Malstrom: "My purpose is to reveal and inform people about Nintendo."

[KungKras]

theprof00 said:

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.

And rebuttal shall be offered.

There is also Tetris for Game Boy, Final Fantasy VII that pushed the PS1 to new heights, Pokemon that revived the then ancient gameboy, NSMBW that revived Wii for a couple of years, GTA 3 that gave a tremendous boost to PS2, Halo that spearheaded Xbox Live and prevented Xbox for being a total disaster and even outsell Nintendo. Single games can have enormous momentum changing effects.

Yes, SM64 changed momentum in that it didn't sustain it the way 2D Mario used to do. It was important that it existed, because Nintendo had something to prove going into 3D, and I disagree that others at the time did it better, SM64 still has edges over many 3D platformers, but that depends on what you value in games.

Since the sales stabilized around SMW/SMB3 sales, I think it's a fair assumption to make.

SMB2, SMB2(American), SMB3 and SMW competed against more games in the same genre than any 3D Mario ever will, so even if the market was, and even the first had competition when others saw, and tried to imitate its popularity, so I'm not getting what you're trying to get across.