To be honest and I've said it before the Nintendo of the 90s died with the GameCube.
When that system was not a success after following up the dissapointing N64 for Nintendo, I think the company radically shifted.
We just didn't want to notice it or hand waved it away thinking eventually Nintendo would "come back" to the hardware they used to make.
It was never happening. Too many dumb mistakes made in the past eventually effectively buried their home console business.
They have no choice now but to merge what's left of that division (which is basically nothing -- 14 million Wii U owners) into the much more popular portable side and hope that it can hold serve.
The winding road of failure that got us to this point though ... that began really probably 20+ years ago. Nintendo never should have allowed Sony to make the initial Playstation, they never should've allowed the N64 to ship without a CD-drive, they never should have taken Microsoft so lightly, etc. etc. etc. Every one of those missteps was like stab through a vital organ of their console business, and eventually enough of those just caused it to collapse, the last one being betting the entire farm on casuals as your "new" audience but getting hung out to dry by them.
Switch is a system that has to be what it is, because Nintendo simply backed themselves into a corner and had no other options.
