So Nintendo has made a ton of mistakes since they broke into the videogame business in the mid 80s but I keep coming back to what are perhaps their two biggest mistakes they've ever done and whose consequences are still visible to this day.
Those mistakes were both made in the mid 90s when Nintendo was on top of the world and thought nothing could topple them riding on an all time cocky attitude and they were done very closely one following the other.
Of course I'm talking about Nintendo betraying their talks with Sony about them making a CD-ROM peripheral for the SNES by announcing a new deal with Philips that went nowhere and utterly embarrassed Sony and enraged them so much they decided to go on on their own and create Nintendo's biggest rival ever which took them a decade to finally beat once with the Wii only to come crashing down again with the WiiU.
The other being that once they've betrayed Sony and with threats of loosing important third party support (which they didn't take seriously) they decided to stick to the expensive carts that were a nuisance for everyone (including the customer) except themselves instead of going with the now industry standard CD technology. If there ever was a confirmation needed for third parties to finally ditch Nintendo for good in favor of the PlayStation it must've been this. Manufacturing a single N64 cart had to be ordered months in advance and cost more than $10 each while CDs could be ordered in much smaller windows and cost cents.
Many would consider, myself included, they've never fully recovered from those stumbles. But which is the bigger Nintendo blunder for Era? Whichever we choose I think could very much so be considered Nintendo's one true biggest error of all time.
Those mistakes were both made in the mid 90s when Nintendo was on top of the world and thought nothing could topple them riding on an all time cocky attitude and they were done very closely one following the other.
Of course I'm talking about Nintendo betraying their talks with Sony about them making a CD-ROM peripheral for the SNES by announcing a new deal with Philips that went nowhere and utterly embarrassed Sony and enraged them so much they decided to go on on their own and create Nintendo's biggest rival ever which took them a decade to finally beat once with the Wii only to come crashing down again with the WiiU.
The other being that once they've betrayed Sony and with threats of loosing important third party support (which they didn't take seriously) they decided to stick to the expensive carts that were a nuisance for everyone (including the customer) except themselves instead of going with the now industry standard CD technology. If there ever was a confirmation needed for third parties to finally ditch Nintendo for good in favor of the PlayStation it must've been this. Manufacturing a single N64 cart had to be ordered months in advance and cost more than $10 each while CDs could be ordered in much smaller windows and cost cents.
Many would consider, myself included, they've never fully recovered from those stumbles. But which is the bigger Nintendo blunder for Era? Whichever we choose I think could very much so be considered Nintendo's one true biggest error of all time.
