6 ms·
While not an exact example, it matches GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." The idea is that you find widely
by favorited 10y ago
While not an exact example, it matches GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." The idea is that you find widely understood tech, which is inexpensive due to its widespread use in other areas, and find a way to use it in making games. Everything from using calculator LED displays for the Game & Watch to using an accelerometer in a Wii Remote follows that principle.
Sourcing a bunch of inexpensive parts and throwing together something like the NES Classic Edition to fill the gap in an otherwise Nintendo-less holiday season seems to fit that mantra.
Yokoi made some of the first toys (for personal enjoyment, out of spare parts in a factory) which, when Nintendo's young president Yamauchi saw them, convinced him to really commit to the consumer toy space.
- gpawl 10y agoand that's why Nintendo hardware is a letdown -- instead of designing ideal experiences, they take solutions and go hunting for problems.
- to3m 10y agoBut are the games a letdown? That's probably the question you need to ask...
- lucasmullens 10y agoWhy is this downvoted?
- bronson 10y agoFor using the omniscient voice. Many people don't think Nintendo hardware is a letdown.
- andoon 10y agoThen they aren't comparing Nintendo consoles to any other console of the same generation.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe thing is, Nintendo consoles are so unique in the experience and quality they provide, nobody really cares that they don't have ALL THE GIGS. They're just a lot more fun.
- __david__ 10y agoThat's their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. It shows that great games don't have to have top of the line graphics horsepower behind them but it also means pretty much every graphically intensive third party game will never be ported to the system (which only hurts the console in the long run). I don't blame them for not chasing the top end but I just wish they'd come just a little closer to it.
- Millennium 10y agoOr they realize that comparing console hardware isn't a useful exercise. The upgrade cycle hasn't done anything to make games better in years; the Wii came closest, but required a marketing pivot that third parties didn't want to make.
- emodendroket 10y agoI mean at that rate all consoles are a letdown because a gaming PC will always be better.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adventured 10y agoJust guessing, but probably because Nintendo's magic is regarded to be mostly in the software - the gameplay experience, stories/characters, etc - and not contained in the power or cutting edge of the hardware almost at all.
- ry_ry 10y agoNintendo's hardware had never failed to be slightly disappointing to anybody expecting something anywhere near the cutting edge. The Ninty magic has always been in their playful treatment of their handful of IPs, with their bizarre ability to randomly drop something truly genre defining. Nintendo stopped being a hardware company when they knocked the playing cards on the head.
- chc 10y agoEverything they made up until the Wii was far from disappointing. The NES was way ahead of anything near that price, the SNES was competitive, the N64 chose different tradeoffs than the competition but was probably more powerful, and the GameCube was better than the PS2.
- planteen 10y ago> Nintendo's hardware had never failed to be slightly disappointing to anybody expecting something anywhere near the cutting edge. I'd argue the N64 was cutting edge when it was released.
- derstander 10y agoI think you're letting the immediate past (Wii and WiiU) unfairly color your perceptions of Nintendo. Even as recently as Gamecube, Nintendo released a "cutting edge" (from a console gamer's perspective) system. It offered performance near to XBox and certainly more powerful than the PS2. I say this even though I had a PS2 that generation because I found the extreme parallelism in the architecture really interesting. I even had one of the PS2 Linux kits, though I didn't do all that much with it.
- brador 10y agoCellphone screens for VR is a more recent example of this.
- posguy 10y agoYeah, but it seems like Nintendo could just move to a slightly newer SoC (say the Allwinner H3) with the same software stack and keep putting these out at a $2 premium to cover the more expensive SoC. A similar board to what was in the NES Classic, the OrangePi One, is $9.99 retail, and I'm sure Nintendo could put in under 20hrs of work total to add what they need to the board and stay within a dollar or two of that board's price point.
- planteen 10y ago20 hours of work? Are you kidding me? You are going to need to spin the PCB, re-validate signal integrity, deal with the situation of purchasing over 100k of the part, re-tool your manufacturing setup, make whatever software changes are required and re-validate SW, and probably a whole lot of other things.
- paulcole 10y agoThese are the same kind of delusional people who think Twitter is a weekend project.
- frik 10y agoAnd in LED projectors. The only question is why aren't there chinese made FullHD LED projectors in the cheaper price range? Maybe as people still buy the 320x200, 800x400 and HD (1280x800) LED projectors. It would take one chinese manufacturer to change the cycle, if he releases a 1920x1080 FullHD LED projector for $300 or less.
- tawayway 10y ago>an accelerometer in a Wii Remote I don't think this is the best example, accelerometers were not a cheap common part at the time. The Wii predates the iPhone, MEMS accelerometers were not anywhere near as widely deployed as they are now and they cost an order of magnitude or two more. I can remember hobbyists buying Wii Remotes after launch just to rip out the sensors :) IMO, perfect example is the B&W LCD on the original DMG Gameboy. A generation behind the competition, but cheap and low-power for the time.
- vanderZwan 10y agoThe Wii Remote is more an example of Iwata's Blue Ocean strategy. The rest of the Wii hardware however..
- chrisdbaldwin 10y agoA Gamecube with an extra chip...
- vanderZwan 10y agoExactly, nobody said that proven and established hardware couldn't be your own hardware after all
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThe Wii was one of the projects where another company came to them with an idea (of motion controls), IIRC.
- cma 10y agoDefinitely not as widely deployed as now, but I believe they were widespread in laptops to allow shutoff of harddrives during fall detection.