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theprof00 on 01 May 2012
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KungKras said:
theprof00 said:

Extremely doubtful.

One game would not have stopped the migration.

You're saying another super mario brothers in 2d would have been able to hold the n64 steady... There is absolutely no way. The move to 3d was an explosion which created dozens of new game styles and genres. Staying in 2d would have continued stagnating. People just didn't want mario anymore in the n64 era. Not when we had 100 other great IPs that everyone wanted to play. Mario in 2d was only successful in a barren market.

It's revival sales are so much in reliance upon the nostalgia crowd hipsters.

But perhaps you're right and that Mario just simply isn't good in a 3d setting. Then what do we make of every other franchise that has seen success in movign to 3d? Are we to assume that mario can ONLY be a 2d platformer? What then is to be said about Mario itself? That it is typecast? Regardless of what it was, smb would not have prevented the move to 3d.

One game rocketed the NES to prominence, same for Wii and Megadrive. Don't underrestimate the momentum-changing power of one game.

As I said, selling on the level of SMB3 or SMW (which is where the series stabilized) would have done more for the N64 sales than SM64 did.

You overrestimate the number of new genres that 3D gave birth to (but that doesn't matter to my point anyways).

Calling the market 2D Mario suceeded in barren is both wrong and an insult to all the brilliant games that were out there. 2D Mario competed against much, much more, and better designed competitors than 3D Mario.

@ Bold, I already adressed that in an earlier post. That is just venomous dogma that needs to go if we are to have a serious discussion.

Mario is good in a 3D setting, just not as good as 2D Mario. SM64 had its place, and made gaming better through its innovations, but sales wise, it is a weaker series than 2D Mario, and therefore 2D Mario is more important. Both can be made, SM64 should definately have been made, but so should SMB5 and both can have the production values to make them awesome, but Nintendo obviously has priorities wrong.

What you're doing is dramaticizing this. Calling one game a miracle worker simply because we have seen it happen 3 times in 30 years. Don't fool yourself into banking on the remote chance.

After all one game DID change the momentum, and it WAS SM64. It's just that everything exploded, and people were ready for new things....that weren't mario.

Mario on NES exploded because it was arguably the best game of its time. SM64 was NOT the best game of its time. It was a revolutionary game and vision, but others did it better and at around the same time.

---next point---

You don't KNOW that the sales would have been the same level as SMW...in fact, that graph is completely missing super mario world 2; aka yoshis island, which already shows a downward trend.

And no, I'm not calling the market of SMB Barren. The market BEFORE NES was barren. Super Mario was on NES. NES paved the way to many outstanding games, but Mario did not have to compete with most of them. All it had to do was be better than anything else out at the time, which it did handily. Tell me I'm wrong, I encourage you to offer rebuttal.