One of the biggest setbacks in Nintendo history was getting leapfrogged to the CD-ROM generation by first Sega with the Sega CD in 1991 and then the Sony PlayStation in 1994, a really harsh blow they've been struggling to recover from ever since And they did it to themselves
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
They had the market share, they could've ruled console gaming *permanently* They were looking into CD-ROM technology in *1988*, they developed the "Super CD" as an add-on to the SNES But the upper-level brass at Nintendo were always suspicious of it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Based on the fact that 1) They were unable to develop their own CD-ROM technology and format completely from the ground up in-house without anyone else's patents, and 2) This meant any CD-ROM software would be vulnerable to ripping and piracy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Mr. Yamauchi, the President of Nintendo himself, *hated* this His *whole damn philosophy* was that everything cradle-to-grave Nintendo made be on Nintendo-owned proprietary tech, like to even make another device you can plug an SNES cart into was laborious reverse engineering
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
They got really, really far with the concept of a CD-ROM-based console as a collab with Sony -- because it just made obvious sense as what the next console generation would be about -- but it was dogged by skepticism and increasingly harsh demands from Nintendo the whole time
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And then at some point, we don't know exactly what it was said, but Mr. Yamauchi unceremoniously shot the whole project in the head Sony made their huge announcement of their Nintendo partnership at the 1991 CES only for Nintendo to openly disavow this the *very next day*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
People at the time said Sony President Norio Ohga took this as a deep personal insult -- Nintendo saying "We've decided to go a different direction with Phillips instead" without even telling him They called it a Japanese honor culture thing but honestly it's a universal thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Anyway that's why Ohga went out of his way to create Sony Computer Entertainment He founded a whole-ass company just to get revenge on Yamauchi for making him look like an ass in public Putting together everything they'd built for Nintendo they still owned and making the PS1
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Nintendo created their own worst and most powerful competitor in one fell swoop because of their high-handed arrogant bullshit and even today they're still struggling to catch up from that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I dunno. I don't think Nintendo is doing that badly nowadays. (I thought the Switch was a big hit. Plus they still they still kill on 1st party releases.)
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All I mean is that the days when "Nintendo" was synonymous with "video game" are long over, and while that was probably inevitable, people at Nintendo are probably still kicking themselves over how it happened
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Yeah they definitely don't dominate the game landscape anymore. Incidentally, I think another big blunder for Nintendo was that they didn't embrace "mature" gaming they way Sony did.
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Replying to @2plus2equals7 @Nymphomachy
Yeah the bizarre thing here is how Nintendo's legendary prissiness, that ignited so many gamer outrages when we were schoolchildren - no blood in Mortal Kombat! - has been not only fully adopted by a bunch of Kids These Days but actively rebranded as "left wing"
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