Re: Ps3 slim and price cut rumors running rampant.....madden in 2 weeks....coincidenc
The way I see it,Nintendo owes everything to ColecoVision and Atari(as far as home systems are concerned).Atari's popularity was mainly due to their massive library of games,and Coleco had better looking games and more peripherals.Add those two ideas together and you get the Nintendo Entertainment System with R.O.B.
Nintendo built upon a few different pre-existing ideas and made them a hell of a lot better,but without those ideas where would Nintendo be?The two guys who founded Atari are responsible for creating the world's first arcade video game,so in all actuality,all bow down before them as if they were hobbits atop of Minas Tirith.
Nintendo's number 1 attribute throughout their existence is that they pimp their shit better that anyone.
I'm not saying Nintendo invented gaming. For about the first decade of their existence they were essentially just a brand name more than the games they offered, (the Super Mario franchise notwithstanding). And for that decade all they really did was push their line of consoles etc... as better than anyone else, sort of an early version of the current-day Microsoft-Apple battle. Sega and Nintendo did the exact same thing.
But you're overlooking what is probably the single greatest addition to video games as we know it: 3D. Nintendo was the first to be able to port 3D games to consoles, and they did it for about 6 years better than anyone else. After that point, games became more about systems graphical capabilities more than games.
I would agree with you that Nintendo has done a lot of copying in its history, but then again, so has every game company.
What I meant was is that Playstation made the videogame business what it is today in terms of size,popularity and prosparity. Its like nintendo and Atari were the creators of home videogame enjoyment but Playstation perfected it. If it were left up to nintendo the videogame business would be underground.
The N64 was like a dreamcast but with better games.They started that "nintendo is unique" thing with the N64. Before they started that bullshit they had Super nintendo,which they kept old school. SuperNES against Genesis was like a ps2 vs xbox thing. Gamecube kept the "unique" theme and was very lackluster. The Wii is more of a fad cause of the interaction with the motion controller. In the end how many versions of sports does one need to wave the remote around to??? Mario is in the rigor mortis stage too. Look at the figures,the Wii sales are terrible the last few months and are gonna get worse. Its very one dimensional the Wii and will fizzle out but in a much slower pace than the dreamcast did for the simple fact that its affordable.
As far as Micro$oft and Xbox.....they just jumped on the F'n bandwagon and havent done shit except make an online service that is good but charges people for everything from changing a gamertag to downloading a picture pack...$$$$$...sad.
Eh, that's not really true. Pre-N64, Nintendo was essentially just another company who happened to market really well, just like Apple does today. Where Nintendo really set the standard was bringing 3D games to the forefront of the modern game lexicon. They basically not only laid a foundation of 3D gaming on consoles, (it had already been done on computers) and building significantly on it. Their work in the 3D realm has essentially been the reason why FPS games have become the most popular in the world. The Gamecube, and moreover the Wii are prime examples of a marketing strategy, not prowess. Nintendo at the time of development made a conscious choice to try to market to a particular crowd, and they've stuck with it. It didn't really catch on with the GameCube, and wasn't until they developed a new interaction method that they could really get to the market they wanted to (and somewhat miraculously, the market they weren't interested in as well).
Sony's biggest contribution, now that I think about it, is probably not even related to the games themselves. Sony has actually historically almost identically modeled the way that Nintendo operates. They take a product, market the hell out of it, and then continue the cycle. The advantage they have over Nintendo in that regard is that Sony happens to be an electronics manufacturer, meaning they can skip having to pay other companies to build their systems. The interesting part is that Microsoft upon their entrance to the market did a really good job in providing a really technically powerful console, a precedent that Sony has mimicked in the PS3. Microsoft and Sony between the stages of PS2/Xbox and PS3/360 sort of switched positions. Sony has become much more acutely aware of the value of technically impressive gaming, (although it did almost take them two years to begin to push this angle), and Microsoft has become much more about marketing the product.
Don't underestimate the impact of Microsoft in the history of the video game business. While it may seem trivial, online multi-player and the system that makes it work is probably the greatest contribution of the decade to video games. 10 years ago, LAN parties were the only efficient and dependable means to play games online. Now, nearly 50% of Xbox 360 owners play on Xbox Live. That's an absurdly large portion of the population of 360 owners. The PS3 has roughly the same percentage, albeit with fewer users overall. That is why Microsoft is in fact at least a solid contributor to the video game industry.
Saying that Sony has done the majority of the work in making the video game industry what it is today is sort of like saying the guy who paints cars on an assembly line is the major reason why the car got finished, that is, Sony and Microsoft have really only been a part of the process, and have benefited immeasurably from the contributions of other companies.
