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Message: [QUOTE="Lena CE, post: 402404, member: 26523"] 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. [/QUOTE]

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