It's hard for me to argue with the feeling in the op. There's correct emphasis of the way the time was being perceived by most gamers. PS4's line up obviously had new 3rd party titles that gamers wanted. Wii U (I hate even saying that name gugh!!) Kicked my ass as a nintendo gamer. I thought I was going to skip the console until my gf convinced me to get it for myself. That's when ZombiU took me in... hook in mouth. Despite financial failure, i fell gaga for it and ended up loosing my interest as a gamer.
Financially 1995 may have looked safe, but I would say these are the years that DoOMed Nintendo's Home Console Brand. I'll give a drunken history: Nintendo and Sony were engaged.. then sony was all like "I wanna make babies on cd with you", and ninty was all "Girl! HELL NO!! I aint never getting married..." .
95 was hyped up to be the transition from "Super" to "Ultra"! Video Game Magazines wrote and spun a million ways about 3D!!1! It was going to blow our minds to play "Better than Arcade Quality" on your very own couch. But when 1995 came there was no new console after all :( Just the same SNES we been playing all our little lives.
"After 19 months of intense development, we have attained our two main goals for Nintendo Ultra 64: to develop a chipset capable of delivering the world's best video game experience, and to do it at a price that can deliver a hardware set below $ 250 retail," said Howard Lincoln, then-chairman of Nintendo of America. "However, we have made a conscious decision not to rush Nintendo Ultra 64 to market. Instead, we've decided to give our software developers additional time to maximize the power of this system in their game creation."
More here: http://www.1up.com/news/day-history-nintendo-64-born
Instead, we got Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, Windows 95, and Virtual Boy. In no particular order of suckiness. Windows 95 was a sleeper hit with truly amazing experiences only available to the master race. Playstation proved itself instantly as the Simba of the Gaming Jungle. Just that fact you could listen to your music cd on your tv with cool visuals made it the obvious choice for every child and adult in the world. I hated it! It was clearly cooler than anything out there. I was too die hard to leave nintendo for psone.
Nintendo Home Console Brand never recovered from this. The renamed N64, the unusual GC, the shameless Wii, the GUGH!! WiiU, all failed to be "cool". They are so uncool that it's an embarrassment. The consoles are in many ways the best of their generation's, just they all failed to build a long term customer base. Nintendo put a lot of work into disguising this fact, but they have exited the home console race. The switch lite proves that switch is primarily Nintendo's Handheld Brand. To display the game on tv is one of the features we gamers have asked of handheld's since the Gameboy.
And it all started in 1995.
