If we're talking iconic as in Mario - then Mario, no doubt, no mater how much people actually like to play those games or not.

If we're talking PlayStation and Nintendo - PS, a long, long time ago.

At one point, Mario was more recognized than Mickey mouse. My mom still calls every console "Nintendo" and my job has a "No Gameboy" policy ( which I circumvented by bringing a PSP instead. Suckers!).

I just don't hear video gaming called "PlayStation" any more than I hear Nancy Grace of some pundit call it "Nintendo" or "Xbox". Even the president called gaming " Xbox ". Of course I live in North America, though.

Huh. Never thought of it that way.

If we're talking about home console only of course PS is win. But if we're counting handheld too Nintendo is winning since like 25 years ago ( I'm not counting mobile because obviously they aren't console).

Edit: What I want to say is everything has its place.

Was this article written a year after PS1 released? Oh wait never mind :^)

Very inspiring.

Hardware wise? Absolutely. But as an all encompassing brand of hardware and IP, it's not even on the same stratosphere.

I remember bringing a DS to a conference where we weren't allowed PSPs. I succeded.

They're not changing them beyond recognisability though. If Nintendo came out and said "We've made the next 3D Mario into a FPS" then you'd have a point, that would be a real risk, but taking a highly iconic franchise and character, keeping the core game very much in tact and then giving it a new artstyle and some other bells and whistles is only risking to make less profit but not actually risking to lose money. You use Wind Waker as an example, that game still sold 4.6 million copies on Gamecube, despite the differences.

There are much more iconic than Nintendo since the first Playstation. Sony was new in this market and they sold 3x more Playstation consoles than Nintendo 64 consoles. And in the next generation they dominated everything with Playstation 2. Playstation 2 sold more than 7x than the Gamecube. When you ask people today what they associate with gaming almost everyone will tell about Playstation. Since Playstation released they are much more iconic than Nintendo.