| Jumpin said: Thanks. It should be noted that power was never a key feature with the NES as it competed with the Master System that was roughly 3X more powerful. Not to mention 25 of the 42 million NESs sold outside of Japan occurred AFTER the launch of the Mega Drive. Another thing to note is that due to the late release of the SNES, it was actually not as powerful as contemporary devices coming out around that time, and possessed specifications only slightly better than the Mega Drive released years earlier (the Mega Drive's CPU was actually double the power of the SNES's, but it was bottlenecked by the number of cycles; that is, without the Sega CD's processor which was 4X the clockspeed of the SNES). The SNES lifespan was cut short because 32-bit consoles were announced about 2 years after it launched, and released a year later. It's also false to say the Wii was the first time Nintendo didn't play the clockspeed game. The lateral design philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi was introduced in the 1970s - or rather, a philosophy which states that it's in creative design in other (less pricey for devs and consumers) directions can be compelling too. The Gameboy ran on this philosophy and sold the most hardware of any dedicated gaming console in Nintendo's history before the DS released, another console which also followed this philosophy. The Wii was simply the result of one of Yokoi's disciples, Genyo Takeda, who applied the lateral hardware design philosophy to their home console market after two colossal failures with the N64 and Gamecube. The same philosophy worked again with the Switch - a cheaper console which uses other mans (other than expensive chipsets) to make it compelling. Anyway, to explain Yokoi's philosophy a little further, he believed in using cheap, often older, components to make a more desirable device. The "lateral" part of the equation is designing it with a new sort of approach in mind in order to make it compelling (such as dpad interface, motion control interface, portability, hybridization, and touchscreens). It generally worked out well - his major failure was VR. |
Master System came out two years after the NES originally did it was always going to have the power advantage that situation wasn't really Nintendo not going for power per say.
The SNES also more than slightly better than the Mega Drive this is apparent when you look at certain type of games on the two systems for example RPGs on the SNES looked way better as it could display 256 colours at a time with a possible 32768 colours at higher resolutions with double the RAM to the MD's 61 at a time from a possible 512. The CPU was about the only thing MD had in its advantage which is why it excelled in arcade like games but SNES was the visual powerhouse of the two and also had much better audio hardware
