What happened? Happened that Nintendo created the consoles that will remain forever in my head
my favourite consoles by far, the pinnacle of gaming, the ultimate entertainment sources

Nothing went wrong they just did not have as much variety in gaming as Sony did and Sony had a lot of unique exclusives compared to the N64. By the time the PS1 era ended I was hooked on the PS brand and thought all Nintendo made was colorful, bright games. I liked those, but also needed some darkness and adult themes, yeah.

The game cube era had hardly any brand dominance for Nintendo as the PS brand dominated video game retailers space. That has all changed and can change again.

N64 rocked. I loved the thing. Most of my favorite games came out on that system. I don't know why people seem to hate on it so much.

Mario 64
Mario Kart 64
Zelda: OoT
Zelda: MM
Harvest Moon 64
Goldeneye

Why the hate?

they got competiton

Pretty much everybody said it.... :/

@viper1 i already said that had little to do with the cd-rom. Just another example of how they were messing up in those days.
speaking of the cd-roms, ill refer you to soundwave who said it better than i could.

His statement doesn't add anythig that you diddn't already state except maybe a price.

Fact is that Sony wanted full brand control which nobody would ever agree to.   Philips and JVC were some of the providers for 3D0, SNK and Sega's disc drives which may have been why Nintendo had difficulty attracting them.   We do know they couldn't go with Matsushita (you may know them as Panasonic) because they were building a competing console.

Nintendo didn't turn its back on CD media.  They tried.   They started working on it way back in 1988.  Does that sound a company that just wanted to turn its back on optical media?

By the time all those deals fell through, they were already a whole year behind schedule.   It was go with carts or be 2 years late to the market against a very competitive Sony.   

And as soon as Matsushita shelved the M2 project, Nintendo went back to them to work on the 64 DD and the GC disc drive.   Seriously, does that sound like they turned their backs on optical media to you? I mean they wanted an optical disc drive so badly that they made the 64 DD. 

never said they turned there back on anything. Dont know where you got that from.

YOu said it yourself, they could have waited it out. They werent "forced" to stick to cartridges, they made the choice to go ahead with it.

SoundWave did and you agreed with his statement.

"forced".  Outside of a physical force, not one is forced to do anything.   But we use the term "forced" when options are reduced to where only 1 other "feasible" option remains.   Launching 2-3 years late with a CD drive would have been corporate suicide.  The only other feasible option was to utilize carts again.  

But that's semantics.  And if that's the card you want to play, fine.  Play it.  But it's a very weak card.

That.

Sony just happened to be in the right place with the right console at the right time and the rest is history. People tend to forget that their own expectations and perceptions change with time. Sega screwed themselves and Nintendo screwed developers, Sony just gave away the condoms for free. (somewhat wrong but fun anyway)

The Wii is effectively the NES redux, essentially it is the NES 2. It combines the two most famous things about the NES, the controller and the light gun. Nintendo just went back to basics and said 'we were successful with the NES so lets release the NES 2'.

The game is the same but the league is different; Sony and Microsoft are both far stronger than Atari and Sega ever were. Nintendo came out this generation with a completely new playbook which won them the superbowl as the competition simply didn't have enough time to get to grips with the new moves.