With the announcement of the NX, Nintendo admits defeat with the Wii U

[Folco]

I honestly just can't wait for them to die so we can talk about how great Nintendo was in the 80s, instead of how shit they have been for about 10 years or so.

I honestly just prefer to play the games Nintendo released the last ten years than the games they released in the '80.

Yeah its a shame, that the old SEGA never have Nintendo war chest At least SEGA gave it a go with the DC and pushed the boat out, Nintendo have been a joke, since the N64 days for consoles...way behind on tech and a complete waste of time for on-line and HD gaming really . They're an analogue dinosaur in the digital age.

Nintendo earned that war chest through videogames, it didn't fall from the sky.

[A Black Falcon]

Almost. Still had gimped storage space. But it's been the closest Nintendo has come to having a console that is really on par with the competition since the SNES. (The n64's carts were a much larger hindrance than the smaller disks were for the cube).

The GC still sold about as well as the oXbox. Neither one of them was going to beat out the PS2 however.

The N64's better third-party game library than the GC's should be more than enough to prove you wrong. The N64 and Gamecube are both hardware just as good or better than the other consoles of their generation. Smaller storage mediums mean little compared to the powerful hardware in the boxes.

However, good tech didn't sell well enough, so Nintendo changed strategies with their next system. Now that Wii strategy is struggling, what will they do next...

[EclecticGroove]

The N64's better third-party game library than the GC's should be more than enough to prove you wrong. The N64 and Gamecube are both hardware just as good or better than the other consoles of their generation. Smaller storage mediums mean little compared to the powerful hardware in the boxes.

However, good tech didn't sell well enough, so Nintendo changed strategies with their next system. Now that Wii strategy is struggling, what will they do next...

When the Saturn and ESPECIALLY the PS1 were embracing full CD audio, massive pre-rendered cut scenes, and generally all sorts of stuff that took up tons of storage space... it absolutely was a problem.

The N64 hardware was more powerful, but at the same time they couldn't push the content to it. The cost of pressing a CD was cheaper than even the lowest capacity N64 carts, and offered much more space.

The n64 was also the first true post SNES Nintendo console. It was supported by a great number of the companies that had supported them before. It wasn't until the PSX stole that generations thunder that companies started shifting their focus. The GC and oXbox both had less 3rd party support than Sony... because the PS2 was already a sales monster before they even got released, they just were never going to compete unless something drastically happened to Sony.

People always bring up the GC as being a bad system for Nintendo.. but compared to what? To the PS2? So was everything. Compared to the oXbox? Just barely, and mostly due to the US market, but even with that they were pretty much neck and neck by the time they were both discontinued.
Compared to the N64? Well yeah, it wasn't going to reclaim market share up against the PS2.

The GC did ok, but not great, and instead of redoubling their efforts to make a killer system we got the wii. Which they got lucky with.

[A Black Falcon]

When the Saturn and ESPECIALLY the PS1 were embracing full CD audio, massive pre-rendered cut scenes, and generally all sorts of stuff that took up tons of storage space... it absolutely was a problem.

The N64 hardware was more powerful, but at the same time they couldn't push the content to it. The cost of pressing a CD was cheaper than even the lowest capacity N64 carts, and offered much more space.

FMV and CD audio aren't gameplay. They can be nice things, but aren't necessary in games. N64 cartridges are big enough for any actual gameplay content that generation. Gameplay is what matters in games, more than anything else. And anyway, Resident Evil 2 for N64 shows how you can do plenty of FMV on the N64 if you want, and use good compression. As for music, games like Wipeout 64, Top Gear Overdrive, and the Tony Hawk games have music with full vocals, so you can do that on the system too.

The n64 was also the first true post SNES Nintendo console. It was supported by a great number of the companies that had supported them before. It wasn't until the PSX stole that generations thunder that companies started shifting their focus.

This isn't really true, the third-party support the N64 had stuck through until '99 at least, and only faded after that because of the coming of the PS2, not because of anything related to the PS1. As for the third party support the N64 had, it was a mixture of third parties that had supported Nintendo before and some new ones. For Western third parties, Midway was mostly new, for instance; they only started making their own home console games in about '95. Acclaim had supported Nintendo since the NES, but significantly improved their game quality on the N64 -- the N64 has to be Acclaim's best period. Other studios were a mix of old and new.

In Japan of course Nintendo lost most of their top supporters to Sony, so there what you're saying really isn't true. They did continue to get some support from major third parties like Konami and Hudson, but most others abandoned them, following Square's lead towards Sony. There never was a time where the N64 actually had good third-party support from Japan; Enix did initially consider supporting it and then decided to instead follow Square towards the PS1, but you make it sound like it had support that went away partway through the generation, but that didn't happen. In Japan Nintendo mostly lost it at the beginning of the generation, and in the US the support they had stuck with them until the new consoles were about to come out.

The GC and oXbox both had less 3rd party support than Sony... because the PS2 was already a sales monster before they even got released, they just were never going to compete unless something drastically happened to Sony.

If you look, you'll notice that GC third-party support dramatically drops after the first few years, as third parties fled the system thanks to struggling sales. A lot of third party games in '01-'03 are on GC as well as PS2 and Xbox, but after that, most third party games are PS2/Xbox only. In the US at least, the Xbox has far better third-party support than the Gamecube.

People always bring up the GC as being a bad system for Nintendo.. but compared to what? To the PS2? So was everything. Compared to the oXbox? Just barely, and mostly due to the US market, but even with that they were pretty much neck and neck by the time they were both discontinued.
Compared to the N64? Well yeah, it wasn't going to reclaim market share up against the PS2.

The GC did ok, but not great, and instead of redoubling their efforts to make a killer system we got the wii. Which they got lucky with.

The GC is a great console, but it was Nintendo's worst-selling TV console before the Wii U, has worse third-party support than the N64, and has FAR more games that are just ports of games from the other consoles of the generation than the N64 had. A lot of GC games are PS2/Xbox ports (or DC, in some cases), while the N64 has a lot more exclusives, or PC/N64 only games that aren't on other consoles.

I find N64 versions of Nintendo series games often better than their GC sequels, too -- N64 Zelda is better, N64 Mario is better, N64 Wave Race is better, N64 F-Zero is better, N64 Mario Tennis is better, N64 Star Fox is better, N64 Mario Kart is better, etc. Some GC versions are better -- Smash Bros. and 1080 I like more on the GC -- but more series I like more on the N64.

[EclecticGroove]

Are you really trying to say that the CD audio and FMV on many high profile PS1 games WASN'T a huge marketing advantage for the system? I mean, gameplay certainly matters, but aside from Nintendo's own first party N64 games, there wasn't a huge amount of hype for that many games. And those that were hyped got positively destroyed by the likes of FF7.

The lack of storage space being available for N64 games was a giant issue regardless of your thoughts on the matter.

And yes, later on some 3rd parties started to stray away from the GC, but they also started to go BACK towards it as well closer to the end.


And again, the GC can't really be faulted for its sales. It sold just as well as the other non Sony console that gen. You can't expect it to magically do better out of nowhere. Sony dominated to a point that no one else could touch... so you have to look at relative performance.
MS took it as a foothold and went on to do great with the 360.

Point is, the GC... for it's generation, did just fine. Could it have done better? Yeah, most likely. But Nintendo went and got super lucky with the wii... but that was more of a fluke than an actual workable strategy.

[Yharnamresident]

Almost. Still had gimped storage space. But it's been the closest Nintendo has come to having a console that is really on par with the competition since the SNES. (The n64's carts were a much larger hindrance than the smaller disks were for the cube).

The GC still sold about as well as the oXbox. Neither one of them was going to beat out the PS2 however.

I always bring up this fact.

During the prime of the 6th-gen era(1999-2006), I didn't know a single person who had anything besides a PS2. No Dreamcasts, Xboxs or GameCubes.

[Obviously]

I had a Gamecube for Metroid Prime. No regrets.

[j_factor]

Point is, the GC... for it's generation, did just fine.

Perhaps it did. But I can't imagine anyone of authority at Nintendo holding up their worst-selling prior console as a model for their strategy with their next one.

[Dr Robotnik]

Nintendo lost much of their 3rd party support the moment they announced they were going to release a cartridge based system. If the n64 had been CD based it would most likely had had the first resident evil, Final fantasy 7, metal gear solid, probably tekken and soul blade. Many of the killer apps that made the playstation so successful would have been nintendo games. They might have had a multi-platform release, but Nintendo had the money to pay for exclusives and even if they had been multi-platform releases, the n64 was the most powerful so would have had the best versions. All of those developers made great games for the SNES and would have continued with it's successor if only it hadn't been so crippled.

The frustrating thing with Nintendo is they constantly try and tell gamers what they want. I remember when they announced the N64 and said it was going to use cartridges because it was "unacceptable to wait sometimes several minutes to play" (i'm paraphrasing). This was during the 90's arcade resurgence when I'd spend my saturday nights queueing for half an hour just to play the new AM2 arcade machines for a few minutes. I was only 12 at the time, but even I knew CD-ROMs were the absolute shit and Nintendo were retarded not to use them.

The gamecube did okay, but again they limited themselves with the little discs and by painting the console purple and giving us a yellow nubbin instead of using the twin sticks which were standard for the other consoles. The ps2 owned that era, the xbox did okay because it was the most powerful, but there wasn't really anything that stood out about the GC.

If they ever want to compete with sony and microsoft, it's pretty obvious the only real way they can do it is by making something that's better for cross-platform releases than the xbox one or ps4. Since it's coming out several years after them, there's no excuse for it to not be more powerful and able to have nicer looking versions of the same games. If they want to save costs then I guess they could ditch physical media entirely and go totally online.

Of course I'm dreaming. Their revolutionary new system will most likely have 2 wii remotes per person and be bundled with a remake of Samba de Amigo.

[gamevet]

The N64's better third-party game library than the GC's should be more than enough to prove you wrong. The N64 and Gamecube are both hardware just as good or better than the other consoles of their generation. Smaller storage mediums mean little compared to the powerful hardware in the boxes.

Why do you think that the N64 had better 3rd party games?

The Gamecube had these exclusive 3rd party titles (some released later on PS2):

Rogue Squadron II
Rogue Squadron III
Viewfitul Joe
Ikaruga (North American Exclusive)
Chaos Field (NA exclusive)
Phantasy Star Online: Episode III
MGS The Twin Snakes
Tales of Symphonia
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Resident Evil 0
Resident Evil 4
P.N. 03
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg
Chibi-Robo
Super Monkey Ball
Pac-Man Vs.
Lost Kingdoms
Lost Kingdoms 2
Eternal Darkness
Baten Kaitos Origins
Baten Kaitos Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean
Bomberman Generation
Beach Spikers
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
Skies of Arcadia (encounter rates were improved upon the DC version)
Evolution Worlds
Lost Kingdoms
Lost Kingdoms II
Go! Go! Hypergrind

The Gamecube also had a lot of 3rd party games that supported progressive scan, while the PS2 didn't.

[Obviously]

One of my favorite GameCube games was a third party, Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. That wasn't an exclusive though.

There was also that awful Mega Man EXE game.

[Azathoth]

Are you really trying to say that the CD audio and FMV on many high profile PS1 games WASN'T a huge marketing advantage for the system?

Although 20 years later they are pretty much despised across the board, FMV games sold like hotcakes and FMV or digitized sound/graphics were gigantic software selling points at the time.

Game players disliked them, but the general game purchasing public loved to buy them.

[A Black Falcon]

Are you really trying to say that the CD audio and FMV on many high profile PS1 games WASN'T a huge marketing advantage for the system? I mean, gameplay certainly matters, but aside from Nintendo's own first party N64 games, there wasn't a huge amount of hype for that many games. And those that were hyped got positively destroyed by the likes of FF7.

The lack of storage space being available for N64 games was a giant issue regardless of your thoughts on the matter.

The lack of storage was a problem in Japan, it was one of the factors that convinced Square and Enix to abandon Nintendo for Sony. In America, however, it really wasn't all that important. Some of the major Western third parties supported the N64 much better than the PS1 or Saturn, after all, and others supported it decently well. Of course part of this is because the system sold well in the US, but all those quality Western third-party titles helped those sales continue, so the two things are connected. In Japan, it was losing all those third parties that was the key blow that doomed it there, I think... but still, RE2 and such show that no, the N64 could do just fine even with FMV. If the cost of overall better gameplay (no load times, larger game areas without complex streaming, etc.) is losing Square that generation, that was a tradeoff well worth taking. I've always said this, but the N64 with CDs would be a worse console. The system benefits overall from using carts.

As for marketing, Sony had FMV, while Nintendo had better looking actual ingame graphics. Poor people who thought all those 100% CGI FFVII ads were actually ingame graphics... (Yes, of course FFVII and its FMV was a big hit for Sony, but still, the N64 held its own well, you are understating its success in the US.)

And yes, later on some 3rd parties started to stray away from the GC, but they also started to go BACK towards it as well closer to the end.

... What? The GC was my only current-gen TV console between its release and 2007, and I can assure you, this most DEFINITELY did not happen. The only third party games the GC got later in its life were a few major franchise titles (Need for Speed, some sports games) and kids' licensed movie/TV show tie-in games, pretty much. And Sonic.

And again, the GC can't really be faulted for its sales. It sold just as well as the other non Sony console that gen. You can't expect it to magically do better out of nowhere. Sony dominated to a point that no one else could touch... so you have to look at relative performance.
MS took it as a foothold and went on to do great with the 360.

No, it can be faulted for its sales. Nintendo allowed Microsoft to steal away the entire Western core gamer market that generation, they had no good strategy for keeping that important element of the N64's American userbase. This was a significant failing which helped determine the path Nintendo took afterwards, away from core gaming and towards the Wii's casual aim; away from competitive tech and towards lower-powered tech good enough for what they wanted to do but not as good as the other systems.

The GC was also when Iwata took over, and he started taking away NoA's independence, controlling everything from Japan, ruining Nintendo's relationships with all of its Western second parties and some close third parties as well (Factor 5, for instance), and more. He tried instead a strategy which got major publishers to make games with Nintendo franchises on Nintendo systems. This got some games, but not lasting support from those companies outside of those few titles; I think the second-parties strategies Howard Lincoln and co. pushed in the '90s was far better. I don't think Lincoln, if he had still been at NoA in the '00s and still with the independence he and Arakawa had in the '90s, would have allowed things to get as bad as they did... he almost certainly wouldn't have let Rare go, for instance, that was one significant mistake. Losing Factor 5, Left Field, and Silicon Knights and replacing them with nothing also hurt (Nintendo's two American first party studios, Retro and NST. both started up under his leadership, so those don't count as replacements).

Point is, the GC... for it's generation, did just fine. Could it have done better? Yeah, most likely. But Nintendo went and got super lucky with the wii... but that was more of a fluke than an actual workable strategy.

Third place out of four really isn't "just fine". It wasn't AWFUL, thanks to America, but it wasn't just fine. Nintendo's drop from 21 million N64s sold in the US to only 12.5 million Gamecubes was a huge collapse, percentage-wise almost as bad as the SNES-to-N64 collapse in Japan (17.17 million SNESes there to only 5.54 million N64s). Percentage-wise, Nintendo's biggest decline in the US in TV console hardware sales before the Wii U is the one from the N64 to the Gamecube! Did you know that? The GC did do okay, I knew plenty of people who owned one for sure, but it did a lot less okay than the N64. Nintendo had its first quarterly loss ever during the GC era, and as I said above it was the GC's failure that convinced Iwata to try the Wii strategy. Of course as I said I have bigger problems than that with Iwata's decisions then, I really do think centralizing power in Japan hurt Nintendo, but the Wii only exists because the GC didn't sell well enough. I do think the Wii is a pretty great console, but it would have been nice to see Nintendo continue to make consoles with hardware competitive to the other systems.

[A Black Falcon]

Why do you think that the N64 had better 3rd party games?

Better third party exclusives (or PC/N64 only titles). For overall libraries the GC has more games, because porting PS2/Xbox games over to GC was a lot easier than porting PS1 games over to the N64, so I don't know if the overall third party library is better on N64. But in terms of exclusives... for me at least, no contest. And I'd probably pick the N64 for overall third party games too, purely in my personal opinion of course.

The Gamecube had these exclusive 3rd party titles (some released later on PS2):

Rogue Squadron II
Rogue Squadron III
Viewfitul Joe [Not Exclusive - also on PS2]
Ikaruga (North American Exclusive) [Not Exclusive - DC port]
Chaos Field (NA exclusive) [Not Exclusive - DC port]
Phantasy Star Online: Episode III
MGS The Twin Snakes
Tales of Symphonia [Not Exclusive - also on PS2 in Japan and on PS3 worldwide]
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Resident Evil 0 [Not Exclusive - also on Wii]
Resident Evil 4 [Not Exclusive - also on PC, PS2, and Wii]
P.N. 03
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg [Not Exclusive - also on PC (Europe only release]
Chibi-Robo
Super Monkey Ball [Not Exclusive - also on PS2 and Xbox]
Pac-Man Vs.
Lost Kingdoms
Lost Kingdoms 2
Eternal Darkness
Baten Kaitos Origins
Baten Kaitos Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean
Bomberman Generation
Beach Spikers
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle [Not Exclusive - DC port, now also on PC, PS3, and X360]
Skies of Arcadia (encounter rates were improved upon the DC version) [Not Exclusive - DC port]
Evolution Worlds [Not Exclusive - DC port/redo]
Lost Kingdoms
Lost Kingdoms II
Go! Go! Hypergrind

The Gamecube also had a lot of 3rd party games that supported progressive scan, while the PS2 didn't.

All of the strikethrough titles are actually first or second party games, not third, and shouldn't be on this list.

-Eternal Darkness and MGS: Twin Snakes are by then second party Silicon Knights.
-Baten Kaitos Origins is by Monolith Soft from after Nintendo bought 83% of the company; Monolith Soft has been a Nintendo first-party studio since this games' development (Nintendo bought the rest of Monolith Soft in '07. I didn't strike the first game because I think Nintendo didn't have rights to that until after its release (that is, Namco published that game, but then Nintendo got the franchise rights when they bought the developer from Namco.).
-Pac-Man Vs. is a first-party Nintendo title developed by Miyamoto at EAD. Namco then published because it uses a Namco IP, but it's a first-party Nintendo game.
-Chibi-Robo was published by Nintendo, and developed by an "outside" team that only supports Nintendo platforms and I think is partially Nintendo-funded.

Also, I didn't strikethrough them, but Factor 5, the team behind the Rogue Squadron games, had a close relationship with Nintendo in the N64 and GC generations -- they made a music system for the GBC for Nintendo, for instance. I guess they were a third party, but they were a close one.

And finally of course RE4 had a PS2 port less than a year after its GC release, it's not really an exclusive. Super Monkey Ball and Viewtiful Joe also later had PS2 ports.


As for the N64, list wars are kind of silly because the lists are always incomplete, but here's some (including N64 exclusives and games only also on PC but not other consoles), here are some pretty good third-party exclusives (not counting the Cruis'n franchise because Nintendo had partial rights to the name). Note that all titles on this list are N64-exclusive, excluding only the listed PC and arcade versions of the games.:
----
Rogue Squadron (also on PC)
Battle for Naboo (maybe my favorite of Factor 5's Star Wars games) (also on PC)
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (also on PC)
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (also on PC)
Turok: Rage Wars
Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion
San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing (arcade port also on PC)
Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA
California Speed (arcade port)
Mace: The Dark Age (arcade port)
NFL Blitz Special Edition
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey (arcade port also on PC)
Doom 64
Quake II (redone, not exactly a port of the PC/PS1 game)
Wipeout 64 (adapted from Wipeout XL (PS1/PC/SAT, but not the same game)
Hybrid Heaven
Castlevania
Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
Goemon's Great Adventure
Flying Dragon and SD Hiryu no Ken Densetsu (there is a related PS1 game, but it's not the same as these)
Fighter's Destiny (1 and 2)
Bomberman 64 (US) (Nintendo published this game in the West, but the original Japanese release is from Hudson) [JP: Baku Bomberman]
Bomberman 64 (Japan)
Bomberman Hero
Mischief Makers (Nintendo published this game in the West, but the original Japanese release is from Enix)
Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage
Tonic Trouble
Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth (arcade port I think)
Chameleon Twist 1 and 2
Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers
Forsaken 64 (different from the PS1/PC game; similar gameplay, but different levels and such here)
Iggy's 'Reckin Balls
World Driver Championship
Rally Challenge 2000
Big Mountain 2000
Top Gear Rally
Top Gear Overdrive
Top Gear Rally 2
Top Gear Hyper-Bike
Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 2
Extreme-G
Extreme-G 2 (also on PC)
007: The World Is Not Enough (the PS1 game of the same name is entirely different)
Rocket: Robot on Wheels
BattleTanx
BattleTanx: Global Assault (the PS1 version of this game has different, redesigned levels)
Alice's WakuWaku Trump World 64
Indy Racing 2000
Duck Dodgers
Scooby-Doo: Classic Creep Capers
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Buck Bumble
Dual Heroes
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (also on PC, Nintendo pushed this game in advertising but it was made and published by Lucasarts)
Destruction Derby 64 (flawed game, but decent)
Ridge Racer 64 (not exactly a port of the PS1 games)
Beetle Adventure Racing
Road Rash 64
WCW/NWO Revenge
WWF No Mercy
All-Star Baseball 99, '00, and '01
Stunt Racer 64
Lode Runner 3D

Some other okay (mostly) but not great N64 exclusives include the Doraemon games, Chopper Attack, Xena: Talismans of Fate, Knife Edge: Nose Gunner, Carmageddon 64 (PC port almost everyone other than me hates), Off-Road Challenge, Aero Gauge, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Twisted Edge Extreme Snowboarding, Monster Truck Madness 64 (based on MTM2 for PC), ClayFighter 63 1/3, Clayfighter: Sculptor's Cut, Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs (adapted from a PC series), MRC, GT64, Super Robot Wars 64, WWF Wrestlemana 2000, Virtual Pro Wrestling 1 and 2, Aero Fighters Assault, Super Robot Spirits, Automobili Lamborghini, Bomberman 64: The Second Attack [JP: Baku Bomberman 2 (JP)], NFL Quarterback Club '98 and '99, Penny Racers & Choro-Q 64 2, and some more.

Rakuga Kids, AirBoarder 64, Taz Express, Getter Love, and Last Legion UX are some import-only titles that might have been on this list if I'd played them before.

There are also Superman and Daikatana (also on PC) of course, for bad exclusive games.

And on N64 and next-gen consoles (Dreamcast or PS2) but not PS1 or Saturn:
--
San Francisco Rush 2049
Star Wars Episode I Racer
Bangaioh
WinBack: Covert Operations
NFL Quarterback Club 2000
F-1 World Grand Prix II (Europe-exclusive release on N64)


The GC does have more third-party exclusives than are on your list there, but there just aren't nearly as many great ones as the N64 has.

[EclecticGroove]

The GC and Xbox sold almost the same amount. The oXbox had ~3 million console lead in the US, but sold next to nothing in Japan. You talk as if the GC was a gigantic flop that trailed behind the oXbox in the same way the oXbox trailed the PS2. They were virtually neck and neck. A single hot selling game would have made all the difference (either to let it catch up, or to push MS further ahead).
I'm not saying Nintendo did the best they could. MS pushed online and made a huge deal of it, making Live a huge deal. Sony didn't get on board with that fully till the PS3... but didn't need to with the PS2, MS wasn't going to catch up.

My whole point is, looking at the GC from Nintendo's perspective and saying, "well, no one cared about competitive hardware" makes no sense. They absolutely could have taken away a few things... like.
1) Maybe demanding to be the sole resource for the media, especially one that is less robust, wasn't a great thing to do again.
2) Hey, that online thing. Wow! MS is kinda of making that a big deal, and making some good money off it. Maybe we should actually seriously look into it.
3) Third parties. We need to figure a better way to market our system to make sure people know about their games and get interested in them as well.

And storage space was an issue for everyone. Your own opinions don't matter when talking about the market as a whole. That a few games managed to work around it, or be good in spite of it, doesn't change the overall perception.

And Japan was still HUGE in the n64 era for games. So, a "problem for Japan" translated to a very big problem for the system.