Nintendo is one of the most successful, most beloved and most innovative video game companies out there. They revived the industry in 1985 with the NES, they've pioneered new console designs and gameplay innovations with systems like the Wii and they've managed to compete with, on paper, much larger competitors in the form of Sony and Microsoft.
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That being said, like all companies, Nintendo isn't immune to its own brain farts and over the years there have been some pretty noxious ones. As such, I wanted to take a break from sacrificing what's left of my youth to Tears of the Kingdom and perform a little retrospective (or autopsy) on all the decisions that Nintendo's made over the years that really make me question how they're still in business.
The Virtual Boy
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This was inevitable. At this point, kicking the Virtual Boy isn't even beating a dead horse. It feels more like digging up the dead horse from next to the glue factory and setting fire to what's left.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Scarlet Menace, the Virtual Boy was Nintendo's first attempt at virtual reality. In 1995...
What started off as a cute experiment to bring SNES-style graphics and games to an immersive VR system became a reality for Nintendo when the N64 kept getting delayed. You see, Nintendo's new competitor, Sony, had released the first Playstation in 1995 while the Nintendo 64 wouldn't be ready for another year. Thus, Nintendo needed to fill shelf space for the holiday period to try and keep hold of some market share. Enter the Virtual Boy, being rushed onto shelves to fill the gap.
On the most shallow surface level, the Virtual Boy did fill the space. In fact, it kept on filling shelf space because nobody bought one. Only 770,000 units were sold until it was discontinued only a year later in 1996. Only 22 games came out for it and only 14 of those saw North American markets. Overall, a pretty massive oops for Nintendo.
Why did it fail? Well being a VR system 20 years before it was close to being viable is a good place to start. The system was also rushed out with a confused marketing campaign and the ability to only display games in red and black rather than full colour in order to keep costs down.
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Then there was also the fact that magazine writers who played it reported on back pain from leaning to look into the system and eye strain from the colours and close-up display. All of this simply served to baffle and turn off consumers when Christmas 1995 rolled around. Ironically, this all but ensured that shoppers would seek shelter with the Playstation rather than Nintendo's plastic torture device.
With 30 years of critical appraisals, some players have pointed to some of the Virtual Boy's games being passable or even good, with series like Mario Tennis getting their start on the system, but this was never enough to save it and it has gone down in history as one of Nintendo's biggest flops. Key word being one of...
Nintendo 64
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Yep, it didn't take very long for Nintendo to get another major misstep under their belts, albeit a much smaller one than the Virtual Boy.
The N64 is an odd duck of a system. Nowadays, there are countless people who talk about the joy and excitement it gave to them through its killer games like Super Mario 64 or Mario Kart 64. To this day, it's impossible to entertain a conversation about the greatest games of all time without someone throwing in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Through this fog of hindsight, many forget that the N64 massively under-performed at the time and set the tone of a whole slew of issues that Nintendo has had to grapple with in the subsequent decades.
You see, while the N64 was much more powerful than the Playstation, it took an extra year to be released, hence the Virtual Boy debacle. This meant that Sony was able to gain a leg-up in the fifth generation of consoles despite having the weaker hardware. As a result, when the N64 did release, there were plenty of people who already owned a Playstation that were satisfied with not needing to switch.
Usually, a more powerful console can claw back market share with a strong library of games but this is where the N64 really dropped the ball. It all came down to Nintendo's favourite C-word. Cartridges.
Despite the N64 being released after the Playstation, Nintendo still made it a cartridge-based console. This was partly a technical thing because cartridges load faster. It was also because Nintendo's always been very protective of its IP and cartridges are harder to pirate. 
(Image property of Nintendo)
Regardless of the reasons though, it was detrimental to the N64 because, above all else, cartridges are more difficult to develop for, have less storage and are exponentially more expensive than CDs. As a result, third-party mainstays like Konami with Castlevania, Capcom with Resident Evil and Square Enix with Final Fantasy all developed games either exclusively or primarily for the Playstation instead.
It's at this point that the N64 fan club will point out those games I mentioned earlier that have become bona fide classics. On this front, take note of two things. Firstly, they did not make up for the entire library of the N64. The Playstation had literal thousands of games made for it while the N64 limped along with a library of only 388. Secondly, all of those games I listed were first-party Nintendo titles, and therein lies the rub. They had no third-party relationships.
The N64 finished second, far behind the Playstation in the fifth generation and while that doesn't necessarily make it a commercial failure in the traditional sense, the damage that its cartridges did to Nintendo's third-party relationships has damaged it all the way up to the present day.
Arguably, only with the Switch's massive install-base has Nintendo managed to regain some third-party support beyond the one-off Assassin's Creed games or incredibly short-lived exclusivity like with Resident Evil 4. Thus, the N64's financial failure was like a horrible night of drunken antics. It may have been rough at the time, but the long-term damage to one's reputation is what really makes it sting.
Gamecube
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Oh boy, Nintendo really has a thing with game delivery systems. Making games? Sure, they're some of the industry's best and brightest. But when it comes to getting the things onto a system so you can play them, they just can't seem to wrap their heads around it.
Following on from the N64 cartridge crisis, Nintendo did a fantastic job of learning the bare minimum number of lessons. For their next console, the Gamecube, they decided that the time had come and they needed to move on and start utilising discs for their games. I guess it took them until 2001 to decide discs weren't a fad...
So, if Nintendo was innovating with its tech and getting on the same page as the rest of the industry, how did they mess it up?
Well, sometimes size really does matter. Nintendo's Gamecube, as promised, did use disc-based media for their games. The problem was that the discs they used were tiny mini-DVD discs which, like the N64's cartridges, had less storage and were more awkward for third-parties.
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Yes, old man Nintendo was still terrified by the prospect of piracy and thus continued to cripple their relationships with third-parties in order to ensure that nobody could duplicate Kirby Air Ride. Thank God.
The Gamecube was less of a failure in its own right and more of a second act to the play started with the N64. The problems with third-parties really came home to roost and with Sony going from strength-to-strength with the PS2, the Gamecube failed to keep up. In the end, it only sold 21.7 million units, under performing even when compared to the N64's 32.9 million.
SNES CD-Rom
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You might be wondering, "What the hell is that collection of letters?" and that is a fair reaction. I had to use Google to make sure I got the name right. In place of an explanation, you may have noticed that I've referred to Nintendo's ongoing struggle to keep up with Sony and the Playstation several times now. Well, the SNES CD-Rom attachment was where that recurring nightmare began.
Originally envisioned as an add-on to the SNES, the CD-Rom was a joint venture between Sony and Nintendo to bring games on a CD-Rom to the SNES. However, problems arose with the contract between Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo got cold feet on the deal and tried to partner with Philips instead because they were worried that the contract was giving Sony too much power and influence, causing the deal to collapse.
Why was this a big deal? Well, Sony had been producing prototypes with Nintendo as part of the project and, as a result, had gained a pretty good idea of how to make a decent, affordable console that operated on CDs. This allowed them to go away and create the Playstation which, as mentioned, would out-sell the N64 and dethrone Nintendo from its perch atop the console market.
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The SNES CD-Rom is a fascinating case of Nintendo being their own worst enemy. Not only did they undermine their plan to use CD-Roms on their consoles which, as discussed, would go on to be a sabre-tooth tiger sized teething problem for them, they also managed to create their strongest rival in the process.
I wonder if someone at Nintendo has spent the last 30 years kicking themselves for allowing this deal to collapse and enabling Sony to repeatedly out-perform Nintendo in the console market. I wonder if they also had something to do with...
Wii U
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Jesus Christ, where do you even start with the Wii U? 13 million units sold. 8 million less than the Gamecube and 19 million less than the N64. Nintendo's worst performing console ever.
This bomb was also from 2012 to 2017, when the market for consoles was larger than when those other consoles were being pushed. Plus, lest we forget, it also came off the back of the Wii phenomenon which sold 101 million units. In these terms, this wasn't just a failure, it could've killed the company were it not for the 3DS gaining some legs and the Switch turning things around in 2017.
This console really was the house fire that never went out for Nintendo. Its first reveal made the Wii U sound like a controller add-on to the Wii rather than its own console. That was the starting whistle for the demolition derby. Before it even came out, developers were not-too-subtly hinting that their games wouldn't come to the console, a recurring theme for Nintendo at this point but nonetheless suggesting that they had zero faith in it.
In the long-run, even if the console had sold well enough, it's unlikely that third-parties would've turned around on it due to the massive awkwardness of the screen controller and its four hour battery life.
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Unfortunately, unlike the N64, Nintendo didn't give it enough support. Mario was well-represented with games like 3D World but these took some time to come out with early Wii U games like New Super Mario Bros U being fairly derivative. Beyond that, there was no Zelda, no Metroid, no Animal Crossing and even the games that did release from first-party franchises like Star Fox: Zero were impressively terrible in some cases.
Everywhere you looked with the Wii U, there was a new problem with it. It was a shame in many ways. The system did have some good games available on it like Bayonetta 2, Super Mario: 3D World and Mario Kart 8.
Unfortunately though, these may not be remembered as Wii U successes as most of them jumped ship over to the Nintendo Switch as soon as it released for want of a player base larger than a kiddie pool. As a result, the Wii U well and truly sunk but unlike many of history's biggest shipwrecks, nobody is likely to have much interest in diving back down to see the remnants.
The Round-Up
Thankfully, despite their best efforts, Nintendo hasn't managed to put itself out of business yet and, while many of these systems and decisions are fun to look back on, there is also value to be taken from this.
Nintendo has always been fairly accepting of risk. Even the original NES was a gamble in an unstable console market. Risk is how Nintendo got to where they are today with the NES, the Wii's weak hardware and motion controls and the Switch's mode-switching.
What this list comprises are the casualties of war. The Wii, the NES, the Switch, all of them could've gone the way of the Wii U or the Virtual Boy if they had come out under different circumstances.
Thus, while it is fun to make fun of Nintendo's bizarre business strategies at times, take this opportunity to think about all that they've managed to achieve over the years and how, thanks to many of these mistakes, lessons have been learnt and passed on to get us to the point that we are at in the industry today.
All images and property names belong to their respective rights holders and are deployed here for the purposes of criticism and review ( Nintendo please don't sue me for poking fun at the Wii U).