5. Firing Gunpei Yokoi: Father of the Game & Watch, Gameboy and Metriod series. He was made the sacrificial offering after the failure of Virtual Boy despite finishing work on what would become the successful Gameboy Pocket interation of the famed Handheld. Granted in the long run it might not have hurt the company but for those that know the history, Gunpei Yokoi's legacy with the company and the tragic circumstances that lead to his death there is no doubt that this is a failure in the grand scheme of things, as they lost the man that helped build the company and probably could have helped mold their future hardware into better and more profitable devices if still around to collaborate with.
4. R.O.B: For all the talk of gimmickry that the Wii's motion controls or the DS/3DS and Wii U get for touch screens, none of that compares to the Robot buddy known as R.O.B. Worked for only two games and I use the term 'worked' loosely, it is said to have been meant to be Trojan horse to get companies to view the Nintendo system as something different from its competition that died in the video game industry crash of the 80s but there is no denying, for those that wasted money on it or its games they hosed.
3. Virtual Boy: Creation of the system no doubt had the idea of it be revolutionary but the idea that people could adapt to stationary game play, with 3D graphics no better then the SNES but in shades of red proves somewhere along the line testing wasn't done on this device before it was announced or shown. Maybe a little arrogance on Nintendo's part thinking they could adapt the public that far, that fast to something so strange all for the sake of cheap depth illusion in games that were just above SNES capabilities.
2. The Wii U launch: Its almost a year, there is no denying it anymore, Nintendo messed up. Almost all the things that could go wrong with a major hardware launch seemed to hit the Wii U. A massive day 1 firmware update, long load times, lack of original software, consumer confusion (both with the fact that it is a new system and what exactly outside of graphics, how it would compare to the next gen consoles released down the line and its touch interface was the point of it), bad marketing, lack of foresight on using the GamePad itself as a selling point and a host of issues. Many that were within Nintendo's power to control but failure to do so has left the company in its worst starting position in a console race in the company's entire existence.
1. Failure to adopt to CD/DVD medium as the industry shifted: Nintendo's failure to change their gaming medium with the N64 produced a critical blow the company hasn't recovered from. Publishers went for the cheaper to produce and higher storage of CDs taking away one of their previous system's strongest weapon against its competition, the larger number publishers and developers. Maybe Nintendo really was concerned after seeing various other CD based systems like Sega's CD add on and others fail they didn't want to risk it. Maybe Nintendo was concerned about piracy eating away at sales. Maybe they just preferred other publishers having to pay premiums to get bigger carts and the cut they got out of it. Who knows, all that matters is that the N64 was dealt a blow by being cart based medium and the Gamecube was also dealt one due to Nintendo opting for more secure mini discs and while being a more capable piece of hardware then the PS2, it was frequently skipped over had downgraded versions of games due to companies not wanting to make up the space or do a lot of compression work to fit within the standard GC mini disc. Nintendo did a lot of things in the past to screw over other publishers and developers but the smaller medium they implemented since the N64 period has damaged their reputation worst then anything they have done with a lot of people.
