It is mostly credited to Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy:
"Yokoi articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology". [...] "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product"
Nintendo consoles have always been a bit behind technologically; but I think this became really accentuated with the Wii, which was by design not that far ahead of the Game Cube- when the rest of the industry went full steam ahead fighting on specs.
I think there's a bit of a darker side as well. The Wii was so unbelievably successful, and profitable that it seems to have created a kind of corporate-level of addiction, and subsequent profit-seeking behavior. The Wii was underpowered, quirky, but just happened to hit all of the notes that a ton of people who hadn't played games before (and would later move on to playing on phones and tablets) were looking for.
Most of all, they made a profit per unit sale of the Wii, when the standard at the time was (is?) to sell consoles at a loss and make it up on fees and sales of games. They made profit on the base Wii, then they profited from all of the other shit they made up to sell for it. When the time came to move on from that gold mine to something new, they predictably tried to strike gold a second time.
They didn't.
Now they're trying a third time, and I suspect it will end badly for them. They've increasingly lost sight of what made them great, blinded by the allure of unbelievably quick and vast quantities of hard cash.
Nintendo has a history of doing quirky things, in an effort to differentiate themselves. They've always been innovative.
- Directional Pad (NES)
- Shoulder buttons on controller (SNES)
- third handle on a controller and controllers with expansion slots (N64)
- portable gaming systems (starting with gameboy, which didn't even have a backlit screen)
- subsequent iterations that included: folding designs (SP), Touch screens for interactivity (DS), game sharing (DS), 3D (3DS, designed before 3D was "a thing")
- RFID out-of-game experiences (Amiibos)
- Innovative nunchuck design where moving the controller is an axis of control (Wii)
- A second-screen experience (Wii U)
- ... and these are just the recent/well known innovations. I'm sure I'm missing many (link cable, anyone?)
So, basically, Nintendo has always tried to push the envelope with their consoles. Nintendo isn't interested in making a boring "not-a-pc-i-swear" console.
Nintendo hasn't lost sight of what made them great. In fact, I'd argue that they're still very much on that path. The day we see uninteresting hardware is the day Nintendo has strayed from what made them great.
Power Glove was Mattel, not Nintendo. (Though it was featured heavily in The Wizard, which Nintendo was involved with; and its name evokes Nintendo trademarks from the era like "Nintendo Power" and "Now You're Playing With Power", so lots of people thought it was Nintendo's.)
You can really divide that list into two distinct eras:
Era 1: Nintendo is the head of the pack in software and hardware, and not afraid to try new things.
-NES
-Gameboy
-SNES
-Partly N64
-DS
Transitional period: Gamecube. At this point it's pretty clear that Sony is bringing things to the table that Nintendo is struggling to match. It's not a bad console, the GC, and it ends up being almost laughably affordable, but it's the slowpoke of the gen.
Era 2: Wii->Present.
-The Wii, as you say a pretty quirky and novel take on interfaces. This is the period when Nintendo makes a huge part of the fortune they're sitting on today, and expands to a truly staggering userbase. Traditional Nintendo fans (i.e. people who want Mario and other key franchises) are happy, new gamers are happy, people who want one console are not.
-WiiU, frankly stunk. It didn't do what anyone really wanted it to do, it wasn't as inexpensive and cheaply fun as the Wii or GC. The WiiU tried to be the Wii, and a mainstream console, and it wasn't.
-3DS. Not a bad thing, but I'm yet to meet anyone who really gives a shit about the 3D. Another gimmick that gets forced into things, but ultimately the portable brand is full of such incredibly good games that it doesn't matter.
-Modern portable: ... Fantastic. It's hard to argue against Nintendo's mastery of this aspect of gaming. Underpowered, still too focused on gimmicks instead of perfecting the core experience.
-Amiibo... brilliant business move, it's hard to argue against how happy it made some people, but it was also a manipulative money-grab. It was a case of Nintendo understanding how to maximize a fad, but it brought nothing of value to games.
-"Second Screen Experience"... again, it was something you could work with, but it mostly got in the way of developers and ended up being underwhelming.
Nintendo has lost sight of doing something simple, extremely well. The Gameboy was great because it was just a portable gaming machine, and it kept on that way until two screens and 3D gimmicks, and multiple iterations of largely the same handheld started to muck it up.
Hardware has made Nintendo rich, but it's the software that made them great. Mario as a concept and a game was much better than the NES platform and interface. The more Nintendo has made money on hardware, the more their software has suffered.
Gamecube was the slowpoke of that generation? That sounds wrong. Official specs suggest Dreamcast < PS2 < GC < XBox. But it seems to be generally accepted that XBox specs were a bit overblown and in practice GC and XBox were almost equal in overall real world results. (And the weak PS2 clearly won that round anyway.)
I think that's a good assessment, but Gamecube wasn't a slowpoke. More powerful than PS2 which won the generation. Games looked really good on that system compared to PS2. It really suffered from arriving late, after PS2 had huge momentum. It also had the smaller 1.5GB optical disc that might have held it back.
I'm not really sure I agree. I think the eras you've chosen are pretty contrived.
If the gimmicks that "muck up the same handheld" aren't worth anything, then the vita should have captured a large segment since it had virtually no gimmicks and just solid hardware. Not the case.
Nintendo's portables have added a lot. Please don't tell me that juice is "essentially just water with some flavor gimmicks." yes, everyone is iterating. No, nobody knows what will ultimately pan out and what won't. If you want Mario on PS then say so, but Nintendo is genuinely trying to innovate and think differently. Move and Kinnect are gimmicks. Nintendo will happily devote a generation to do something interesting.
The day Nintendo gives that up and makes an x86 platform running expensive hardware with no "gimmicks" is the day they become a primarily a software developer.
I still can't for the life of me understand why they didn't slap a gps chip on it. I was so hoping that Nintendo would develop the gameplay that will become the standard for AR games.
From what I understand, they can readily afford to make these bets though. If Switch turns out not to be another Wii, but rather a WiiU, that's no sweat to them and they can easily figure something else out.
Shareholders aren't impressed by "our quarterly losses only burned through a tiny portion of our stockpile", though. The pressure on Nintendo to deliver with the Switch is quite high.
The SNES, N64, and the GameCube were not really behind technologically (they were different from their competitors, but not behind). The Wii was the first Nintendo console that was clearly just flat out technically inferior to all of its competitors.
I think the GameCube was actually ahead of the PlayStation 2 and behind the XBox in terms of raw power. But it might have had other limitations that I'm unaware of.
I like this utilitarian perspective and believe it could strike a good content/profitability balance if done correctly. Constantly pushing new hardware specs is what has allowed the novelty of franchises to wear off into tired rehashes with better graphics. So we have to buy new hardware to push the new rendering engine that powers the new Call of Duty game that is ... the same as the previous 3 Call of Duty games, with more realistic 'splosions and faces.
If a company could, and would, pour its resources into a novel concept that leveraged existing, known technology, then I could be pretty happy with that. I don't like having to buy/accumulate more "stuff" but that's what we're being sold.
The closest I've seen Nintendo come to allowing this "Lateral Thinking ..." philosophy was with Xenoblade Chronicles X. Otherwise I've been wholly disappointed with the Wii U and the Wii before it (once the novelty wore off).
The SNES is not underpowered compared to the genesis if you compare them as a whole and not just spec for spec like comparing mhz on a CPU. Console hardware is made for running games and are not general computing devices.
The snes hardware had many hardware supported graphical modes that allowed it to push the envelope without relying on a beefier CPU, the most famous of which is Mode 7 which allowed the pseudo 3d you see in games like F-Zero, the FF world maps, Mario Kart, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG and so on. And then there was this very common practice on SNES to embed coprocessors and DSP on the game cartridge, which is what allowed the graphical effects of Star Fox and Yoshi's Island notably. There was no such practice on the Genesis.
> The list of Super NES enhancement chips demonstrates the overall design plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whereby the console's hardware designers had made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. This standardized selection of chips was available to increase system performance and features for each game cartridge. As increasingly superior chips became available throughout the SNES's vintage market years, this strategy originally provided a cheaper and more versatile way of maintaining the system's market lifespan when compared to Nintendo's option of having included a much more expensive CPU or a more obsolete stock chipset.
As far as graphical capabilities were concerned, the SNES ecosystem was definitely more powerful. By the time Sega considered the idea of extending the Genesis with the 32X it was already too late into the console lifecycle to matter and flopped (very close to the release of the Sega Saturn and 1 to 2 years before the Nintendo 64, depending on your region [NA, EU, JP]).
There was also the Sega CD but all it did is enable a library of not-games pseudo-interactive movies.
I didn't want to state the obvious and be too detailed but yes that's exactly what I meant. And is what people were trying to assess above too: what are the reasons behind Nintendo hardware. And to phrase it again differently, Nintendo tries to be vertical for "entertainment", doesn't really matter how, as long as they achieve quality fun.
Yes, but the Genesis came one year before and had quite a more beefy CPU (even two IIRC). This makes the SNES "processing" power a bit tame in a way. Otherwise I agree, visual and musical capabilities were vastly more important for gamers. Lots of games looked magical on a SNES but rusty on a Genesis.
Define underpowered. It had a slower clock, but supported much more feature wise. You can't just compare clock speed when comparing different architectures. It's more appropriate to compare the entire system. By that account, the SNES was the most advanced console out. Same for the NES. Same for the 64 (which was a joint development with SGI of all things). Even the gamecube had some grunt but was hampered by it's silly disc format and poor development environment.
No, Nintendo didn't decide to go with underpowered hardware until the Wii. Prior to that they were certainly competing with the top tier systems.
But more importantly than the specs war between those two consoles, the Genesis had vastly superior games and catalogue. I had both and the only people I've met who think the SNES > Genesis were people who only had the SNES.
"Yokoi articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology". [...] "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...
Nintendo consoles have always been a bit behind technologically; but I think this became really accentuated with the Wii, which was by design not that far ahead of the Game Cube- when the rest of the industry went full steam ahead fighting on specs.