I should point out that Nintendo started doing backwards compatibility for its products only when things started to go wrong. When was the last good Mario, Metroid, or Zelda game made? About a video game generation ago, that's when (at least). Fast forward twenty years from 1996 to 2016, and the big problem is that Nintendo's still trying to play by its own rules while the games department is running on fumes. It was the Nintendo 64 where Nintendo started to lose track of the industry, by focusing on what they wanted to do and not where the market was going, and that cost them dearly, even if the games would still be good in that period. To borrow from a less-successful console from that time period's marketing, 'do the math'. On that day, Sega released the Sega 32X, and Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country. The excellent book Console Wars makes note of the day that, although it isn't explicitly stated in the book, the functional end of Sega as a serious competitor: November 21, 1994. Their decision to push better games instead of finicky add-ons cemented their place in history.

The Super NES fought off stronger competition with once again a superior system with superior games. box art for the first Mega Man was terrible. Ask anyone to name some 'solid SMS exclusives' and you'll probably get Alex Kidd or Phantasy Star.ДЄnd you thought the U.S. The Sega Master System was more expensive, arrived after the NES had hit the stores, and did not even have a solid line-up of first-party titles. In NES games at least compared to the Atari 2600 and its contemporaries, a higher level didn't mean the 'the same but more' or 'the same but faster', but a whole new experience. The reason why the NES did very well in the marketplace is that it had brilliant games no one else had, and not necessarily because of its exclusivity contract. The Nintendo Switch, which promises to meld the console and handheld experience, is at least a cool idea but to me it still misses the point of why Nintendo became good in the first place before its fall from grace. Although the writing seems amateurish today, I was not impressed. Some years ago I watched the Nintendo E3 event and saw them unveil the Wii U for the first time, and I wrote about it in the blog.

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