Classic TechStuff: The Nintendo Story: Part Two

itself apart from other competitors in the space. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and remember we're gonna have a part three coming up, a brand new episode that I am going to record very very soon. It'll be the next episode to Aero. Talk more about that after this class episode, So see in a bit. Okay, so we're going to do the the whole catch you up, um if you're just tuning in previously on Tech Stuff.

Nintendo started out as a playing card company in nine gradually diversified then got out of several other businesses, including the toy market, but that did give them the idea that possibly this whole video game thing might be an idea, and they started creating video game consoles that were only able to play a game or maybe sit up to six games, but you know, kind of like the old Odyssey system and that it was very limited. It was

all hardwired into the system. You could not put a cartridge in there was it was not cartridge cartridge based. At that point, also created the game and Watch, which was the portable variation of that, but again, single game, that's all was on that system. Meanwhile, the arcade craze is taken off all over the world and Nintendo finds itself with a complete bomb and asks a young designer, Miyamoto, Shigeru Miyamoto, to give it a shot. Can you come up with something that we can use in the video

game market? And he thinks a storyline would sell games, so he creates a simple story about a giant gorilla who hauls off a a woman named Pauline to the top of a skyscraper and challenges a young plumber well actually he was just a guy with a big mustache and overalls named Jumpman to come get her. And it defies just about everybody in the company's expectations by becoming a huge hit, inspiring several uh several follow up titles

and licensing agreements. With these different console manufacturers to bring them into homes. Because home video games are becoming popular in the early nineteen eighties, late seventies and early Nintendo decides to get into that market. While the getting is good, I want me some of that action. They and they introduce the Nintendo Family Computer and they launch it in Japan on July fifteenth. Yeah, it's a great name for a console. Uh yeah, great name for the console, the Famicom.

So if you're not familiar with the Famicom, that is what in America we referred to as the Nintendo Entertainment System. It's gonna if you're not familiar with it, yes you are. It didn't immediately come over to America because at the same time as it was launching in Japan America, in North America there was the video game Crash. We talked about that. If you haven't heard it, go back and listen to it. There's an entire podcast about it. But to give you the short form of that, what happened

was the video game market was doing really well. Uh so many players got into the system. Not not so many players. So many companies got into creating video game systems and video game titles that the market became saturated, and there were there were there were several really really good games, but there were way more crappy games and some of those, Yeah, we talked about some of those

in our Worst Video Games of All Time podcast. There were some of the two big ones that leap to mind were the licensed version of pac Man for the AY and of course the number one game on everybody's list e T. The Extraterrestrial almost everybody's, but no, a lot of that. That was the thing. A lot of the game The idea was these games are a hit in the arcade, let's bring him to the home console.

So you had games like pac Man and Donkey Kong, um stuff like Amadar Burger Time Reactor, and they tried so hard to make them work on home consoles immediately that they ended up being complete and under dogs. Yeah, they were just a was such a rush to get to the market with that quality. Was was really sacrificed

in order to get sacrificed in favor of speed. Well, Nintendo ended up not launching in America right away because again, this video game crash was taking place mostly through and so it wasn't until October eighth five that the fam Con made its debut in the United States, and of course then it was known as the Nintendo Entertainment System. And originally Nintendo took a very very controlled approach to introducing its system. It wasn't it wasn't like a a

nationwide launch. In fact, you could originally only get an inn e ES if you were willing to go to New York City to get it. That was the limited market they introduced it to and it was something like a hundred thousand units and they sold out of ninety thousand of them in a heartbeat. Um in a New

York minute, Yeah, in a New York minute. And the original in as when it first came out in New York, was loaded with extras in order to tempt people to buy it, because you gotta remember, at this point, the home video game market in the United States is toast. People are starting to move to personal computers. Video game consoles are looked at his things for kids, and it's and there's just no insistency and quality. So Nintendo had an uphill battle here. So when they launched it in

New York, here's what he came with. This is a huge difference to the way you buy a video game console today. You got the console, you've got two games, you've got two game pads, you've got the Zapper light gun, and you got the Robotic Operating Buddy or rob one hundred and twenty five dollars. Wow, that would be about two fifty dollars in today's money. So it's still sort of affordable in terms. I mean, you think about the

PlayStation three debuting it what six United States? Yeah, so it's it's you know, it was a pretty amazing deal at the time, and uh, it does very well, and then Nintendo starts to open up in other test markets places like Chicago and Los Angeles. Um, still very gradual until it goes nationwide pretty much in six uh and at that point, the h the price had moved up to a hundred and ninety nine dollars, so the d was kind of the introductory price to kind of get

that word of mouth campaign going. And and once it went nationwide, they figured they could price it at one and that would be the right market value for then

Intoo Entertainment System. I don't know, it might hot cakes, yeah, sure, dead And in eighty six that was also when in Japan, Nintendo introduced a special disc system accessory in the Famicom, because I could remember in Japan it was it was built as a family computer system, not just a video game console, so it would allow you to actually use discs to uh play games on the Famicom. Back in Japan, you could even go and have you know, a disc made of a game or whatever at special vendors in Japan.

Now and in the United States, we were not so fortunate as to get access to this, although I'm sure there are plenty of collectors out there who have the Japanese version of it. In America, that's always been a

hot like underground market in the United States. Yeah. Now, keeping in mind too that in the late seventies, when or the mid seventies, when consoles were starting to come into the homes, all this stuff was hardwired into the console itself, as as Jonathan was just saying a minute ago, and they figured out that it was possible to make a connector slot so that all the ROMs would be actually in the cartridge itself and it would make a

connection with that cartridge when you plugged it. You had to give it a firm push to get it snapped into the slot the right way. Also, you had to you had to breathe into the cartridge. That was that was required before you. That's what we always did, ye before you. Well, it's good to get the dust out of it. Of course, some of the Atari cartridges had a little flap they protected the guts. Not all of them, some of them, but yeah, they the Nintendo Entertainment System

used similar cartridges too. They were they were wider than the the Atari cartridges of course, and and bigger. But yeah, they were using the same types of programmable rum chips that you would just snap into the game slot. Didn't have a disk like the game systems do now. So in eight six they also introduced some titles that became big. Commando huge in e S game, I think I heard of that. Yeah, fun one too, Ghosts and Goblins one of the most difficult games ever. Also fun but hard.

And then um there was came out in six If that's not confusing, that's a little weird. Uh. And in eight seven, two other big names in Nintendo franchises debuted, Castlevania, Yes and Metroid Yeah. So a lot of the games that would become sort of emblematic of Nintendo Entertainment System started to launch right around this time, and uh, the NES does incredibly well. Now, I never owned an in NES.

I had a friend who lived down the street from me who did own an NES, and I used to go over to his house all the time and play. And in fact, I played one of the games that won the best Video Game of the Year for Nintendo now that that happened back in. That game was punch Out, and we're talking about the arcade game at that point, but man oh, the arcade game was a huge hit. I loved punch Out so much. That's one of those

arcade consoles. Like you know, you always have that fantasy of some of us anyway of owning certain video game consoles, like having a special room that would just have video game consoles in it. Punch Out would be one of the consoles I would own punch Out. There there are two other titles I can think of right off the top of my head that I would have to own for that and on the one one would be the original Star Wars arcade game use the Forest Luke and

also the Spy Hunter. Those are the so those would be the three Elevator Action maybe yeah, if I had room, but if I only had room for three, it'd be Spy Hunter, it would be Star Wars, and it would be punch Out. Forget those of you keeping scored home.

Punch Out is the only one that's a Nintendo game anyway. Yes, but there you go, that one of the three games would be a Nintendo game, because when most of us think of Nintendo, we don't necessarily think of the arcade games that much because they made such a huge name in the home console market. Now, Donkey Kong of course

being like the big exception. Yeah, well that's how I think that's how Nintendo was able to sell the Nintendo Entertainment System was that they could say, hey, we were the guys behind Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. And Super Mario Brothers. Yeah, you don't have to worry about us taking some sort of u uh well, especially when they were reporting games from the arcade to the console, you know, since it was the same company that was

producing these hit games, so much more faithful. Yeah, and and so they you know, that could be a message they send out to the market, is like, you don't have to worry about some terrible port of our game, because we're the ones who made the Arcade game, We're the ones who made the console. You know that the console is gonna reflect the gameplay that you are familiar

with in the Arcade. Well. One of the things that Jonathan touched on in the first episode, and again, if you haven't listened to it, will wait for you to come back and listen to that first. But one of the things he touched on was that the the CEO, the CEO at that time of Nintendo, insisted that everything go through him for approval. And that was important in a way because it ensured that there was going to

be some quality in the stuff. They weren't just throwing it out the door like certain other companies that I can mention, I didn't mention. Well, that was part of the problem of Video game crash. Yes, So Nintendo had had taken the certification process, yes, and that that was a selling point from the Nintendo Entertainment system that the other consoles didn't have at that point. Because if a title was going to be on the NES, it had to meet certain criteria, it had to had to pass certification.

It's frustrating for developers because the developer might have a great idea, but for some reason they run up against a barrier that to the developer seems arbitrary and then, uh, you know, we see this today with developers who developed for Apple, for example, for for apps on the iPhone and the iPad. They're developers who say, I submitted this, I thought it was a great idea, and then I'm

hitting a wall. And in some cases it may seem arbitrary to an outside observer, but to Apple it may seem like, no, this is not following our rules, and this the rules are there in order for us to

ensure that the user has a good quality experience. At the end of the day, that was a Nintendo's approach to with the video games, and said they did not want to fall into the same trap that Attari and Collico had fallen into, where they started to put out and publish games that or they allowed third party publishers to publish games that just did not measure up. Now, that did not mean that Nintendo was free of bad games, but they weren't glutted with them like the Atari was

towards the end of its days. Yeah, it killed both at and Calico. Yeah, and if you say yes, but it are still around it a different company. They purchased the name anyway. Anyway, Um, yeah, that was that was one of the selling points. Um. And the other was, in addition to good marketing, they had something that they

could market around, and that was Miamoto's characters. Um. Donkey Kong had made a name, well not literally because his name wasn't his name at that point, but had a name character and Mario and they were able to use those characters in successive games and so uh, they basically had exclusivity. You didn't see Mario on games that weren't licensed by Nintendo. Nintendo was was uh, basically ensuring a future for itself by creating a storyline in its games

that could be carried from game to game. Yah. They really started to protect their intellectual property. They were very protective of it. So still still are. Yeah, you still are not going to find Mario pop up on say an iPhone game, which that'll come into playing at the end of our conversation today. So Nintendo has taken this approach and it's working well for them now. In n uh So this is ninety nine years into the company's history.

For those scores, ninety nine years in the company's history. Nintendo makes an agreement with another company called Sony. I think I've heard of them too. Yeah, they were going to work together and put out a new video game console system that would use optical disks instead of cartridges to store games. Hey, that seems like a great idea because Sony is really good with this electronics stuff here, as Nintendo doesn't take them off. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened.

Nintendo and Sony could not see eye to eye on many aspects of the deal, and ultimately the deal fell apart. Now this this collapse. Yeah, the collapse of this deal would later lead Sony to develop its own video game console system called the PlayStation. I think I've heard of that too. You may very well have heard of that. Nintendo wishes it had. Yeah, PlayStation ended up causing a big headache for Nintendo, particularly in Japan in a couple more years. But we'll get into that in so on

the company's centennial, which is so hard to think up. Like, there's so many companies out there, and you're like, how many of them are a century old or older? Not many? Not many are still around. Nintendo is one of them. Uh. In nine the company introduces the game Boy. Now, the game Boy sold for eighty nine dollars in the United States, which is about a hundred and fifty dollars a hundred

fifty six dollars today. Uh, and the game Boy sold very well, partially because it was marketed not just kids, but to adults who would spend time doing things like writing the train or the bus. If you were one of those people who are commuting on a system like that, then you would want something to occupy your time. And uh, yeah, Chris is humming the theme song to the game that was packaged with the game Boy that became like it was.

If you want to call about talk about a killer app or a killer title, this is like one of the top killer titles of all time. We're talking about Tetris, which was not a video game developed specifically by Nintendo. Actually came from a Russian developer. But Tetris was such a compelling puzzle game and still is today that it it was probably responsible for selling more Game Boy units

than just about anything else. I played Tetris for so long on my game Boy that I could see when I turned off, you could tell this this is a good game. When you turn off the game and you close your eyes to go to sleep, and you're still seeing those little shapes drift into place. Or when you are moving and you're packing up the moving van and at the time you're going do do do do do do do crooked space piece, I don't I needed an L shape? Uh yeah, So why did I get that sectional? Um? Yeah?

I spent many many hours with my game Boy. Yeah, it was a very popular device, and that was my first Nintendo system. And game Boy also was developed by It was designed by gum Pay Yakoi, who we talked about in the last podcast. He was the fellow who was hired and had had turned Nintendo's fortunes around by introducing a toy that became the Ultra Hand, basically an extendable claw that would grip uh toy balls or you know,

that was what came with it. But you could use it for all kinds of other games like harassing the family cat. But yeah, the often than not probably. Yeah. So he was the fellow who designed the game Boy.

So yeah, very popular design, very simple design, you know, unlike his first portable uh for a this was this was basically the hundred of portable games, because before that they were all hardwired, like the Mentel games with the little led s that would go you know yeah, and even even Nintendo's UH game games were all hard fed at that point. So this was the first cartridge based

one that really started to take off. So in nineteen nineteen, into No introduces the Super Famicom, which in the United States a year later in ninety one was known as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Yeah, the NES was starting to near the end of its life cycle, though it

was still supported for a few years after this. UM and the NES was an eight bit video game system, the S and E S the Supernintendo was a sixteen bit game system, twice the bits, and at that time Nintendo boasted an ownership a market share of about eighty percent of the United States game industry and nine percent of the worldwide game industry, so truly a dominant company at this point. Also, this is a good time to

mention the character designs that Miyamoto came up with. The reason why the characters look the way they do is because the eight bit gaming era was so low resolution that you had to pick a very simple yet iconic design to be able to show people what your character look like. So he has Mario has a giant nose, so you could see that he had a nose at all. Mario has a mustache because it was easier to see

than a mouth. His his his overalls, his hat, all of that was designed because in order for him to show up well against multiple backgrounds, he had to have a very simple design. And we're done all the way back to the Donkey Kong days. So um yeah. Even in the sixteen BET the designs get updated, of course because now you've got higher resolution, but they're still based on that very simple premise and it was something that

guided Miyamoto's design for for many years. Uh yeah. So now, right around the same time in Japan, Nintendo starts to face down lawsuits brought against it by competitors who are accusing Nintendo of fixing prices with retailers, so that essentially the Nintendo products would stay on store shell and and and keep selling, while the competitor peditors would end up getting pushed. Aside um, Nintendo was is no stranger to

lawsuits century which makes sense. I mean, you know, if you're the dominant player, then the antitrust lawsuits are gonna start popping up, because really, for a while, Nintendo was, and no pun intended, the only game in town, or so it seemed. Now we're gonna I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. So SNDS is really popular. A lot of really popular titles come out on the SNS. But I don't think I need to go into all of those. Um, let's let's talk about one of Nintendo's major missteps, not

the power Glove, which was its own problem. Nintendo hasn't always succeeded when it's come up with some innovative products, and one of those innovative products that really bombed by Virtual Boy. But what could be wrong with that Virtual

reality was the wave of the future. We're all going to be walking around with these things on our heads that would show us these amaze immersed in a computer world that would be uh indistinguishable from our real world all around us, as long as our real world all around us is a monochromatic vector graphic. As it turns out, there's a glitch in the matrix. Yeah, so the Virtual Boy comes out. It's a head node display. It's actually on a little stand and you lean forward, it's almost

like a pair of binoculars. You you lean your head forward and you have a screen for each eye, and it if only it didn't have to be hardwired into your neural network. It relied on something that we call parallax. And parallax we've talked about on this podcast before, but in general, parallax is the phenomena we experience because our eyes are not located in the exact same spot in

our head, or else we'd all be cyclops. Uh we have vision, Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a difference between, uh, the way an object appears in your left eye and the way it appears in your right eye, and your brain assimilates the information from these two images, and that helps you judge things like depth. It's not the only thing that lets you judge depth. And there are people who have trouble with parallax who can still tell generally

how far something is away. And of course the further away something is, the less parallax matters, because the the converging points become closer and closer to being parallel instead of converging on a single point. Um. But anyway, it used these two screens, one for each I to give the illusion of depth. And it was monochromatic and used red graphics, which mean you know, you were staring at a at a black screen with red graphics on it.

I remember Warrio showed up in UH in Virtual Boy, and at first I thought Warrio was introduced in Virtual Boy, but that's not true. Warrior Warrio actually predates Virtual Boy by a few years, and he first appeared on a Game Boy title. But I remember there was a Warrior title on Virtual Boy and a friend of mine, um, no one, actually, I guess none of my friends actually owned a Virtual Boy. I remember testing it out in in various toy stores, toy stores, not toy stories. Um

you got a friend in me, thank you? And it launched and around a hundred and eighty bucks when it came out in UH. It did not do well. People were disappointed in the graphics quality, They did not feel that it was particularly compelling, and there were a lot of reports of people suffering massive headaches while trying to play this thing. I can't imagine why, and there and there just weren't that many compelling titles either. It was

kind of like a triple threat. Really, you had a system that just didn't feel like it was fully baked, You didn't have a lot of really great titles, and you had reports of people having headaches while playing it. So, uh, yeah, the Virtual Boy ended up being a bomb, a non virtual bomb. Yeah. Um. And apparently I think eight hundred thousand of them were produced, so they're now collector's items. There aren't that many that ever hit the wild. At

least they didn't bury them in the desert. No, they didn't grind them up and bury them under the desert like a certain video game titles where so they didn't put them on top and I want to put them next to e t um Yes, So, how how do you recover from a flop like that? Well, they weren't. I would argue that that the company's name wasn't damaged to the point where Nintendo was hurting. But that was certainly, uh a thorn in its side. It wasn't like the

Virtual Boy ruined their reputation entirely. It was just that it was not a success. But in nineties six they did bounce back quite a bit. They introduced their next video game console. Now this was during the you know, we we had the eight bit systems, we had the sixteen bit systems, a few thirty two bit systems came out,

but Nintendo did not jump on that bandwagon. Instead, Nintendo bided its time for a sixty four bit system and surprise the world when the Nintendo sixty four came out, And I say surprised because they decided to stick with the cartridge based games as opposed to moving to an optical disc system. Yeah. So let's see who who were their competitors. Atari had basically uh, you know, they had come out with the links. Yeah, we had, it was

not doing well. You had Sega, which we if you've listened to our podcast about Sega, you realized that Sega, although it was always an also ran when it came up against Nintendo, except Nintendo really kind of rebuilt the home digital video game market and uh and Sega came along about that time, and they gave they they were the the Apple to Nintendo's Microsoft in this world because

they pushed Nintendo harder and we're a good competitor. And in fact, their marketing slogan was Sega does what Nintendo don't because they had Sonic. Sonic was designed to show off the speed of the Genesis UH system at home, and it did a great job of showing that off because he moved very quickly. The graphics sixteen bit system looked very nice. Um, and then you had Sony. Yeah,

the PlayStation. Really In Japan, the Nintendo sixty four did not do so well, and it's because its main competitor was the Sony PlayStation, which just seemed much more compelling. The graphics seemed better, um, and they were using an optical disc system, which meant that the games could be far more complex. Cartridge had a limited amount of space that you could hardwire a game onto, and also it meant that there were limitations with a cartridge based game

that you didn't necessarily have with an optical system game. However, there were also positive sides to go with cartridge based the big one being that you didn't have to worry about loading times. Yes, and you also don't have to worry nearly as much about ruining the cartridge as you did about scratching it, and it's much more robust than

the disc was. But yeah, the big one being loading times, because you know, with an optical based one, the laser had to find the right track on the CD in ordered for it to start playing the right information and then load that information into the the console's memory so that you could start playing, whereas with a cartridge bass system, it just because everything's hardwired, it's never changing. It goes straight to where it needs to go, and you didn't

have to have these loading screens. And Nintendo thought that was an advantage. And uh, in the United States, it did quite well. In fact, some of the best games, some people would argue of all time came out during the Nintendo sixty four era. But that controller. I liked the controller. I actually enjoyed that controller. Uh. And it

was the first one to have a thumbstick in Nintendo's history. Uh, not the first, not the first one to have a thumbstick ever, but the first one for Nintendo before they were using the D pad. Yeah. So yeah, that, like Gold and I, came out for the Nintendo sixty four and that was a big hit. That was a big hit, one of the one of the games that people still will refer to as one of the best video games of all time. Um. Oddly enough, I think it's probably

arguably more favorite of people, uh than the actual movie. Yeah, and that's just personal observation, not based on anything other than that. So Don't write Me, and and there were other games like Mario sixty four really kind of reinvented Mario quite a bit. Um. People thought that was pretty innovative. I was a huge fan of the wrestling games that came out for the Nintendo sixty four. They were very deep,

They allowed incredible customization. You could create your own wrestler. Um. There were phenomenal games, and the Japanese games were even more robust than the American ones. I had all the American titles because I didn't have the Japanese system. You couldn't play Japanese games on an American system unless you had an adapter um or in Japanese, you know, or you just went ahead and bought a Japanese game system. Right.

Two systems were not compatible. They were region locked for the you know, that's the easiest way of saying it. But I loved a lot of the games in the in sixty four. In sixty four does well in the United States, doesn't do so well in Japan. And two thousand one, uh Hit they introduced the Game Boy Advance, but they also introduced them into No Game Cue Ube. Yes, so there's a five years have passed since the sixty four debut nine six and sixty four comes out two

thousand one. You get the game the GameCube, and this is when Nintendo moves to the optical disks, except they don't use the big optical disks the same size as a CD or DVD. No, these are smaller. So yeah, that kind of part of that is a d r M thing. But anyway, it was one of those things where where people were, oh, so, now Nintendo is getting on the the disc train as opposed to cartridge is on the train. They did not look back from that point forward. Uh, Nope. They had removable storage and uh

and a very nice game controller. Actually, the GameCube was my first Nintendo home console, not counting the game Boy because that's a portable and it also had some compatibility stuff with game Boy Advance. So you started to see some convergence here where you could you could have the two systems interact with one another, which I like, Yeah,

that was kind of cool. And then in two thousand two, uh, Satoru Iwata becomes the first Nintendo CEO who was not related to the founder Yamachi um by marriage or by blood, so he was the first time was the first time, Nintendo had a CEO that was not part of this legacy, and he took over at that point. In two thousand three, Nintendo introduced the game Boy Advanced sp which was a thinner and lighter version of the game Boy Advance and uh.

In two thousand five and two thousand six, Nintendo starts to launch their DS line, which interestingly looked a lot like some of the old the old game and watch um systems that had the clamshell designed to double screens, but in this case they included a touch screen with stylus, and so that was kind of a differentiator in the home or the handheld market at the time, because remember in two thousand five and two thousand six, smartphones and not really become a thing in the United States, and

games for smartphones were pretty much unheard of at that point, yes, at least in the US. UM and then the Nintendo launches the d S I in April two thousand six, and then we have to you know, the WE also comes out in that around that time, the WE console, which is the current Nintendo console on the market, introduces the Wei remote where you've got the motion gaming, and Nintendo kind of surprises people by taking aim at the

casual gaming market. Yeah. See um, if you'll remember, at that point, Microsoft had released the Xbox and the Xbox three six UM, and Sony and the PlayStation three. Yeah, I mean they PlayStation two was a huge success. H. The Xbox was a huge success, and basically Nintendo was

taking it on the chin with the GameCube. Although the GameCube was sophisticated um, and it had again the the uh brilliant licensing maneuvers of Nintendo by keeping Mario and the Zelda franchise and some of the others Metroid uh alive on the console and locked into the Nintendo console the fans of the franchise. Again, Miamoto's thinking that there should be a story is playing into Nintendo's success because without that storyline and the fans want the storyline, Um,

Nintendo probably. I think you could argue, um that Nintendo may not have survived past that because uh, there was an onslaught from Sony and Microsoft and they needed again they needed something to differentiate them from the mark and from the rest of the market. And the we did that. Yeah, and it was when the Week came out, it really did make a big splash. I mean, it had huge sales figures, and it was leading the video game console sales in the United States for for ages. I mean

for the longest time. It was uh, the question wasn't who's in the lead, it was who's in the second place, because you knew that Nintendo was in the lead. But Nintendo sales have slowed down more recently because we well a lot of reasons. The game consoles several years old now, and um as are the Xbox in the PlayStation models the current models. But Nintendo also has the problem of it aimed for casual gamers, and casual gamers don't tend to be the kind of people who rush out and

buy the next new title. Necessarily, they might be satisfied with just a few handful of titles because they gain casually, They're not that they're not as heavily invested in the system as a hardcore gamer is. Yeah, I mean, their gamers will replay games even on older consoles. They will keep older consoles and older computers around to play classic games that they really love. Case in point, the newer versions of Golden Eye, long after the movie franchise has

moved on. Several films um Golden I is sticking around on newer consoles, and so you've got with the Nintendo we' you've got this issue with saturation again, just like with the video the playing cards back in the sixties, you've got uh, you know, the argument is just about everyone who wants a wee has a wee, and so there's not a whole lot of reason to go out and buy more. So of course sales figures are gonna start

to falter. Plus I'm sorry, go ahead. Plus Microsoft now has to connect and Sony has the move, so now they're motion control is not as big a deal anymore. Um. And so also the smartphone revolution and the gaming on smartphones and social networks has taken a big bido Nintendo because Nintendo was taking aim at that casual gamer. Well back in two thousand and six when the Week comes out, the casual gamer wasn't really being catered to that way.

But today you've got everything from phones to uh to uh you know, set top boxes in some cases, to um, you know, the social networks that all have these casual games that are available. Nintendo has no longer got a lock on that. So it's they're actually in a way, you could say their competition is way more fierce in that area than it would be if they were competing against Microsoft and Sony. Well, now I would argue that

that Nintendo is finding itself at a crossroads. UM. It has announced the Wii U, which is the next version of the Wi. Um Yukoy had said, as you will recall from the last podcast, that Nintendo was the kind of company that takes mature technology and utilizes it to create new products, which is exactly what they did with the WI that enabled them to hit a lower price

point out of the out of the gate um. And people criticize the hardcore gamers who liked the Xbox three sixty, who liked the PlayStation three because it had UH full on her high definition graphics UH, criticized the we because it only had the lower definition. Um, well, it's still high deaf, but it's UH DVD resolution, not the ten A DP. It was seven UM and or seven or seven twenty I away lines of resolution. It's not it's

not top of the line. Yeah, And the we U is aimed at the high def market and it has a again, they've reinvented the controller. It has a it's a much bigger controller that has additional functionality has its own screen UM. But they're also like combining the d S I with the UM and some people really like it, some people really don't. We'll have to see when it actually gets out on the market whether it succeeds or not.

But the DS is competing with smartphones and other devices, and people have pointed out, and rightfully, so, why would I pay thirty dollars, which is sort of the price point for a new DS game, when I can get the same exact game for my smartphone for five dollars, And and my smartphone does stuff other than play games. So some people say that perhaps Nintendo should get into the smartphone business, or perhaps Nintendo should re reevaluate it's it's line on not licensing out it's it's prime core

material to other companies. We should also point out the three D S, which launched in is another Nintendo slow starter. It has not done nearly as well in the market as they had hoped. That, of course, is the d S system, the handheld gaming system that has the glasses free three D effect, using essentially a variation on a lenticular display. If you'd like to see one. Taking apart you can see that on our website. Yeah, I I we bought one specifically for me to demolish, and I did,

and there was much wailing and nation of teeth. But the yeah, the three DS was sort of Nintendo's approach to try and combat the smartphone casual gaming market by introducing this new element three D, which was not available on most other systems. But it just has not taken off. And a lot of people who have enjoyed the three DS have told me this is anecdotal, but they have told me that they've just turned the three D off because it's just more of a problem than than Uh.

It doesn't it doesn't enhance the gameplay for them. So the Xcel, however, has done reasonably well. It's as with a larger screen. Yeah, and uh, I we need to start wrapping up this, uh this episode. But I did want to point out one other thing. We've been talking about lots of different people, and I do have a kind of a tragic ending for one of the folks involved in this story. Um Yakoi, the guy who was the designer who came up with the game Boy design.

He also designed the Virtual Boy, so not everything he touched turned to Gold, he decided to leave Nintendo in and he went to found his own company, but unfortunately, tragically, he died as a result of a car accident in he his car rear ended a truck on a highway and when he got out to inspect the damage, he was struck by another driver and died as a result.

So that was something I thought I mentioned. It was a person who really was instrumental in the design of a lot of early Nintendo US and his design elements carried over into current generation Nintendo products, and I thought it was it was important to remember him. And Uh, it's sad, of course, the way, um, the way that all turned out, but I thought it was something that we should definitely touch on. So it'll be interesting to see what happens to Nintendo in the future. Recently, as

of eleven, the company has been struggling financially. Uh, it's just it's one of those things where the video game console market saturation has caused problems. The three DS sales have caused problems, but the company has returned from setbacks in the past, so we can't we can't just discount Nintendo and say that they're out of the game. Like they're they're also ran. At this point, there's always the chance that they're going to reinvent the home video game

market yet again. Yeah, and it's it. It's uh. Well, just before we recorded this a few days ago, they announced that their earnings were going to be less even than they had predicted before. UM, which is some mumblings of doom and gloom around the industry. But um uh, you know, they could also end up as saga. Did you wonder what the creators of Mario and Link and and all those other characters Kirby and so many of

the others that we love, UM would would do. I mean, Sega found as it got out of the video game console business that it still could make great video games, uh some not so great UM, but still sell them to uh markets and reach out through other people's hardware. And I think they've been somewhat successful in partnering with Nintendo UM to do that. Uh. So it is possible that even if Nintendo gets out of the hardware business, they could still end up making fantastic games around their

their wonderful characters. UM. So hopefully, you know, if they find a way to UM that they'll find a way to continue one way or the other, but they're still not They're still not out of it yet. Oh Hi there, how are you? I hope you enjoyed that classic episode

tech Stuff. Next week, I'm going to dive into what the company has been up to since two thousand and eleven, and there's a lot to talk about, things that are both fun and interesting and exciting and some very tragic UH situations as well, And I'm going to cover all of that in the next episode where we really dive into what Nintendo has been up to and what is the future of the company, what does that look like and can anyone really predict what's going to happen next?

So that will be the focus of next week's episode. Make sure you joined to hear the exciting conclusion of a series that has been five years in the making as it turns out. If you have suggestions for future episodes, or maybe it's a guest host that you think would be awesome to have on the mic with me, or someone I should interview in the future, please let me know. The email address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com or draw me align on Facebook or Twitter

to handle at both of those. Is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Releases For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com