They were originally a playing card manufacturer. They've had an interesting history over the years of trying different things. The Wii itself is almost a throw back to the 80s as much as Lady Gaga is leading an 80s revival. I did say reinvent itself, but not in terms of throwing away successful I.P. Who would throw away a more well known character than Mickey Mouse?

That isn't really an unusual thing though, I find many things like this seem to have a 30 year cycle. The 60s was similar in many ways to the 90s, 70s to the "noughties" and recently (just going into the 10s) has been similar to the 80s (though I would say the fashion is considerably better, there seem to be similar clothes now as in the 80s, but much better combinations. Though perhaps in 30 years people will laugh at what we wear now)

They pretty much still are, the cards just have Pokemon on them.

Anyhow it's not such a great leap, Matel made a similar jump with the Intellivision. Many of the original video game developers were tabletop game companies. If you look at an old computer gaming world magazine from the 80s, Wargames were the dominant genre akin to the FPS today. Plus MS started out making traffic light software and Sony started out making radios.

I think you might have a point if every other new Disney blockbuster was a Mickey movie. That's not to say everything is exactly the same, Mario is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more anoiying now that he can talk.

I would think this generation has proven that it is much easier to sell a console through a game, rather than selling a console then selling people games. Certainly it is easier to sell games after they have the console, but to sell the console itself, it is easier to sell them with the promise of a game, rather than the alternative

I strongly doubt Nintendo will open the platform, though I'd like to see it happen. If they do open up any sort of homebrew possibility, I would expect it to be very limited in scope: possibly something akin to Apple's iTunes store, if even that much.

But now you gotta catch em all!

I remember the stories about the some of the games, real time strategy was a genre which started on the tabletop but really evolved into something more on the PC platform especially. I was really too young to remember as I started on the MS-DOS operating system and I believe I learnt how to type before I learnt how to read or write by copying my mother and father to boot up games.

The point is also about how Mario has declined with time whereas Mario has stayed fresh and relatively current. If Mario was as popular as he was back in the 60s/70s they would have probably kept using him as the centrepiece of their games.

I suspect the 90s and noughties will be held in much higher regard than the 70s and 80s. Over time people are generally getting smarter about things and they aren't reviving everything bad/good from previous generations. I suspect the rise of fashion magazines and the internet has probably helped considerably in this regard.

Personally, I think Nintendo would try to win the next generation by advancing the way games are played in a way that Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t think of or don’t seem to see the potential in. One of my thoughts on this is that Nintendo worked on improving the way that our actions in the real world were translated into the digital/videogame world by introducing (decent) motion controls; in the upcoming generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo focused on improving how the digital/videogame world interacted with the real world.

I remember the stories about the some of the games, real time strategy was a genre which started on the tabletop but really evolved into something more on the PC platform especially. I was really too young to remember as I started on the MS-DOS operating system and I believe I learnt how to type before I learnt how to read or write by copying my mother and father to boot up games.

Not real time strategy, turn-based. I started more or less the same way (probably have the CS degree because of all the stuff I had to learn to get those DOS games to actually work), but my father was a war gamer in College (the 70s equivalent of the modern gamer) and would bring back copies of new games from work (the 80s equivalent of torrenting) with photo copied manuals (for the questions they would ask you to prevent piracy). The main advantage was that you didn't have to memorize the rules, and the serious war games had a lot of them.

Underlying this whole discussion is one's view of how innovation actually happens. When something goes well, people have every incentive to claim they knew things would work out as they did all along. The more you look into these types of claims though (in my experience), the less true they seem.