Sony. Censorship, high cost of goods, exclusivity contracts. Brett covered this pretty well.
3. Not having a followup to Goldeneye on theGameCube at launch. This was absolutely imperative and they didn't even realize it. The reason N64
hung on with the crucial older gamer demographic was Bond, and they should have pushed Perfect Dark onto GameCube and shipped the goddamned thing at launch, even if they had to pull a Microsoft-circa-2005 and contract Koreans to finish it.
2. GameCube. After the Nintendo 64, you'd think Nintendo would have been shocked into realizing that they either needed to compete with
Sony and Microsoft on their level or move out of the tech race entirely. GameCube attempted to straddle, and failed because of it.
1. Not putting a CD drive in the Nintendo 64. Ultimately, this is way more important than snubbing Sony, because if Nintendo had done this, it's quite possible that the PlayStation would have gone the way of the
Saturn -- if it even achieved that level of success.
