The fall of Nintendo

“Nintendo, out of all these game companies?” you might wonder, and yes, it’s a seemingly odd thought at first, but let me explain this to you as we go along.

After the great video game crash in 1983, during which the entire gaming industry collapsed, Nintendo established the software licensing model that we all know these days; game developers pay money to Nintendo, and in return they get the development tools and hardware to create games. On the flip-side, Nintendo can perform a quality-check on the games for their platform, and make sure that all games live up to a certain quality criteria. You will never see nudity, or any sexually-flavored games on Nintendo platforms because of this (though, that being said, there are extremely rare exceptions). It mainly serves to keep junk out; which was the cause of the earlier mentioned great north american video game crash.

Since establishing this model, every developer and their cat has jumped aboard the bandwagon and Nintendo and it’s platforms and games have flourished, creating the birthplace for the likes of Mario, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Metroid, and F-Zero, games that many of use have come to love over the years. One thing that has always been clear to developers, though, was that Nintendo likes to favor well-established technology that’s cheap to come by, and has proven itself, as opposed to being on the cutting edge. The gameboy link cable for example has a striking resemblance with Firewire cables.

Firewire cable

Gameboy link cable. Obviously not based on firewire

When looking across their product line, you can see they have been very consistent in using this approach with your very own eyes; The Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and Wii (just to name a few), are prefect examples of this interesting habit. I also think it’s safe to say that as a result of this, they have always been in second (or third) place in terms of hardware. Fortunately, we all know that their exclusive games have always been where their game platforms made the difference. The gamecube wasn’t special, but The Wind Waker and Metroid Prime were, the Wii wasn’t all that interesting, but Wii Sports and Mario Galaxy are, and the GBA was just a Super Nintendo, but then we saw Golden Sun, Advance wars, and Metroid Fusion. It’s all coming back to me now!, good stuff. Read more