The_Liquid_Laser said:
Illusion said:
The difference is that, at least in North America, the N64 succeeded in achieving massive mainstream appeal. If you were a kid in 1997 and you had an N64 in your house, every kid on the block wanted to come over. If you were a kid in 2013 with a Wii U, most of your friends would roll their eyes and go back to their smartphone.
Games like Goldeneye, Star Fox, Smash Bros, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time created massive popularity and hype and made the N64 a household name for at least the first half of its life. Even though the Wii U had some great games, Mario Kart 8 was probably its biggest title from a popularity standpoint and it faded from memory after a month or two.
What really kills the Wii U though is how its legacy got cannibalized by the Switch. Nobody is going to remember that Splatoon or Mario Maker were Wii U games because most people will have played these games for the first time on the Switch. Very few people 10 years from now will think back to their childhood and remember the Wii U fondly like people today remember those sleepovers in the 90's playing Goldeneye with their friends. I would argue that the Wii U isn't even as impactful as the Dreamcast was despite selling more units just because so many of the special experiences that the Wii U had have been completely recreated and enhanced on the Switch. The Wii U's legacy was destroyed in order to make the Switch a success.
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The problem with this post is that it does not describe reality. Was N64 popular with kids? Of course. Every Nintendo console is popular with young kids. That includes the Wii U. Kids did not roll their eyes at the Wii U. (Everyone else did, but young kids did not.) The issue Nintendo has is getting people other than young kids to like their console. Also the N64 did not have massive mainstream appeal. It was, at best, tied with the PS1 in North America. And that was during it's best years which did not last. Also people still liked games like Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros on Wii U. But this was not enough to get people to buy a Wii U.
And I am not saying all of this because I think the Wii U was great. I am saying all of this as a reality check on the N64. So much of what you describe as great about the N64 also applies to the Wii U. Maybe this is not really why the N64 sold better than the Wii U? Nintendo had a huge amount of positive momentum going into the N64 generation. The name Nintendo was synonymous with gaming in those days. The Wii U did not have that kind of positive momentum. Other than that the N64 is not really that different than the Wii U. Although the Wii U gamepad was even worse than the N64 controller. One positive the N64 had is that it's controller was less terrible. Other than that it's main advantage was Nintendo as a brand. Nintendo's name used to be a lot stronger.
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I don't know, when I was around young families in the 2013-2015 range, most of them either still had Wii's or the parents had bought PS4's. I knew a few families that had the Wii U but I can't really say that the kids were into it the way there were into their tablets, etc and it was usually the parents who bought it because they were fans of Nintendo... That wasn't the case back in the 90's where the N64 really was the coolest thing out there for a few years. It had better graphics than the PS1 or Saturn and it really regarded as something that was "cool". The N64 was my first console and I was not a popular kid, but that year in '97 I had more friends than I could count who just wanted to come over to play Mario 64.
I never saw that from kids and the Wii U. Nintendo was in really big trouble in the Wii U's era because mainly kids for the first time in decades were growing up with something other than Mario. They were growing up with Angry Birds and Candy Crush. The Switch has succeeded in bringing Nintendo consoles back into the homes which is helping to reverse that damage.
