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Just to make it clear : Nintendo really got back to its roots, the Gunpei Yokoi philosophy, after the departure of its old CEO. Before Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo wa

by wazoox 16y ago

Just to make it clear : Nintendo really got back to its roots, the Gunpei Yokoi philosophy, after the departure of its old CEO. Before Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo was making playing cards; he conceived the first nintendo toys (Ultra hand, Ultra machine...) in the 60s, the first Nintendo electronic toys (Love tester, Light gunner ... ) in the 70s, the first Nintendo arcade systems, the Game & Watch concept in the 80s, the Game Boy, the Virtual Boy... Gunpei Yokoi repeatedly revolutionized markets by recycling well-known technology. For instance the GameBoy went out after the Game Gear. It was obviously inferior technically : black and white, no backlight. However it crushed the competition by providing what was previously oversight : excellent battery life.

masklinn 16y ago
> For instance the GameBoy went out after the Game Gear. Yes, right, the GB (released in April 1989) went after the Game Gear (released in October 1990). The Game Gear project had barely even started (if that) when the GB was released. You also overlooked the GB being about half the price of the Game Gear and it being nigh-indestructible (where the Game Gear was plagued by hardware problems, especially early on) and thus a much better fit for handheld, especially children handheld.
- recoil 16y ago
  You're absolutely right, but the original point is (I think) that Nintendo do things differently to their competitors, which I think you illustrate rather well. The analogy of the original GB hardware with Apple products (say the original iPod) is a pretty good one: Nintendo delivered what customers actually wanted (portability, near-indesctructibility, great battery life, low cost) at the expense of certain extra features, which it turned out were less important to the customers that Nintendo sought. The iPod was exactly the same: it was worse in many respects than the competition, but sold amazingly well because of all those "other" factors. Nintendo are also similar to Apple in that they're willing to try something completely out of the box once in a while. People deride both the Wii and the DS (and recently the 3DS) because the hardware specs don't match the competition, but what differentiates both of those products is the originality (and in the case of the 360, the hardware quality!), which is comparable to the way that the iPhone has trounced all comers by re-inventing how people use a phone. First-party software is an incredibly important part of Nintendo's successes too, and again they differentiate themselves from the competition with a focus on quality, which is obviously not unlike Apple either. That's not to say that Nintendo aren't guilty of churning out some bad games, but they're never buggy, at any rate... Nintendo's industrial design isn't a patch on Apple's though, and that's definitely part of what the article's about. Things like the DS Lite and Wii are both better than the awful N64 and GameCube designs, but they're rather derivative of Apple products. Of couse both Apple and Nintendo have made some awful decisions over the last 2 or 3 decades, but there's always been enough of a difference in each company's culture for them to be able to standard apart from the others around them.
- wazoox 16y ago
  OK sorry, actually the Game Gear came after. The Lynx came out about the same time though. Anyway, everybody at the time thought that the game boy will fail because it was so dull.

by wazoox 16y ago

masklinn 16y ago

> For instance the GameBoy went out after the Game Gear. Yes, right, the GB (released in April 1989) went after the Game Gear (released in October 1990). The Game Gear project had barely even started (if that) when the GB was released. You also overlooked the GB being about half the price of the Game Gear and it being nigh-indestructible (where the Game Gear was plagued by hardware problems, especially early on) and thus a much better fit for handheld, especially children handheld.

recoil 16y ago
You're absolutely right, but the original point is (I think) that Nintendo do things differently to their competitors, which I think you illustrate rather well. The analogy of the original GB hardware with Apple products (say the original iPod) is a pretty good one: Nintendo delivered what customers actually wanted (portability, near-indesctructibility, great battery life, low cost) at the expense of certain extra features, which it turned out were less important to the customers that Nintendo sought. The iPod was exactly the same: it was worse in many respects than the competition, but sold amazingly well because of all those "other" factors. Nintendo are also similar to Apple in that they're willing to try something completely out of the box once in a while. People deride both the Wii and the DS (and recently the 3DS) because the hardware specs don't match the competition, but what differentiates both of those products is the originality (and in the case of the 360, the hardware quality!), which is comparable to the way that the iPhone has trounced all comers by re-inventing how people use a phone. First-party software is an incredibly important part of Nintendo's successes too, and again they differentiate themselves from the competition with a focus on quality, which is obviously not unlike Apple either. That's not to say that Nintendo aren't guilty of churning out some bad games, but they're never buggy, at any rate... Nintendo's industrial design isn't a patch on Apple's though, and that's definitely part of what the article's about. Things like the DS Lite and Wii are both better than the awful N64 and GameCube designs, but they're rather derivative of Apple products. Of couse both Apple and Nintendo have made some awful decisions over the last 2 or 3 decades, but there's always been enough of a difference in each company's culture for them to be able to standard apart from the others around them.
wazoox 16y ago
OK sorry, actually the Game Gear came after. The Lynx came out about the same time though. Anyway, everybody at the time thought that the game boy will fail because it was so dull.