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Soundwave on 07 May 2016
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Aquamarine said:
NightDragon83 said:
LOL @ '95 being a terrible year for the SNES. Aside from the obvious (Yoshi's Island and DKC2, some of the greatest games not only on the SNES but of all time), the SNES had a TON of big releases that year, many of which were *gasp* THIRD PARTY TITLES!!! I know, shocking to think that at one time nearly all the big third party titles out there were on the SNES.

The SNES started to wane a bit in '96 due to the Saturn and PS1 already out and the N64 on the horizon, but '96 was still a banner year for Nintendo with the likes of Super Mario RPG and DKC3 on the SNES, along with the release of the N64 and games like Mario 64, Wave Race and Pilotwings.

What about the mediocre-at-best year for the Game Boy, the horrible failure that was the Virtual Boy with its shitty lineup, the uncertainty surrounding Nintendo 64 getting randomly delayed into 1996, the instant success of the PS1 overshadowing the 6-year-old SNES, etc.

You're letting the nostalgia of a few incredible, classic SNES releases overshadow the overall period of mediocrity and uncertainty that Nintendo fans were in during that time. As an example, look at Nintendo the company which had unprecedently low sales at the time, both in the American market via NPD and consolidated as a company with only 354 billion JPY net sales.

Eh nobody was really that upset about the Game Boy, but that time it was pretty old quite frankly, something from the NES era as the 16-bit era was winding down. We were also hearing reports of "Project: Atlantis" which was supposed to be the GB's successor.

Handheld wasn't really the same thing back then anyway, no one was freaking out about not enough handheld games, it was more like a bonus in those days.

No one at that time (1995) saw Pokemon coming.

The Playstation wasn't really that big of a deal in '95/early '96 either ... the N64 should have beaten it if it wasn't for the incredibly poor decision to use carts only. Hey if you wanna use carts cuz Miyamoto can't make Mario 64 on CDs fine, but that was no reason to make the system cart-only. Betting on the 64DD was stupid too. The N64 still had phenomenonal sales its first year until the drought of games thanks to cartridges stunted its momentum.

The N64 with Mario 64, Zelda: OoT, and GoldenEye *plus* third party support with the CD drive would've slayed everything IMO. NOA emerged from the mid-90s a much better company after learning some hard lessons from the 16-bit wars, their marketing was better and they had the killer add of Rareware. Every was going pretty good at that point, then NCL decides to cut their legs off with the cartridge decision.