Glad to see this thread got some people movin'.
sienar - I gotta hear your story. I know that up until...well...E3 2006 (599 dollars!) There were a LOT of Sony fanatics, drove me nuts.
mariozeldametroid - Thanks for the tale. One thing I always remember is how bad Nintendo was during the N64 era. I mean business-wise, since that influenced all of its design decisions.
The president was Yamauchi, and he drove Nintendo from a business angle with strict licensing policies. Now back during the NES days this was a great way to ensure quality games and consumer confidence (right after the mid 80s crash.) But by the late 90s, there were enough competitors to ensure that, so Nintendo looked like a jerk to 3rd party developers.
So Sony played nice, offered a new CD-based game format (whoa, movies!) and was really lax to developers- they could publish whatever they wanted on the brand-new Playstation system. And then they attracted Squaresoft, who was so angry at Nintendo's cartridge that they burned all relationships with them and moved Final Fantasy to the Playstation. BAM, deathblow.
After Nintendo was dethroned, Yamauchi stepped down and Satoru Iwata became president. His first move was to smooth relations with 3rd party developers by letting them develop key franchises (Star Fox Assault and F-Zero GX, for example.) His second big move was to stick to Nintendo's strength-- innovating their systems so they could make games no one else could. The Gamecube didn't solve that problem, but hey it was a start.
During the Gamecube era, it really sank into me that...maybe Nintendo did screw up during the N64 days. I read their history, looked behind the scenes and said "yeah, they did."
I think that's when I grew up.
There is no such thing as a console war. This is the first step to game design.
