| Impulsivity said: Actually there was this great study. They found that teenagers at the time would not under any circumstances admit they owned a Super Nintendo and not a Genesis. Genesis really did a good job at making it the machine the cool kids had (to the kidish Nintendo system image). Playstation did the same thing if you remember the Crash Bandicoot talking trash in the Nintendo parking lot. It's not hard to be the adult company vs Nintendo when it makes developers censor games like Mortal Kombat for violence (which Genesis did not do). After years of Nintendo when Cid and the rest kept saying s**t in FFVII I was amazed beyond belief. I didn't know people in games were allowed to say anything worse then damn after 10 years in Nintendo World. That said when genesis vs SNES was picking up I was 8 so obviously I went SNES though I had friends with genesis. There just weren't many good Genesis games in the end, almost all the immortal 16 bit games were on SNES especially near the end. Despite that, Genesis was undoubtedly cooler (especially in the US) and I bet if the Saturn hadn't been so bad they could have passed up Nintendo the following generation like Sony did on the teenage and up market. Ever since the PS1 took the adult market pretty securely from Nintendo I think there has been kind of a truce between the two companies. Nintendo dominates the child market (and family market by proxy) along with casual gamer markets (the kind of gamers who make carnival games a 2 million seller) while Sony takes the decided majority of teen and up gamers (the Genesis sweet spot). They really don't talk too much trash because they're not really competing. They overlap a bit but Sony's real enemy is Microsoft and Nintendos....I don't think anyone really bothers fighting with Nintendo since Nintendo is so strong in its segment fighting with them for that kid/family demo is pointless. Besides, a lot of Nintendo players are introduced to video games via Nintendo systems then move to Sony as they got older and God of War starts to look better then Mario (some not all, some will want to play Mario till the day they die). I bet you anything at the end of the day Sony is thankful to Nintendo in a lot of ways, the market wouldn't be as big as it is without Sony, but it wouldn't have been to the point where the PS1 could sell 100 million consoles if not for 15 years of Nintendo. I would bet anything that 90% of Sony gamers have owned one or more Nintendo consoles over the years (I think I've owned 8 counting handhelds). |
Nintendo has always been geared toward "everybody" and in that sense, appeared as the "family friendly" system. That said, Nintendo didn't have a "kiddie" image back during the 16-bit days so much as an "out of touch" one. After the MKI debacle, and the birth of the ESRB, Nintendo lifted it's censory hold and SNES MKII vastly outsold the Genesis version. Nintendo had a fairly strong image with adult and teenage gamers and I was proud, as a teenager, to be on the Nintendo side at the time. At that time, having a flagship fighting game was seen as important as having a flagship platformer. And Nintendo's fighter, Killer Instinct, was vastly darker and more violent than Virtua Fighter.
The kiddie image started with Pokemon and the N64 era. Prior to this, developers didn't really see Nintendo as "kiddie." After all, Acclaim had confidnce in Iguana's hellishly violent and gory Turok game on the N64--and that game (practically a launch title in the States) became a very big success. The kiddie image grew out of hand with Pokemon and Pikachu, the childish way the Game Boy and GB Color were marketed, and let's not forget that dreadful Pikachu-themed N64.
During the SNES days, I never really heard anything about Nintendo being "the kiddie company." Sure, Sega was seen as cooler and for teenagers, but part of that came from them marketing Sonic as a kind of badass when compared to Mario. The kiddie stuff really hit with the N64 and the Game Boy when Pokemon began their reign. Had the N64 been a powerful disk-based system, it would have held onto many of the more mature franchises from it's past that went to Sony. Unfortunately, the N64 was a trainwreck of a console and developers abandoned it. Nintendo and Rare were left holding the reigns to the majority of N64 development, and Pokemon became a cash cow. But when gamers were diving headlong into amazing games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, and superior versions of Mortal Kombat II, MK3, and MK3 Ultimate. Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country were big hits.
One other thing that helped Sega cultivate a cooler image was their "renegade ways" with some games on the Genesis and Sega-CD--most notably, Night Trap.
At the time, I was firmly on Nintendo's side, but damn if I didn't still love the Genesis. Only one of my friends, though, had a Genesis. The rest of us all had the Super Nintendo.
