A question about Nintendo past the SNES era

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I'm from a market that was never Nintendo's to take -- everyone from low and middle class incomes chose the Genesis instead each and every time, with most people "graduating" to the PS1 a few years after. It really did seem that most people's last Nintendo console was the NES, with some bold ones snatching the Gameboy + Camera package when that released (and even those were a fringe minority).

However, I DID know a few people who owned the SNES during the tail end of the 16-Bit era, getting the console at a huge discount while unsold inventory was being cleared to make room for the next best thing.

But almost no-one ever went for the next console on that lineage, citing the unaffordability of the cartridges, the atrocious release the whole system was subjected to (it didn't make it here until late 1999, according to an old magazine of mine) and the fact that the PS1 had been outshining it for years, dominating both the home and rental markets with all the brutality of an invasion.

I only ever knew one N64 owner at the time, and he was a foreigner who just happened to travel with it.

Then I never met anyone who owned a GameCube, either

And the very first Wii I saw was near the end of its life cycle as well.

I can understand those systems not making a splash here when cheaper alternatives were available (and I do recall buying a brand new Model I Genesis for $200 when the SNES sitting right next to it was priced $350), but it's the lack of celebration for all those machines that gets me.

Even if very few people actually owned it, reviewers and the public alike paid it a LOT of attention to the Super Nintendo, with even one TV show focusing entirely on its catalog. I never saw that kind of praise for subsequent systems, getting the Saturn/Jaguar treatment instead: "we know they exist, but don't ask us to care".

And that? That was really odd for me even at the time.

However, I DID say that this was never a Nintendo market, so maybe this wasn't the case elsewhere.

Was it?

 

[Tonberry]

Where I grew up (born '95 so at the very tail end of the '90s to early-mid 2000s Sweden) it was usually a "does your family have a Nintendo or a Playstation" kinda deal. Both existed but few households had both. We used to go to one kid's house to play Zelda, Mario and Smash, then another's to play Crash, Spyro and Tekken.

As far as I know though Sega was a very big deal in the early 90s, as it was more affordable I think, and the Sonic cartoons ran non-stop on a national kids' television show. I just wasn't particularly in the know because a) it was before my time, and b) most people I knew played Nintendo so I guess I got into that through osmosis. My aunt (born '82) was super into NES games like Zelda and Castlevania so she was like my gateway into videogames.
Then in the mid-to-late '00s literally every single person I knew went over to Xbox 360 because of the HD and online play.

Everyone and their mom had some version of a Gameboy though. It was like by far the biggest hit in my general age group.

 

[zacharinolongpants]

Hmmm all I can say is that where I live, the SNES and Genesis/MD were pretty equally advertised and it as 50/50 whether you had Sega or Nintendo. I got a Nintendo 64 a few years after it came out and got the handful of good games on it and had a good time. HOWEVER it was around 98 or 99 when the PlayStation just sort of dominated and by early 2000s nobody was touching the 64 over here.

I think after seeing stuff like Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Tekken, Gran Turismo, Silent Hill, Spyro, Tenchu... it was just a way more interesting and novel console and the people in my neck of the woods very quickly stopped caring about the N64 lmao.

By the time the GameCube dropped, everybody I knew save for one friend had a PS2. That friend had a GameCube and we did play splitscreen Phantasy Star Online on it and that was dope lol.

So yeah, here in the Midwest US, Nintendo kinda started losing their market dominance sometime in the late 90s to Sony, and Sega dropped off pretty hard, tragically. Sadly the Saturn might as well have not existed then lmao.

 

[jon2]

In our locale (Asia other than Japan) SNES was bigger than GENESIS due to this:

Game backup device - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

My family owned one of these:

Super UFO

Comment 1: Backup your Game Cartridge and store in 3.5" floppy disk. Oboard disk utility formats disk to 1.6MB and below. Cheat-code function allows use of X-terminator, Datel Action Replay, and Gold Finger code. The unit can be set to auto-load cheats for games once loaded, from its built in...

videogamedevelopmentdevices.fandom.com

The only cart we had was Super Mario World; all our other games were for that

That's why 'sailing the high seas' is in my blood: I started young

 

[stealthRUSH stealthRUSH]

Pretty much the opposite, almost everyone I knew owned a SNES after owning an NES. The only person I knew who owned a Sega Genesis was my one friend on the block. The marketing for Genesis was targeting a 'older, teenager, young-adult crowd, for example; having blood in Mortal Kombat, and the whole Night Trap fiasco.

I'd say fan were loyal to their choice back in the day, like how people were subscribed to Nintendo Power (which exclusively covered Nintendo hardware & software) That being said arcades were also popular, we had small & large venues of them. Speaking for myself, I would own Nintendo's first two home consoles thanks to my parents although going for Sega's 32-bit machine Saturn since it had a lot of my favorite arcade games going to be released on it.

I kept track of gaming news from reading various of magazines like GameFan, GamePro, EGM-Electronic Gaming Monthly, Edge reading previews, reviews, and being envious of the import section on the back.

Nintendo 64 made a big impact, at least where I lived. Most of my friends bought it, whereas I went for PlayStation instead. At the time I wasn't into N64 library of games since I was more intro arcade 2D fighters, run'n guns, shmups, brawlers and RPGs.

I stuck with Sega in 9/9/99 owning Dreamcast- most of my friends also bought it. I was hesitant for months since I still enjoyed playing my DC, but PS2 ultimately dominated the console war- where there were no long sides- everybody had one!

GameCube was another system that was moderately popular, but not as big as Nintendo 64. Four of my friends and I owned one, compared to two of my friends going with Microsoft Xbox instead. I took a break from playing 'new' games around the time Wii launched (and Wii U) so I'm unfamiliar of their impact.

 

[Strategist's icon Strategist Strategist]

I'm from a market that was never Nintendo's to take -- everyone from low and middle class incomes chose the Genesis instead each and every time, with most people "graduating" to the PS1 a few years after. It really did seem that most people's last Nintendo console was the NES, with some bold ones snatching the Gameboy + Camera package when that released (and even those were a fringe minority).

That's a weird narrative considering the prices for the SNES and Genesis were pretty close, at least where I'm from. I know some places in South America have to deal with weird taxes and imports, but the base SNES with Super Mario World was 129.99 and the Genesis Sonic bundle might've been around 99.99 at the time the SNES was released. Not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. 30 bucks won't send a poor family into bankruptcy.

And the Gameboy was cheaper than the Game Gear, even more so when you consider the battery life. So its not even like its overwhelmingly in favor of the SEGA side of things.

I had a friend who would buy everything SEGA but most of my friends had Nintendo consoles. So it was quite the opposite in my area.

Once the Playstation came out though, everyone jumped on that bandwagon. N64s were pretty rare amongst my friend group. Even my SEGA friend abandoned his Saturn and bought a Playstation.

 

[Jayonnaise6105 Jayonnaise6105]

My situation was very similar to Tonberry's. Early-mid 90s kid and everyone I knew growing up either had a Nintendo or PlayStation console.

The weird thing for me was that I never knew anyone growing up who had a SEGA console. I was too young to know about any of that "console war" stuff, or remember how much anything cost or to know how well things sold. I didn't know SEGA or that they even made consoles until well after they'd switched to only developing software. I even grew up thinking Sonic was a cartoon character before playing my first Sonic game on the Gamecube in the early 2000s.

Everyone I knew also had a Gameboy, usually with some form of Pokemon.

 

[Dr.Kisaragi Dr.Kisaragi]

Well in my Country Nintendo and Playstation are the best seller not much of Sega though and my store had a lot of Japanese console ver and all of them are jailbreak.

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

I think that the UK had a similar vibe.

I knew a few people with Nintendo home consoles, but everyone had a MegaDrive.

Then the same was true for the N64. I knew 2 people with that system, but everyone wanted to own a PlayStation.

That said, the GameBoy was something that everyone had, even the people who weren't necessarily into video games as a rule. My step-mom had a gameboy and I don't think that she ever played another game in her life. She even made the mistake of giving it to me as a kid in the late 90s and that's when it met its doom.

The difference between regions and the success each console had their is really interesting. Seems like Europe and South America were pretty closely aligned in terms of what was popular, at least up until the Wii era. That thing was a must-have here for a few years.

 

[Luxfin]

I was born in the South of USA in the 2000s (late 2003 to be exact). way too late for me to experience the SNES and N64 era. My family only had an NES due to (this is my mom's word) "the fancy Nintendo looking cool in gray." I was too young to quite experience the Gamecube and PS2 but my cousin had a Gamecube because of the marketing hooked him but my friends all had the DS due to marketing of the DS lite and Wii later on because of it's the Wii. I was able to get the 3DS due to the early market but no one else that I knew had it. Besides that only my friend's parents really payed any attention to Nintendo or Playstation marketing. Only way my family pay attendtion is when I tell them or they randomly brought it up for "nostalgia sake."

 

[DanCalibur]

Here in Brazil, consoles and games always were quite expensive, so the more popular ones would be the ones with the best availability of cheap pirated games. In the beginning of the 90's, both SEGA's Master System and Mega Drive as well as Nintendo's NES and SNES were available and quite popular in here. But the better availability of pirated NES and SNES games, as well as the many cheap famiclones, made the Nintendo consoles stay popular for longer, even around the early 2000's.
The N64, PSX and Saturn were originally rich kids toys but after PSX got mod chips, it exploded in popularity and the competition was pretty much dead.

 

[X y b e r - S k u ll]

I’m a 2000’s kid so 6th gen onwards is more what I can accurately speak on and have perspective of, but based on talking to people older than me over the years, I can pretty much confirm what most of my PAL region peers are saying in the thread.

Traditionally, Europe has always been more of a PC gaming market (Commodore, ZX-Spectrum, MSX etc. not sure about Australia/NZ though), with consoles not really being a popular thing until the 4th gen (Though places like France and the Scandinavian countries were successful for Nintendo when it came to the NES). From what I’ve heard and read, Sega absolutely dominated much of Europe during this time, though the SNES was a lot more successful across Europe than the NES, Mega Drive undeniably won that generation in Europe. 5th Gen was dominated by the PS1 over here, with Sega Saturn becoming a very niche product and N64 doing fairly well.

When it comes to the 6th gen, from what I remember as a kid; it was either PS2 or GameCube. Those are the consoles that we’d talk about on the playgrounds. PS2 still undeniably came out on top in the end, but GameCube was still very popular with kids over here. Handhelds were always pretty much Nintendo all the way, though I think that’s true for pretty much all regions lol, but everyone I knew who was into games back back then had a GBA SP (Never actually saw an original model GBA back then now I think about it), and when the DS came out? PSP had no chance lol.

Everything after that pretty much mirrors what was going on in North America though in terms of console sales and trends/popularity.

 

[Zerpina]

I had a Sega Genesis (secondhand) before I ever even had a SNES...
When the PSX (I remember them calling it Code name PSX and that has always stuck with me) launched, I was working full-time so I went straight from a Sega Genesis to an original PSX.

A few years later, around the time the PS2 was coming out, I finally bought a SNES at a pawn shop, it might have been a thrift store.... I can't recall at the moment. It was a fully boxed system with Mario World, etc. It was scuffed but worked. I only got an N64 a few years ago... it doesn't work due to something wrong with the motherboard, but I plan to eventually turn it into an N64 Pi system.

When I was a kid, most kids had either a Sega Genesis or NES.
I don't think any of my friends had a SNES, at least not that I remember.

Most of them, like me graduated to SONY's consoles because we had grown up abit and didn't like Nintendo’s kiddie games at that point in time. Honestly, I don't think I ever saw an N64 in person until several or more years after it was released.

 

[χKai]

We got one, probably around the Christmas it came out or the one after. We didn't go crazy and get a buttload of games for it or anything, but we did pick up some good stuff for it once in awhile every so often. It lasted a long time for us, and we made sure to get Donkey Kong 64 when it came out, half for the expansion pak it came with since we saw it as an opportunity to get it ahead of time while it was cheap, being packaged with a full game we each 100%'d. By the time Majora's Mask had come out, we weren't doing awesome financially and ended up acquiring it later.

When I first learned about Smash Bros Melee, I made sure to learn about how to unlock all the characters and stages long before ever getting the game. When the question rolled around, we decided to get the Gamecube because of Smash Bros and the Zelda series, and never regretted it. It stayed fun and had amazing things to play, though few and far between.

 

[Bakuma1997]

While Mexico is known as "Famiclone Land", when scarce we did in fact had some original Nintendo consoles, granted most of them were either sell-your-kidney priced or were second hand and in the case of the Gamecube onwards, already chipped, i remember some kids magazines (My favorite ones being one called ERES niños) used to have a promotion where if you mailed some candiy wraps, you could get a Wii, suffice to say, i never met anyone that won, and believe me, i tried

 

[RanmyakuIchi's icon RanmyakuIchi RanmyakuIchi]

I was fortunate enough to own both a SNES/Gen and a N64/PS1 growing up due to my parents also loving games, so I never really had much of a horse in the console wars arguments stuff as a kid. I do remember the N64 still being fairly popular among my fellow classmates at the time though, with PS1 vs N64 still being a pretty big rivalry (I never knew a single soul with a Saturn then). You were either one of the kids talking about Resident Evil, or one of the kids talking about Perfect Dark.

The Gamecube was a different story in my neighborhood however. It seemed only me and a couple friends had one, and the school arguments shifted to PS2 vs XBox. Nintendo just kinda faded from the local consciousness until the Wii came around. Everyone had a Wii. Everyone. The rivalry was typically XBox 360 vs PS3, but everyone had a Wii on the side that I knew of.

 

[HarmonieGirl]

Interesting. I (from the US, born in the late 80s into a lower-middle class family) grew up with Nintendo systems and I only recall knowing others having Nintendo consoles until later on (GCN era and on). Even after then, still knew plenty with Nintendo systems.

IIRC this daycare I was dropped off at from time to time had a combination of Sega and Nintendo consoles. That was my only exposure to a Sega system that I can recall. In the N64 era, I was aware of the Playstation, but even then only recall seeing those in store kiosks and hardly knew anything about them at all. In the GCN/PS2/Xbox era I did get a PS2 and have liked Sony systems ever since (although I don't own a PS5), but before that era, I didn't know much about them at all despite PS1's popularity. It was all N64 and GB/GBC to me.

 

[Calunomnom]

However, I DID know a few people who owned the SNES during the tail end of the 16-Bit era, getting the console at a huge discount while unsold inventory was being cleared to make room for the next best thing.

As far as I can quicly recall, I remember getting the SNES roughly around mid-1996, just months before the Nintendo 64 came out - and I was more of a NES/Genesis (MegaDrive) kid back in the day. It came with the Super Mario All-Stars+Super Mario World gamepak. I would only be able to rent the games I wanted to play on the SNES whereas I only got new games either on my birthday or Christmas - inevitably , the SNES games in the video rental store got cleared out for newer inventory such as N64 and PSX. In addition, I never owned a GameBoy until the following year and the games I gotten were just Disney's Hercules and Toy Story.. XP

Eventually, I gotten into Pokemon months later and around the year 1998 was when I actually got the N64 and then the following year, the PlayStation. I never knew anyone in my town that had a Sega Saturn when I was growing up.

 

[Stare best girl]

as I'm a 2003 kid, I knew more people that had a Gamecube before a Dreamcast or OG Xbox but still PS2 was the most popular console here in Baja California while for 7th gen Xbox 360 was the most popular console while Wii was 2nd most popular, I think that in Mexico overall NES, SNES and N64 were the most popular consoles

 

[LightningmanEXE]

In the part of the US I grew up in mostly, I got into the NES when the SNES was already out as an aftermarket thing. eventually we got a snes and a good collections of games for that too, the 64 was my first "NEW" console that I got for Christmas one year. I still have memories of that day.

I actually had never met a single person with any Sega system until the dreamcast came out. all my friends had either gone for an N64, a PlayStation, or were well off enough for both. I didn't really experience much elitism from anyone I knew over it, we kind of just enjoyed the games we liked on the consoles we had. I noticed a lot less GameCube's than ps2s though.

 

[Lena CE]

The obvious answer is that the Super Nintendo didn't have a sales issue in the states, you just happened to not know a lot of folks with one. Looking at sales data, about 23.5 million Super Nintendos were sold in the US compared to 30.75m Sega Genesis consoles. Certainly a sizable lead for Sega, but nothing that would lend itself to one system having a general dominance in the country. Sales data for Europe is harder to obtain but it seems that they sold fairly evenly, and then Sega was decimated in Japan with them pushing roughly 4m units and Nintendo pushing 17m.

I think maybe one reason you personally saw less fanfare for later Nintendo systems comes down to their relevance dwindling. As established, both the Genesis and the Super Nintendo were successful and fairly comparable saleswise and Nintendo being more or less the only relevant game company going into that console generation thanks to the NES dominance made them a cultural zeitgeist of sorts. That was still the peak era of unassuming parents calling everything a Nintendo, after all.

Not only that, but when you look at the volume of video game releases, you see that the Super Nintendo itself just had waaaaay more software actually released for it. The Super Nintendo tops out at around 1700 total releases while the Genesis managed around 800. The Genesis figure might not include Sega CD releases, but it only bumps the number up by about 200. If you were a TV program or magazine talking about video games, odds are you had a lot more to talk about coming from the Super Nintendo side of things. As far as everlasting culutral relevance goes, a lot of Super Nintendo games end up topping the "Best 16 bit games" lists, so maybe a lot of focus was given to the system for both its quantity AND quality.

If we establish that the Super Nintendo sold decently well in the states, had more games and in the eyes of the average gamer had more of "the best" games, its no wonder that Nintendo continued their cultural relevance going into the 4th generation. It would also be no wonder why Nintendo lost that relevance going forward. The PS1 and later the PS2 outsold the competition to disgusting degrees, doubling the sales of all competitors combined. In terms of software release volume they also absolutely decimated the competition, so its no wonder that a lot of gaming media be it TV or print would inevitably skew heavily towards Sony's ecosystem.

Fow what it is worth, I was practically the only kid I knew with a PS1 growing up. I had a bunch of friends with N64s, one with a Saturn and yet only one other kid with a PS1. With the Gamecube, I knew a lot of folks with PS2s but it was an almost even split. In fact, when I think back I tend to remember more people in my friend group with Gamecubes. It was kind of wild when I hit middle school and read about how Sony was super dominant leading up to the PS3s launch and how Nintendo had somewhat floundered for the last decade, because in my head Nintendo was the big fish. Kind of funny how regional bias can create situations like that.

As another funny anecdote, I have a friend who moved to Japan for college and at one point had some friends over to play some games. They booted up a Sega Mega Drive and one of the people that had come over was shocked to find out it existed. As far as that guy was aware, the Saturn was the first console Sega ever released because growing up he only knew people with Super Nintendos and PC Engines.