Nintendo's least successful era

[Slownenberg]

I don't get the people who are saying N64 era.

N64 got destroyed in sales by PSX sure, but it was still really popular, sold a lot more than GC or WiiU, and is both historically and at the time considered to have some of the absolute biggest must play games. Despite PSX having multiple times more games than N64, FFVII is the only game on PSX that had the sort of industry defining hype around it that Mario 64, OoT, and Goldeneye all had. It was also THE system for multiplayer gaming at the time. It also introduced numerous permanent hardware changes to the industry like built-in 4 players, rumble, contol stick.

N64 had much larger cultural impact, much more sales, and much better top games than WiiU and GC.
While GC had a much larger library, a lot of the good games were just multiplat games that could be played on xbox and ps2 as well, and GC's top first party games were not nearly as good as N64's for the most part, though MKDD, Prime, and Wind Waker were all fantastic but even Wind Waker had a bad reputation until later gens when people finally got over the fact that it has an cartoon art style and people were able to recognize that was a positive.

And then on the handheld side, GB came out with Pokemon which was the biggest thing ever. It rejuvinated the almost decade old GameBoy as though it was almost a brand new system! There's never been anything like that before or since. In addition the released the GBC which was a nice upgrade revision to make GB even more relevant to go alongside the western release of Pokemon.


So, WiiU/3DS era was by far the least successful from every possible metric. Sales, Games, system design, cultural impact, everything... it was just the weakest.