"Fast, simple action are the bywords for the majority of British gamers, and preferably in a real-world setting with a minimum of abstraction."

I've always thought the UK had the most bland gaming taste, and now I know why. That's pretty much my definition of a bland game. So does Disney animation not do well over there either?

Then again, you're norwegian. Nintendo was all powerful in Norway in large part cause of the excellent work Unsaco did there at the time. It lasted until Playstation was released. But during the NES and SNES days, the pressure to buy Nintendo products was overwhelming and god help you if you where ever that guy with the Sega console. The norwegian government even sued Nintendo for brainwashing kids at the time. Crazy!

thats the kind of uneducated, bigoted opinon i would expect, you know nothing of english culture or of the english gaming heritage! most kids in the 1980 learnt to program on their home computers (not pcs), these guys went on to be some of the best coders in the business and gave birth to the modern day gaming!

The assumption in the OP sounds legit, but it has a big flaw. In it, it is stated that the reason is lack of nostalgia due to computer gaming on machines like the Spectrum, C64 or BBC Micro.

If that was the reason, it would be true for pretty much all of europe, not just Great Britain. Germany for example was very heavely into the C64, Amstrad CPC (sold as Schneider CPC in Germany), Amiga and PC. France was very much into pretty much the same computers as germany, plus the Atari ST/TT lines. Heck, even today France and especially Germany are some of the biggest PC gaming markets out there. And the situation was similar in pretty much all of western europe, and eastern europe being behind the iron curtain would mostly not even know what a console is (they had however their own knock-offs of the western european computers) until 1990/1991 and the fall of the iron curtain and soviet union.

So while this all might have contributed to the overall weakness of Nintendo in Europe, it can hardly be the reason why the british gaming market is so different to the other european ones.

I just think UK gamers just go for the consoles that everyone is getting and is the most popular. That seems to be the biggest factor for them, not the price.

Phenomenal reasoning there.

How, then, does the console get popular in the first place?

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Nintendo should think about bringing back Mario Strikers.

No I am jsut blaming TV shows for what the brits who have oved here have told me too haha. They do say that there is sunlight there but pales to Aus.

Said the guy from the UK with stereotypical UK gaming taste :P

My post wasn't to say that objectively UK gaming taste is bad, just that this article shows why I personally always found it bland. Their definition of an appealing game and my definition of a bland one are identicle. It always bugged me how an entire country seemed to consistently have radically different tastes from me, and now I know the history as to why.

So England is a stereotypical brodude?

I and England disapprove.