Nintendo Consoles, Games and Accessories

Founded way back in 1889, Nintendo originally began as a manufacturer of playing cards. Since then they’ve tried a lot of different things, but their biggest success so far was when they began making video games in the late 1970s.

Starting off with the Game and Watch handheld gaming series in the 1980s, they moved on to home consoles with the 8-bit Famicom (Family Computer) – which we know as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. With this came one of the most successful games in history, Super Mario Bros., which was created by Shigeru Miyamoto – now recognised as one of the greatest developers in the industry thanks to this and his other creations such as The Legend of Zelda.

Merging ideas from the Game and Watch series with the Famicom such as portable gaming and interchangeable cartridges, Nintendo came up with another handheld – the Game Boy. By bundling this new system with a new version of Tetris, it was another huge success, and fought off competitor handhelds such as the Atari Lynx, TurboExpress and the Sega Game Gear to remain the dominant handheld of its generation. The Game Boy also saw some refinements that would resurface in successive handhelds, such as a reduced size (the Game Boy Pocket) and a backlit screen (the Game Boy Light – a Japan-only release).

Following up on the Famicom’s success, Nintendo brought out the Super Famicom (the Super Nintendo or SNES) – a 16-bit home console with better graphics, sound and game speed compared to its predecessor. Releasing two years after its main rival, the Sega Mega Drive (also known as the Sega Genesis), the comparable specifications of both consoles sparked a ‘console war’ (not an actual war, although some ardent fans of each console might have taken it that far), in which the two companies both aimed to have the most market share for their console.

Did you know? The SNES was originally intended to have backwards compatibility with NES games, but this feature was removed before it was released.

At one point, Nintendo and Sony teamed up to work on an addition to the SNES console that would use CDs to play games instead of cartridges, due to previous business interactions with Ken Kutaragi – the man who recommended the sound chip used in the SNES and who would become known later on as ‘the father of the PlayStation’.

Ultimately the team-up between Nintendo and Sony fell through, and Sony used what it had to develop the first PlayStation console – imagine how different gaming would be if everything had worked out!

Although it had researched avenues into CD-based gaming with the Sony partnership, Nintendo opted to continue with cartridge-based games with its next home console, the Nintendo 64. This was Nintendo’s first venture into 3D gaming, and brought with it Super Mario 64 as one of its launch titles, as well as one of Nintendo’s most popular series, Super Smash Bros. later in its life. It didn’t compete well against the Sony PlayStation though, with many developers jumping ship to the rival console due to the easier development methods.

Nintendo also ventured into virtual reality just before the release of the Nintendo 64, with the Virtual Boy – a head-mounted system that projected an image in front of each eye. The red image and uncomfortable method of playing the system resulted in many players complaining of headaches, and the system was discontinued. This is the only time a Nintendo system has been an outright failure, which is also widely credited as the reason its creator Gunpei Yokoi (also the creator of the original Game Boy) left the company shortly afterwards – although this reasoning is disputed.

Nintendo’s slump continued with the Nintendo 64’s successor, the GameCube. The first of their consoles to use optical media (discs) for games, the console’s design, lack of features such as DVD compatibility and appeal to families (seen as a minority demographic in gaming at the time) reduced it to third place in the console war of that generation, as many developers chose to overlook it in favour of the Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles.

The console slump was to end with the next system though – in 2005, the Revolution was unveiled to the world with a new controller that allowed both pointing and motion controlled gaming – the pack-in title Wii Sports allowed players to participate in sports such as ten-pin bowling and tennis by moving their controller as if they were really at a bowling alley or tennis court.

Although seen as a gimmick by many, the Revolution (re-branded as the Wii, a name intended to represent players gaming together) appealed to a much wider audience, featured backwards-compatibility with GameCube games and controllers (at least in earlier models) and allowed players to purchase “Virtual Console” games – classic titles from the NES, SNES and Nintendo 64, as well as games from former competitors such as the Mega Drive and Neo-Geo. The Wii also became the best-selling console of its generation, moving more units than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

This success was not to last, though. The successor to the Wii – the Wii U – was released in 2012, this time including a ‘GamePad’ controller incorporating a touchscreen and HD graphics, as well as backwards-compatibility with previous Wii games and controllers. Suffering from a software drought at launch and lower hardware specifications than the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (making things worse as third-party developers overlook it in favour of the more powerful consoles), the Wii U has been overlooked by consumers, with sales beginning to pick up after the release of games such as Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros for Wii U.

Nintendo has also announced a partnership with DeNA to bring games to mobile platforms, but hastened to add that a new Nintendo system is in development, currently known as the NX. No more details than the name have been revealed so far, with no information planned to release until sometime in 2016 – will it be a new home console? A handheld successor to the 3DS? A combination of both? Who knows – but we’re definitely looking forward to whatever Nintendo brings to gaming NeXt!