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Soundwave on 04 September 2020
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d21lewis said:
Soundwave said:

People really don't understand either that circa 1995/1996, "Playstation" is nothing close to what it is now. It was not a very established brand.

As mentioned above the SNES was outselling it and the N64 demolished its early sales. In Japan the Saturn was beating the Playstation.

Things started to shift dramatically around late '96/'97 when it became clear Nintendo didn't have the games they were famous for.

That's the other thing you have to understand about this time period, pre-1997 "Nintendo = all games". Not just Nintendo games. Nintendo systems meant Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Castlevania, Ninja Turtles, Megaman, and all the major 3rd party games, that's all people knew until then. The idea of a Nintendo system without these games was a foreign concept.

Before that really it was not uncommon at all for a person to have maybe Mario for the NES, but no other Nintendo published games. My neighbor had SMB/Duck Hunt, but outside of that all his games were 3rd party -- Megaman 3, Tecmo Bowl, Duck Tales, Ninja Gaiden. That wasn't uncommon at all.  

I was one of them. Almost. I got my hands on Nintendo games from time to time but, until smb3, the games I played always felt like the worst. I was mainly a fan of the third party stuff. Capcom and Konami and Sunsoft dominated by childhood.

In those days really to be honest no one really delineated third party games and first party games ... everything was just "Nintendo games". In my house, Mario was obviously a huuuuuuge deal, but games like Megaman 2 and Contra/Super C got just as much play time. 

But just to give some insight, you have to understand that a Nintendo system not having tons of games, tons of support, and even software droughts was somewhat shocking for the N64, because the NES/SNES/Game Boy were all the gold standard for developer support until that point. 

That might be something hard to someone to grasp who grew up after the mid-1990s.