Nintendo Should Fail

I love video games. That much should already be evident here. Sure, there are specific games and genres for which I do not care, but I do not begrudge their existence. And yet, somehow, I am rapidly becoming a hater of Nintendo.

How can this be? The Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the Nintendo) forms a significant part of my childhood in a good way. I played that thing for uncountable hours and it represents a keystone in my cultural development. I may not remember the names of my elementary school teachers or nearly anyone with whom I went to school, but I damn well remember the Konami code for Contra and which pipes to take in Super Mario Bros. to get to the bonus coin rooms. And no, I don’t remember these things because I was an asocial shut-in with more games than friends. I was an active kid. Nintendo was just such a huge thing back then.

So how can this affection—nay, love—for Nintendo have turned to such revulsion? I suspect it’s for the same reason that I have come to loathe the once-beloved Star Wars: the creators have tampered with the product to such an extent that they have, in effect, raped my childhood.

My disenchantment with Nintendo began with the Wii. As I’ve documented here, I found the Wii to be an ultimately useless device. It is a game system that, unlike its competitors, only does one thing: play games. This wouldn’t be a problem if there are any games worth playing on the system, but there aren’t. Now, even the Nintendo company itself has officially given up on the Wii and is focusing on their next game platform, the incredibly stupidly named Wii U.

My disgust with Nintendo has only grown over the last year. As I said, the NES was an important piece of my childhood. However, when I became a teenager I outgrew that console and video games as a whole. At the time, games were being marketed as kids’ entertainment, as toys, and they weren’t sophisticated enough to hold my maturing interest. As a result, I missed out on most of Nintendo’s other games and systems after the NES (of course, I played Tetris on the Game Boy, but who didn’t?). It wasn’t until I was in college that I was drawn back into gaming by Sony’s Playstation, a device whose mature games were marketed specifically to adults such as myself. It was at that point that I became the avid gamer that I am today. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to miss the things I had in my youth and so I’ve recently become a part of the retro gaming community, seeking out the older games and systems that I enjoyed—or missed—back in the day.

The point is this: my experience with Nintendo’s game systems other than the NES is not colored by nostalgia. I am able to experience them fresh, warts and all. And let me tell you, there are an awful lot of warts.

Nintendo’s mistakes are legendary. This is the company that released a laughably bloodless version of Mortal Kombat, a game in which the appeal lied in its absurd amounts of gore. This is the company that released the Virtual Boy, a portable device that wasn’t really portable and which automatically paused every fifteen minutes to prevent severe damage to its users’ eyes (you know you’ve made a bad game when the game itself forces you to stop playing it). This is the company that released the N64, a console that used cartridge-based games when CD-ROMs were the industry standard and that had the most frustrating and uncomfortable controller ever devised.

And the hits just keep on coming. Although Nintendo has had great success in the handheld gaming marketplace, let’s not forget that they had to redesign the Game Boy Advance twice because they forgot to include a backlit screen and headphone jack, so the GBA was unplayable unless you were sitting alone and in direct sunlight. The Developers’ System (DS) has gone through four full iterations for various reasons. The current 3DS (which is not actually part of the DS series, despite the name) has experienced significant problems due to being rushed to market before it was ready. It is on the brink of failure for three main reasons: it was overpriced, costing more than a home console; it was released with only a handful of third-party games and no first-party support; and it was designed without a second control stick when modern games require two. Nintendo has tried to rectify the mistakes with the 3DS by cutting the price of it and releasing a control stick add-on, but by doing so in less than six months after the device’s release they have admitted effectively that they don’t know what they’re doing. It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?

And let’s not leave out the colossal turd that is the Wii here. Sure, the Wii was extremely successful for the first few years of its life, consistently outselling every other console by a wide margin. But those days are past. Nobody’s buying the Wii anymore, for two main reasons: a) everyone who wants one has one by now, and b) people who have them—or had them—found out they aren’t worth having. Nintendo’s leaders famously, and correctly, stated that they had done more to bring new people into gaming, but once they had these new people hooked Nintendo did nothing to hold onto them. The vast majority of the Wii’s games were directed only at novice gamers, so once those gamers became more experienced and savvy they graduated to the more mature hardware, just as I went from my NES to my Playstation.

Why has Nintendo sabotaged itself in this way? Why didn’t the company encourage making more sophisticated games for the Wii? Quite simply, it couldn’t; the Wii’s hardware limitations prohibit it. In order to keep the console’s cost low—and thus more appealing to new gamers—the Wii has a smaller memory capacity and less processing power than the other consoles of this generation. The result is a console that cannot support online multiplayer gaming, that has no multimedia capabilities (no CD or DVD playing allowed) and that outputs only in standard definition when HD is the norm in both the game and television industries. The hardware limitations constrain game developers, putting them in the position of having to choose between making games for one limited console with limited appeal or making games that can be released on multiple consoles with wider appeal. That’s not a difficult choice to make.

Looking at Nintendo’s history as a video game company has revealed that its success owes more to dumb luck than to business savvy. With all of the costly missteps the company’s made over the years it’s a wonder they’re still in business. Which begs the question: should they still be in business? I don’t think so, and the way things are going for them they won’t be in business much longer. Their decision to jumpstart sales of the 3DS by slashing $80 off the price less than six months after its release has served to alienate the company’s fans and customers. Nintendo tried to offset the damage by giving free games to the 3DS’ early adopters before the price cut took effect, but that plan backfired when retailers dropped the price early, allowing anyone who bought the 3DS at any price to receive the free games. Oops. Nintendo has driven its fan base even further away by ending its support for the Wii this year and releasing the Wii U in 2012. The company claims that the Wii U represents the next generation of gaming and that the company has a headstart on its competitors, but in truth the specs released so far show that the Wii U is really the current generation console that the Wii should have been and that the competitors are really years ahead of Nintendo. Oops again.

The future looks dim for Nintendo as a hardware company. So what is the company to do if it is to survive? The answer is simple: Nintendo needs to follow the lead of Sega and get out of the hardware business and focus instead on making games. After all, making really good games is what Nintendo has always done really well. I mean, come on! The company’s general manager of development, Shigeru Miyamoto, is the creator of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda! He should be making games, not running an office. The company needs to capitalize on its assets and do what it does best. But so far the leaders of the company have refused to do that. The company’s shareholders have repeatedly called upon its leaders to make games for other, non-Nintendo platforms, notably cell phones and tablet computers. However, those leaders have steadfastly refused to do so. The company’s position has been that Nintendo games will only be made for Nintendo systems. This is yet another costly mistake on Nintendo’s part, the final mistake that I fear will be their undoing. And that is why Nintendo should fail. A company this stupid deserves it.