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Forums - Nintendo - Stop calling the N64 a failure! It outsold every Sega system and the original Xbox!!!!

Ganoncrotch on 25 November 2014

It was a flop in terms of... they messed up the CD deal with Sony and as a result invited Sony into the console market. They pretty much made themselves a massive rival that beat the shit out of their offerings, the only way to look at Sony joining the console market as a + for Nintendo is that Sony did make it "cool" for teens and above to be gamers with the playstation generation and some of the dark games like Resi Evil which were not aimed at kids.

It was a flop in terms of what it did for 3rd party support, absolutely burning bridges with the likes of Squaresoft was idiotic on the part of Nintendo and the N64 was a middle finger to developers with it's expensive and out dated cartridge.

It was a flop considering that the CPU of it was being compared to supercomputers at the time it was being developed... then they put 4mb of ram in it and an absolutely miniscule texture cache, they made a bottleneck machine basically.





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Areal-Llort on 25 November 2014

N64 has good games!! All you people that say no is fat and bad.



badgenome on 25 November 2014

Don't call it a failure because it outsold a bunch of other failures?



ICStats on 25 November 2014
fory77 said:
Who ever called it a failure? Sony fanboys?

I don't know about Sony fans, but recently some Nintendo fans that think Nintendo only got it right with the NES and Wii, sometimes act like the other Nintendo consoles are exceptional failures.

The comments from Sony/MS "fanboys" are more often that, Wii U seems like a natural progression in the N64, GC, Wii U line - with N64 being the most successful.



My 8th gen collection

NintendoPie on 25 November 2014
badgenome said:
Don't call it a failure because it outsold a bunch of other failures?

It's all in your way of looking at things. Ryan decided to call the other failures "considerable hits."



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aikohualda on 25 November 2014
Azuren said:
aikohualda said:
failed to keep up with the competition...

but their games aged better than the ps1 games I must say....


http://romhustler.net/img/screenshots/psx_full/ingame/4fca1aaf87a20.jpg

Looks pretty good to me, even though IX is awful.





 

ijustlikegames:) on 25 November 2014

The N64 was probably Nintendo's last great system...God I hated that controller though. Now I can enjoy emulators to play my favorite N64 games without that terrible controller.



AZWification on 25 November 2014

I wouldn't call it a failure, but its sales weren't amazing by any means..



                
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Zekkyou on 25 November 2014
RolStoppable said:

Is this some kind of reverse fanboyism? You know that the Xbox lost a lot of money, yet somehow you still decide to classify it as "mediocre"? What's bad or even terrible then? Probably bankruptcy and getting your penis cut off in the process, respectively.

When i say 'mediocre' i'm talking purely in reference to its sales in the context of the competition it was up against. As a whole i'd personally consider it a failure. They shouldn't have had to lose $5b to achieve those sales.



Soundwave on 25 November 2014
Shadow1980 said:
The N64 was successful in the U.S. According to the NPD, it pulled about 18 million units lifetime, more than the SNES and Genesis. In fact, during its first 15 months on the market in the U.S., it sold faster that any other system until the PS2, and even today it's still the third fastest-selling system in that span, though the PS4 may potentially bump it down to fourth. Until the release of FFVII, the N64 was outpacing the PS1 in the U.S. While the PS1 eventually outsold the N64 by a comfortable margin, the N64 was still the third best-selling post-crash system ever in the U.S. by the end of the century, only being beaten by the PS1 and NES.

However, Japan is where it suffered. Due to the loss of support from Square, Enix, Capcom, and Konami, Japanese gamers switched to PlayStation en masse. While the SNES officially sold over 17 million units in Japan lifetime, the N64 only sold about 5.5M.

In Europe, Nintendo never made a big impact outside of the Wii. The PS1 was the first truly successful console in the region, and PlayStation has remained the dominant brand for nearly two decades, aside from the four years the Wii took the top spot. The NES, SNES, and N64 combined sold less than 23 million units in Europe.


There's no doubt in my mind had Nintendo compromised with third parties and at least agreed to a CD-drive add-on early into the life cycle that they would've sold 50+ million easy. 

N64 was genuinely something a lot of people wanted and the public really took to it ... it's just than when people saw that completely one-sided situation with game releases versus the Playstation that just killed the N64. 

Imagine the PS4's first year ... and then you basically give XBox One every big third party game for the rest of the generation. 

People didn't know the N64 was going to turn out like that, at that time buying a Nintendo console meant you got all the third party games, it was that way with the NES and SNES, there was no reason to expect otherwise and most people didn't know the economics of cartridge vs. CD manufacturing.