Read Part 3 if you haven't already...
In 1990, Nintendo was on top of the world, Creating a magazine called Nintendo Power, Making Cartoons based on Mario and Zelda, Making Breakfast Cereal, Toys, Clothes, but that same year, They made their next big thing in Japan...
The Super Famicom was released to the Japanese public on November 21, 1990. It had a larger color palette than most of what was available at the time, meaning Images looked crisper than Mega Drive or PC-Engine. It was released in Japan for about $320, And generally speaking, it was a hit. Companies were interested in developing games for the system, including some of the companies in the last part, Like Capcom, Konami, and especially Square Soft, to them they were at top of the world at the moment.
Just over a year prior, Nintendo released the game boy, which would also be a contributor to the war against Sega, NEC, SNK, and Atari. It was compact, Affordable, and had the best pack in game that wasn't Mario...
Waht can be said about Tetris? It was a game that was easy to pick up and play, Hard to Master, It was interesting to see how it came to be... Nintendo was in court with a bunch of different companies to see who would release Tetris on their consoles. One of of those companies was Tengen/Atari, Who was a maker of unlicensed games for the NES, along with Wisdom Tree, Nintendo did not approve of them making Games on their console so eventually they got the axe. Nintendo won the court case, and made tetris for almost all their platforms from then. Tetris wasn't the only game on the Gameboy, There was Miniature versions of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, 3rd party offerings, and newcomers like...
Kirby was a game aimed at beginner gamers that got more complex while the series went on, It wa criticized for being too cutesy, but it gained o following that still is there to this very day... There's also a little monster fighting and collecting franchise that originated on the original Game Boy that we'll talk about in the next part...
Overall, The Gameboy was a hit, and sold hundreds of millions of units.. But what about on the home console side?
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was an improvement to the NES in every way. It had Super Mario World as a pack in game, If you got bored with that game, You had four others, F-Zero, Pilotwings, SimCity (where I live), and Gradius III. Let's talk about 2 major games that showed what the console was capable of...
Super Mario World was bigger than Mario 3, and had everything a Mario Fan wanted in a Mario game, it was colorful, vibrant, and had new power ups. But it would be out classed in every way by a certain genesis title, I forget what it was called... Oh well, the name will come to me...
F-Zero was another game that showed what the console was capable of... Showing Mode 7 Pseudo-3D graphics. Sadly it was more of a Tech Demo than Anything, but it was a damned good tech demo...
The Genesis fought Back with the Game Gear (which got owned by The Gameboy along with the Lynx, and TurboExpress), It was bulky and expensive (not to mention it's disappointing battery life), but one Game single handedly made the genesis a house hold name... that was...
Sonic the Hedgehog was the game that beat Mario to the ground. It was faster, it had better graphics, it had a cooler main character, it also had great gameplay with arguably the best controller on any system ever. It made gret use of the Genesis' not so great sound chip. It was the best game on the system up to that point, Nintendo thought it couldn't be topped...
But they released some of their most popular single and multiplayer games, Link to the Past (arguably the best 2D Zelda), Super Mario Kart (a game responsible for ruining Friendships for it's competitive nature), and Super Metroid (the best 2D Metroid game and making a lot of best oft lists). These games ended up on a lot of best SNES Games lists.
But the war was only beginning, along with releasing more Sonic, Sega also had 2 tactics, one better than the other...
1) Allowing more creative freedom for 3rd Parties: Nintendo didn't allow violent video games to eb published on their systems, but Sega did. this lead to the ESRB Making Mortal Kombat selling more on Genesis the SNES, Along with many other 3rd party games. By the time Nintendo Caught on, It was too little too late.
2) Putting add-ons for "bigger and better" games. The Sega CD and later the 32X were supposed to make the Genesis rival the Super Nintendo in terms of quality, but all it did was make the system more bulky, and almost all it had were crappy Full Motion Video games. The Sega CD was a decent hit, so much so that the Big N was in a fear so what did they do?
They teamed up with Sony to make a CD add-on, At CES of the year this was revealed they told their shareholders that they decided to team up with Phillips to make the add on because they had a more favorable distribution deal. This pissed of Sony and this would lead to Nintendo's biggest downfall and the start of the PlayStation Saga (which we'll discuss next time). Nintendo in return for Phillips making SNES CD consoles, let Nintendo Franchises be published on the CD-i, i'll just show you some good examples of why the only good thing to come out of these games is (ironically) called Youtube Poop...
The gameplay was just as bad. and also the SNES CD Never Materialized.
As If that wasn't enough, They teamed up with holywood to release a legendarily infamous movie...
It'll take a whole another post to explain what happened there, so you tell me, Do you want to see a blog based on this movie? I know It's been done a million billion times but are you curious to see my thoughts on the movie? If so, When I get a copy of the movie, I'll see it then write about it...
It gets worse from there, they had 2 potentially worse competitors on the horizon....
The Panasonic 3DO and the Atari Jaguar had huge amounts of potential, and in theory could beat Nintendo and Sega to the ground. Graphics alone don't make a console, and they both seriously BOMBED!!!!!!! However the Genesis was beating the Super Nintendo Badly, and Nintendo looked no further than England for new ideas that beat the competition...
Star Fox by Argonaut Games had polygonal 3D graphics. It started a franchise that is still going strong 20 years later. It had space flight action.
Rare Ware would over time become Nintendo's most valuable Asset. Developing many games for the N64, but right now they made Donkey Kong Country. This made Nintendo Relevant again. It had Silicon Graphics 3D (almost), It wasn't true 3D, but the illusion was convincing. It also was like Mario mixed with Sonic.
Despite these good games, The ghost of Nintendo's bad decisions started to catch up with hem and shortly after the release of Donkey Kong Country, The Sony Playstation was released in Japan. so Nintendo had to come up with their next big thing ASAP. Coming up in part 5, The Playstation VS Sega VS Nintendo Saga.
KEY PEOPLE:The Genesis fought Back with the Game Gear (which got owned by The Gameboy along with the Lynx, and TurboExpress), It was bulky and expensive (not to mention it's disappointing battery life), but one Game single handedly made the genesis a house hold name... that was...
Sonic the Hedgehog was the game that beat Mario to the ground. It was faster, it had better graphics, it had a cooler main character, it also had great gameplay with arguably the best controller on any system ever. It made gret use of the Genesis' not so great sound chip. It was the best game on the system up to that point, Nintendo thought it couldn't be topped...
But they released some of their most popular single and multiplayer games, Link to the Past (arguably the best 2D Zelda), Super Mario Kart (a game responsible for ruining Friendships for it's competitive nature), and Super Metroid (the best 2D Metroid game and making a lot of best oft lists). These games ended up on a lot of best SNES Games lists.
But the war was only beginning, along with releasing more Sonic, Sega also had 2 tactics, one better than the other...
1) Allowing more creative freedom for 3rd Parties: Nintendo didn't allow violent video games to eb published on their systems, but Sega did. this lead to the ESRB Making Mortal Kombat selling more on Genesis the SNES, Along with many other 3rd party games. By the time Nintendo Caught on, It was too little too late.
2) Putting add-ons for "bigger and better" games. The Sega CD and later the 32X were supposed to make the Genesis rival the Super Nintendo in terms of quality, but all it did was make the system more bulky, and almost all it had were crappy Full Motion Video games. The Sega CD was a decent hit, so much so that the Big N was in a fear so what did they do?
They teamed up with Sony to make a CD add-on, At CES of the year this was revealed they told their shareholders that they decided to team up with Phillips to make the add on because they had a more favorable distribution deal. This pissed of Sony and this would lead to Nintendo's biggest downfall and the start of the PlayStation Saga (which we'll discuss next time). Nintendo in return for Phillips making SNES CD consoles, let Nintendo Franchises be published on the CD-i, i'll just show you some good examples of why the only good thing to come out of these games is (ironically) called Youtube Poop...
The gameplay was just as bad. and also the SNES CD Never Materialized.
As If that wasn't enough, They teamed up with holywood to release a legendarily infamous movie...
It'll take a whole another post to explain what happened there, so you tell me, Do you want to see a blog based on this movie? I know It's been done a million billion times but are you curious to see my thoughts on the movie? If so, When I get a copy of the movie, I'll see it then write about it...
It gets worse from there, they had 2 potentially worse competitors on the horizon....
The Panasonic 3DO and the Atari Jaguar had huge amounts of potential, and in theory could beat Nintendo and Sega to the ground. Graphics alone don't make a console, and they both seriously BOMBED!!!!!!! However the Genesis was beating the Super Nintendo Badly, and Nintendo looked no further than England for new ideas that beat the competition...
Star Fox by Argonaut Games had polygonal 3D graphics. It started a franchise that is still going strong 20 years later. It had space flight action.
Rare Ware would over time become Nintendo's most valuable Asset. Developing many games for the N64, but right now they made Donkey Kong Country. This made Nintendo Relevant again. It had Silicon Graphics 3D (almost), It wasn't true 3D, but the illusion was convincing. It also was like Mario mixed with Sonic.
Despite these good games, The ghost of Nintendo's bad decisions started to catch up with hem and shortly after the release of Donkey Kong Country, The Sony Playstation was released in Japan. so Nintendo had to come up with their next big thing ASAP. Coming up in part 5, The Playstation VS Sega VS Nintendo Saga.
Shigeru Miyamoto created some of Nintendo's biggest games of the era and probably some of the best games of this era of gaming or any era of gaming.
Gunpei Yokoi created the Gameboy, and it was his biggest contribution to the Company, to bad these were his last full days in the company and his death soon followed in 1997.
HOMEWORK:
Here's some games you should examine for this era of Nintendo:
- Super Mario World (for being one of the best Mario Games Ever)
- F-Zero, Star Fox, and Donkey Kong Country (for their ground breaking graphics)
- and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid (for their grand scale that hasn't been matched at the time)
Like always, go original cartridge or go home.
Next time, Nintendo 64, Pokemon, Playstation Saga, Rareware's Heyday, Ocarina, and more...
All images belong to their respective owners and this blog is meant to be educational, so these images are protected under fair use. However, if you'd like one or more images taken down, please contact me at Anonymousyoshi007@gmail.com.
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