N64 & Cube are abominations

[Jon-Erich]

Mr Khan said:
It entirely falls down to game design philosophy. Nintendo doesn't need to do dick regarding following industry trends, because they are capable of designing games that do things that very few other studios are capable of doing

The consoles themselves were not bad, but the strategies behind software development for these consoles very much were.

For the most part, Nintendo was the one who often defined industry trends. The success of Super Mario 64 led to countless platformers spread accross all game systems. Ocarina re-defined modern adventure games. The usage of rumble feedback, analog control, and an emphasis on camera control in 3D pace led to the dualshock and our modern day dual analog controller. The secret with Sony was they never had to define anything. They just needed to lure 3rd parties on to their consoles. 

Nintendo's mistakes with the N64 was partly because of their own philosophy towards games. They are a gameplay-first company. While using cartridges was controversial to everybody else, it made sense to Nintendo. They don't need disc space to create good 20-40 hour games and cartridges could combat piracy better than CD's. Sony's philosophy however is electronic entertainment. The gameplay mattered less to them and their main focus was to entertain the consumers and games with high production values could do this and those high production values could sell games.

GameCube should have been the system that let Nintendo maintain their philosophy while being able to handle the high production values, but their inability to market the system to a wide age group and the lagacy left behind by the N64 doomed the poor system.