MSI Magus
06-27-2006, 01:22 PM
Had a 7 page research paper due for Comp 1, posted about it for help before and got some good advice. Heres the finished product(hehe finished after cutting 10 pages off it since it ended up at 20 Pages). CONSTRUCTIVE critics are appreciated, realize this is a rough draft I just typed and glanced over.
Nintendo is a company that when mentioned parents think of the former king of an industry, children think of a relic and sadly many casual gamers think of a company on it’s way out. The truth is though that Nintendo is a company of brilliant business men, who have kept current, innovative and most importantly profitable. Nintendo has always been profitable.
Formed in 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, the company Nintendo did not start out as a video game manufacturing company-- it would be kind of hard to be a video game company before televisions even existed. Fusajiro Yamauchi, the founder of Nintendo, instead made hand made playing cards using the bark from the mulberry or mitsu-mata trees of the area. At first, the cards had only limited success, similar to other parts of the world, families would play cards, but once a deck is bought there isn’t much need for a new deck. However, just before the dawn of the new century the emergence of theYakuza(the Japanese Mafia)created a huge boom in Nintendo bussines. The Yakuza believed that when playing cards the proper etiquette was to use a new pack with every single game. One can only imagine how many packs of cards professional gamblers like the Yakuza would go through using a new pack every single game!Yamauchis business sky rocketed, he was selling out of his playing cards so fast that he had no choice but to take on apprentices so he could mass produce his playing cards.
Nintendo’s card business achieved growth and prosperity for generations. However, Fusajiro’s successor and grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, a brilliant business man knew the company could not keep selling cards and continue to grow. So in 1975 he made a deal with Magnavox to get the exclusive Japanese distrubtion rights to the first ever home video game console Ralph Baers Magnavox Oddysey. This wasn’t enough for Yamauchi though; he did not want Nintendo to simply handle distribution for another companies system. In 1977 Nintendo joined with Mitsubishi to release the video recording unit Color TV Game 6. Nintendo expanded on the Color TV Game 6 launching several other systems which went on to each sell over a million units a piece.
In the early 1980s Nintendo released Donkey Kong which would go on to be Nintendo’s first big hit, selling over 65,000 units in the US. Nintendo’s future mascot Mario made his first appearance in Donkey Kong as the hero “Jump Man”. Their first solo video game project the Game and Watch simple video games built into an LCD watch was also released and a smash that sold millions. Nintendo had cemented themselves as video game makers.
With his employees making arcade hits and laying the groundwork for the future of handheld gaming Hiroshi Yamauchi was very busy himself. Hiroshi wasn’t content with the partnership with Mitsubishi, he wanted more. Yamauchi ordered people in his video game department to make a system vastly superior to the Color TV series, and for it to have a price no higher then $75. Nintendo ended 1980 with sales of $330 million and 1981 would see sales of $464 million, by 1982 sales would burst through the roof reaching over 1 billion dollars profit.
July of 1983 saw the launch of the first system Nintendo made without help from another company. The famicom, which was short for family computer, was a smash success selling half a million units within just two months in Japan. While the Japanese video game market was booming the US market was falling apart, Atari titles were being sold for a tenth of the suggested retail price. Atari had made the mistake of letting third party developers making games for their systems put whatever titles on their system they wished no matter how bad they were. Even Atari themselves were putting out horrible games such as E.T which sold so badly that trucks had to be commissioned to take non selling copies to a landfill; the games were literally buried in the Arizona desert. Yamauchi though was not scared of the impending crash in the US market, he saw it as an opportunity, a market completely without competition and a desperate Atari. Nintendo went to Atari and offered them to distribute the NES not only in the US but everywhere outside of Japan. Atari declined because a third company Colleco was showing off an illegal copy of Donkey Kong as a title for their system the Collecovision. Atari did not want to strike a deal with Nintendo when their flagship title was being released on another system. Sales reach 3.2 billion.
The mid 1980’s were full of ups and downs for Nintendo. Kids in Japan were camping outside of stores to get their hands on the Famicom, however the system still could not find a distributor for the US. In 1985 Nintendo decided to take a big risk and distribute the Famicom stateside themselves outside of Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System, NES for short. The home console market was dead or at least dying in the US, most companies had went out of business and retail stores like Toys R Us did not want to carry video game systems anymore. Nintendo pressed on anyways launching the system first only in New York— The NES only sold 90,000 units. Nintendo knew that if the system was going to succeed it would need something to draw in new costumers and also make retailers carry the NES. Nintendo decided to hire World of Wonders, makers of the hit toys Laser Tag and Teddy Ruxpin to help them do this. World of Wonders came up with R.O.B which stands for Robotic Operating Buddy. R.O.B was a robot that came boxed with the NES and could manipulate a series of plastic pieces if stacked near him with the second control slot, this actually had an effect on gameplay. Gimmick or not it works; retailers agree to put the NES on store shelves. However, the NES is still met with luke warm results from consumers both in the states and in Europe, thankfully as the late 1980’s roll in everything changes.
Three million NES’s are sold in 1987 resulting in total sales going back up to $430 million. The NES is now the number 1 toy in the US! Nintendo is a household name, the company has gotten so big that they launch their own magazine Nintendo Power. Nintendo’s newest game Zelda goes on to sell over a million copies, a first for any game not packaged with a system. Gunepei Yokoi shows off his newest invention to an impressed Yamauchi. Yamauchi expects that the invention, the Game boy will sell tens of millions of Units. By 1989 the Nintendo brand was so large that the name Nintendo is as widely known as Mickey Mouse and Bug’s Bunny. Nintendo Power is now the number one magazine in its age group and Nintendo even releases a movie called the Wizard about video games staring Fred Savage, star of at the time popular and now classic TV show The Wonder Years. Nintendo used the Wizard to unveil their newest game Super Mario Bros 3, a game that would go on to gross $500 million for the company. New York and other big cities saw the launch of Nintendo World, special stores where kids could go to try out new Nintendo products before buying them. In Japan Nintendo had something bigger then a new game to show off though. Nintendo unveiled the Super Famicom, the successor to the Famicom. Nintendo ends the year selling over 50 million NES games and posts total sales worth $2.3 Billion.
The 90s started off with a bang. Thanks in part to the Wizard which revenued more then any movie except E.T till 1993, every kid had to have a copy of Super Mario Brothers 3. The game sold 18 million copies making it the most successful stand alone game at that time. The Super Famicom launchs in Japan on the 21st of November in 1990, and is so popular that stores have to hold raffles to see who is lucky enough to even get to buy a console. The following year the Super Famicom launches stateside as the Super Nintendo and is a smash success, the game boy also launches this year in the US and again sells out. Hiroshi Yamauchi buy’s 60% of the Seattle Mariners, this would be the first time ever a non North American company owned the majority of a US Major League Baseball team. Looking ahead to the future Nintendo announces plans for their next system calling it Project Reality and announcing it would Launch in Japan in 1995. Nintendo launch’s a second video game movie, this time it is directly based off one of their video games, Super Mario Bro’s. During the early 90s Nintendo controlled 70%-80% of the US video game market and in Japan they dominated further controlling 90%-95% of the market on average.
Nintendo sold its one billionth cart in the mid 90’s and the Nintendo 64 launched in Japan and sold 500,000 units its first day alone. The mid 90’s were more about the beginning of the fall of Nintendo though. Gunpei Yokoi’s newest creation the Virtual Boy did not even manage to sell 50,000 units in Japan in a time it was expected to sell 250,000 units. The Virtual Boy was the newest “handheld” system from Nintendo but it had to use a unajustable stand making play awkward at best in most situations. Worse was that the screen for the Virtual Boy was a headset that only showed images in Red, this lead to gamers having horrible headaches if they played the system for more then 30 minutes at a time and there were rumors that many kids had seizures when playing the system. Gunpei Yokoi resigned from Nintendo disgraced by his product as is considered proper in Japan, sadly he would die in a car accident soon after.
Worse for Nintendo, was that third party video game developers, including the most successful and influential company Squaresoft were now announcing support for Sony’s upcoming Playstation. Nintendo during the 90’s abused developers telling them they were not allowed to release games for trivial reasons, they denied games stateside release without proper explanation and forced publishing rights upon companies that did not want them like Squaresoft. Nintendo even went so far as to publicly insult developers they were not happy with; Yamauchi himself was known to be quite vocal about Squaresoft in interviews. The final nail in the coffin was whenever they launched the Nintendo 64 as a cartridge based system, developers had complained about cart costs for years and wanted Nintendo to move on to a CD based format. The Playstation a CD based system itself only existed because of a mistake on Nintendo’s part. In the early 90s they had been working on a CD add on for the Super Nintendo with Sony. Nintendo illegally broke their contract with Sony leaving them with a half finished product. Sony decided to take the Super Nintendo CD add on and turn it into a stand alone product, The Playstation.
This is where modern gaming comes in. Kids know Nintendo as the past, they know they had major successes and they see Nintendo has fallen from their former status. Most gamers today grew up in the Playstation vs Nintendo 64 and Gamecube(the Nintendo 64s successor) vs Playstation 2 war. Most of these gamers simply see that Sony sold more systems and was much more popular in both generations. This leads to the assumption that because Nintendo is controlling a smaller portion of the market they must be making less and less profit, and thus be a dying company. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Nintendo may have lost market and it did indeed hurt them, but while not selling as well as its competition, they have come up with smarter business plans that have kept them very profitable. This means even though their system may not have sold as many units they made more money then the corporate giant Sony did with their Playstation brand. In the year 2005 while Sony was posting in the area of 200 million lost, Nintendo profited, their total profits for the fiscal year were just under a billion. Nintendo is a very smart company, while Sony and MS have sold their systems at a loss and hoped to make up the revenue with their video game sales, Nintendo has sold their systems for pure profit.
Far too many people also forget that Nintendo is the owner of the Game Boy, and the Nintendo DS. Every kid may own a Playstation, and every parent may know what it is, but every kid also has one of Nintendo’s handhelds, and every Christmas parents fight to get their kids one at the mall alongside their Xbox or Playstation. While the GC may not sell as many units as the Xbox let alone the Playstation 2 the Game boy always outsell Microsoft’s Xbox and frequently outsells the Playstation 2. When you combine the numbers Nintendo is actually dominating Sony in hardware sales with the success of its handheld lines. As of June 18th 2006 in Japan Nintendo has sold over three and a half million systems when its handheld and console sales are combined, in comparison the Playstation line has only managed to sell under half that at 1.5 million. Nintendo has also dominated the software charts there with 7 or 8 out of 10 games being Nintendo made on the top 10 every single month, each selling near or over a million units. The U.S is no different, Nintendo’s newest handheld the DS Lite launched here recently and sold 125,000 systems in the first two days alone, and their newest game New Super Mario Brothers has sold over half a million copies in just over a month. Pokemon alone is a multi Billion dollar industry that could keep Nintendo alive for many years to come.
It’s been said to have a successful future you must look to the past, this is something Nintendo is wisely doing, while Sony is not. Nintendo has looked at their past and worked hard to mend their mistakes bringing developers back into the fold, while Sony find’s themselves ostracizing developers by acting like the Nintendo of the past. Sony the last few years has censored many developers’ games, denied stateside release for asinine reasons and just acted like bullies in general. Nintendo is also listening to developers and gamers, where as Sony is ignoring them and taking a we know best attitude much as the Nintendo of old did. Developers have said they want cheaper development costs and innovations in the hardware, gamers have said they want cheaper games and innovation. Sony has announced their new system the Playstation 3 will cost $500 for a basic model and $600 for the premium package which most people will opt for, and yet the system doesn’t offer anything new. The Playstation 3 is just another big upgrade to the previous systems graphical capabilities, with a few nice additions like a hard rive and better online play. Nintendo on the other hand has announced their system will cost no more then $250 and most experts are predicting a $200 price point unless packaged with a game.
Nintendo’s new system the Wii besides having a reasonable pricing point is using a new controller that detects your movement in three dimensions, and then mirror’s it. This means instead of simply sitting on a coach pushing buttons, gamers can now move their whole body to imitate sword slashes, swinging a golf club or running and jumping. The controller even can sense how hard you are moving it, thus allowing it to simulate things like a slow or fast pitch in baseball or if you toss a grenade 5 feet or 100. Nintendo has created the first truly interactive 3D home game console and done it for 1/3rd of the competitions price. Gamer’s have responded very positively to this announcement, a recent poll in Japans leading video game magazine Famitsu showed that almost 70% of all gamers in Japan were most excited about the Wii while only 20% found the Playstation 3 to be the most exciting new console. Even better news for Nintendo was a second poll showed that almost 90% of all gamers felt that the Playstation 3 was too expensive. Analysts have predicted that with all the negative feelings surrounding the price of the Playstation 3 the $884 million dollar loss Sony predicts they will make launching the Playstation 3 will probally break a billion. Nintendo meanwhile is expected to have minimal losses and possibly even make a profit.
Nintendo may have fallen from the throne they sat on in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn’t mean they are not still a power player. Nintendo takes second seat to Sony in hype alone, their profit, hardware sales, software sales and most importantly ideas continue to dominate. Nintendo is not only relevant today; they are still an industry leader, if not the industry leader, and if popular opinion is correct they may one day reclaim their scepter.
Nintendo is a company that when mentioned parents think of the former king of an industry, children think of a relic and sadly many casual gamers think of a company on it’s way out. The truth is though that Nintendo is a company of brilliant business men, who have kept current, innovative and most importantly profitable. Nintendo has always been profitable.
Formed in 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, the company Nintendo did not start out as a video game manufacturing company-- it would be kind of hard to be a video game company before televisions even existed. Fusajiro Yamauchi, the founder of Nintendo, instead made hand made playing cards using the bark from the mulberry or mitsu-mata trees of the area. At first, the cards had only limited success, similar to other parts of the world, families would play cards, but once a deck is bought there isn’t much need for a new deck. However, just before the dawn of the new century the emergence of theYakuza(the Japanese Mafia)created a huge boom in Nintendo bussines. The Yakuza believed that when playing cards the proper etiquette was to use a new pack with every single game. One can only imagine how many packs of cards professional gamblers like the Yakuza would go through using a new pack every single game!Yamauchis business sky rocketed, he was selling out of his playing cards so fast that he had no choice but to take on apprentices so he could mass produce his playing cards.
Nintendo’s card business achieved growth and prosperity for generations. However, Fusajiro’s successor and grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, a brilliant business man knew the company could not keep selling cards and continue to grow. So in 1975 he made a deal with Magnavox to get the exclusive Japanese distrubtion rights to the first ever home video game console Ralph Baers Magnavox Oddysey. This wasn’t enough for Yamauchi though; he did not want Nintendo to simply handle distribution for another companies system. In 1977 Nintendo joined with Mitsubishi to release the video recording unit Color TV Game 6. Nintendo expanded on the Color TV Game 6 launching several other systems which went on to each sell over a million units a piece.
In the early 1980s Nintendo released Donkey Kong which would go on to be Nintendo’s first big hit, selling over 65,000 units in the US. Nintendo’s future mascot Mario made his first appearance in Donkey Kong as the hero “Jump Man”. Their first solo video game project the Game and Watch simple video games built into an LCD watch was also released and a smash that sold millions. Nintendo had cemented themselves as video game makers.
With his employees making arcade hits and laying the groundwork for the future of handheld gaming Hiroshi Yamauchi was very busy himself. Hiroshi wasn’t content with the partnership with Mitsubishi, he wanted more. Yamauchi ordered people in his video game department to make a system vastly superior to the Color TV series, and for it to have a price no higher then $75. Nintendo ended 1980 with sales of $330 million and 1981 would see sales of $464 million, by 1982 sales would burst through the roof reaching over 1 billion dollars profit.
July of 1983 saw the launch of the first system Nintendo made without help from another company. The famicom, which was short for family computer, was a smash success selling half a million units within just two months in Japan. While the Japanese video game market was booming the US market was falling apart, Atari titles were being sold for a tenth of the suggested retail price. Atari had made the mistake of letting third party developers making games for their systems put whatever titles on their system they wished no matter how bad they were. Even Atari themselves were putting out horrible games such as E.T which sold so badly that trucks had to be commissioned to take non selling copies to a landfill; the games were literally buried in the Arizona desert. Yamauchi though was not scared of the impending crash in the US market, he saw it as an opportunity, a market completely without competition and a desperate Atari. Nintendo went to Atari and offered them to distribute the NES not only in the US but everywhere outside of Japan. Atari declined because a third company Colleco was showing off an illegal copy of Donkey Kong as a title for their system the Collecovision. Atari did not want to strike a deal with Nintendo when their flagship title was being released on another system. Sales reach 3.2 billion.
The mid 1980’s were full of ups and downs for Nintendo. Kids in Japan were camping outside of stores to get their hands on the Famicom, however the system still could not find a distributor for the US. In 1985 Nintendo decided to take a big risk and distribute the Famicom stateside themselves outside of Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System, NES for short. The home console market was dead or at least dying in the US, most companies had went out of business and retail stores like Toys R Us did not want to carry video game systems anymore. Nintendo pressed on anyways launching the system first only in New York— The NES only sold 90,000 units. Nintendo knew that if the system was going to succeed it would need something to draw in new costumers and also make retailers carry the NES. Nintendo decided to hire World of Wonders, makers of the hit toys Laser Tag and Teddy Ruxpin to help them do this. World of Wonders came up with R.O.B which stands for Robotic Operating Buddy. R.O.B was a robot that came boxed with the NES and could manipulate a series of plastic pieces if stacked near him with the second control slot, this actually had an effect on gameplay. Gimmick or not it works; retailers agree to put the NES on store shelves. However, the NES is still met with luke warm results from consumers both in the states and in Europe, thankfully as the late 1980’s roll in everything changes.
Three million NES’s are sold in 1987 resulting in total sales going back up to $430 million. The NES is now the number 1 toy in the US! Nintendo is a household name, the company has gotten so big that they launch their own magazine Nintendo Power. Nintendo’s newest game Zelda goes on to sell over a million copies, a first for any game not packaged with a system. Gunepei Yokoi shows off his newest invention to an impressed Yamauchi. Yamauchi expects that the invention, the Game boy will sell tens of millions of Units. By 1989 the Nintendo brand was so large that the name Nintendo is as widely known as Mickey Mouse and Bug’s Bunny. Nintendo Power is now the number one magazine in its age group and Nintendo even releases a movie called the Wizard about video games staring Fred Savage, star of at the time popular and now classic TV show The Wonder Years. Nintendo used the Wizard to unveil their newest game Super Mario Bros 3, a game that would go on to gross $500 million for the company. New York and other big cities saw the launch of Nintendo World, special stores where kids could go to try out new Nintendo products before buying them. In Japan Nintendo had something bigger then a new game to show off though. Nintendo unveiled the Super Famicom, the successor to the Famicom. Nintendo ends the year selling over 50 million NES games and posts total sales worth $2.3 Billion.
The 90s started off with a bang. Thanks in part to the Wizard which revenued more then any movie except E.T till 1993, every kid had to have a copy of Super Mario Brothers 3. The game sold 18 million copies making it the most successful stand alone game at that time. The Super Famicom launchs in Japan on the 21st of November in 1990, and is so popular that stores have to hold raffles to see who is lucky enough to even get to buy a console. The following year the Super Famicom launches stateside as the Super Nintendo and is a smash success, the game boy also launches this year in the US and again sells out. Hiroshi Yamauchi buy’s 60% of the Seattle Mariners, this would be the first time ever a non North American company owned the majority of a US Major League Baseball team. Looking ahead to the future Nintendo announces plans for their next system calling it Project Reality and announcing it would Launch in Japan in 1995. Nintendo launch’s a second video game movie, this time it is directly based off one of their video games, Super Mario Bro’s. During the early 90s Nintendo controlled 70%-80% of the US video game market and in Japan they dominated further controlling 90%-95% of the market on average.
Nintendo sold its one billionth cart in the mid 90’s and the Nintendo 64 launched in Japan and sold 500,000 units its first day alone. The mid 90’s were more about the beginning of the fall of Nintendo though. Gunpei Yokoi’s newest creation the Virtual Boy did not even manage to sell 50,000 units in Japan in a time it was expected to sell 250,000 units. The Virtual Boy was the newest “handheld” system from Nintendo but it had to use a unajustable stand making play awkward at best in most situations. Worse was that the screen for the Virtual Boy was a headset that only showed images in Red, this lead to gamers having horrible headaches if they played the system for more then 30 minutes at a time and there were rumors that many kids had seizures when playing the system. Gunpei Yokoi resigned from Nintendo disgraced by his product as is considered proper in Japan, sadly he would die in a car accident soon after.
Worse for Nintendo, was that third party video game developers, including the most successful and influential company Squaresoft were now announcing support for Sony’s upcoming Playstation. Nintendo during the 90’s abused developers telling them they were not allowed to release games for trivial reasons, they denied games stateside release without proper explanation and forced publishing rights upon companies that did not want them like Squaresoft. Nintendo even went so far as to publicly insult developers they were not happy with; Yamauchi himself was known to be quite vocal about Squaresoft in interviews. The final nail in the coffin was whenever they launched the Nintendo 64 as a cartridge based system, developers had complained about cart costs for years and wanted Nintendo to move on to a CD based format. The Playstation a CD based system itself only existed because of a mistake on Nintendo’s part. In the early 90s they had been working on a CD add on for the Super Nintendo with Sony. Nintendo illegally broke their contract with Sony leaving them with a half finished product. Sony decided to take the Super Nintendo CD add on and turn it into a stand alone product, The Playstation.
This is where modern gaming comes in. Kids know Nintendo as the past, they know they had major successes and they see Nintendo has fallen from their former status. Most gamers today grew up in the Playstation vs Nintendo 64 and Gamecube(the Nintendo 64s successor) vs Playstation 2 war. Most of these gamers simply see that Sony sold more systems and was much more popular in both generations. This leads to the assumption that because Nintendo is controlling a smaller portion of the market they must be making less and less profit, and thus be a dying company. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Nintendo may have lost market and it did indeed hurt them, but while not selling as well as its competition, they have come up with smarter business plans that have kept them very profitable. This means even though their system may not have sold as many units they made more money then the corporate giant Sony did with their Playstation brand. In the year 2005 while Sony was posting in the area of 200 million lost, Nintendo profited, their total profits for the fiscal year were just under a billion. Nintendo is a very smart company, while Sony and MS have sold their systems at a loss and hoped to make up the revenue with their video game sales, Nintendo has sold their systems for pure profit.
Far too many people also forget that Nintendo is the owner of the Game Boy, and the Nintendo DS. Every kid may own a Playstation, and every parent may know what it is, but every kid also has one of Nintendo’s handhelds, and every Christmas parents fight to get their kids one at the mall alongside their Xbox or Playstation. While the GC may not sell as many units as the Xbox let alone the Playstation 2 the Game boy always outsell Microsoft’s Xbox and frequently outsells the Playstation 2. When you combine the numbers Nintendo is actually dominating Sony in hardware sales with the success of its handheld lines. As of June 18th 2006 in Japan Nintendo has sold over three and a half million systems when its handheld and console sales are combined, in comparison the Playstation line has only managed to sell under half that at 1.5 million. Nintendo has also dominated the software charts there with 7 or 8 out of 10 games being Nintendo made on the top 10 every single month, each selling near or over a million units. The U.S is no different, Nintendo’s newest handheld the DS Lite launched here recently and sold 125,000 systems in the first two days alone, and their newest game New Super Mario Brothers has sold over half a million copies in just over a month. Pokemon alone is a multi Billion dollar industry that could keep Nintendo alive for many years to come.
It’s been said to have a successful future you must look to the past, this is something Nintendo is wisely doing, while Sony is not. Nintendo has looked at their past and worked hard to mend their mistakes bringing developers back into the fold, while Sony find’s themselves ostracizing developers by acting like the Nintendo of the past. Sony the last few years has censored many developers’ games, denied stateside release for asinine reasons and just acted like bullies in general. Nintendo is also listening to developers and gamers, where as Sony is ignoring them and taking a we know best attitude much as the Nintendo of old did. Developers have said they want cheaper development costs and innovations in the hardware, gamers have said they want cheaper games and innovation. Sony has announced their new system the Playstation 3 will cost $500 for a basic model and $600 for the premium package which most people will opt for, and yet the system doesn’t offer anything new. The Playstation 3 is just another big upgrade to the previous systems graphical capabilities, with a few nice additions like a hard rive and better online play. Nintendo on the other hand has announced their system will cost no more then $250 and most experts are predicting a $200 price point unless packaged with a game.
Nintendo’s new system the Wii besides having a reasonable pricing point is using a new controller that detects your movement in three dimensions, and then mirror’s it. This means instead of simply sitting on a coach pushing buttons, gamers can now move their whole body to imitate sword slashes, swinging a golf club or running and jumping. The controller even can sense how hard you are moving it, thus allowing it to simulate things like a slow or fast pitch in baseball or if you toss a grenade 5 feet or 100. Nintendo has created the first truly interactive 3D home game console and done it for 1/3rd of the competitions price. Gamer’s have responded very positively to this announcement, a recent poll in Japans leading video game magazine Famitsu showed that almost 70% of all gamers in Japan were most excited about the Wii while only 20% found the Playstation 3 to be the most exciting new console. Even better news for Nintendo was a second poll showed that almost 90% of all gamers felt that the Playstation 3 was too expensive. Analysts have predicted that with all the negative feelings surrounding the price of the Playstation 3 the $884 million dollar loss Sony predicts they will make launching the Playstation 3 will probally break a billion. Nintendo meanwhile is expected to have minimal losses and possibly even make a profit.
Nintendo may have fallen from the throne they sat on in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn’t mean they are not still a power player. Nintendo takes second seat to Sony in hype alone, their profit, hardware sales, software sales and most importantly ideas continue to dominate. Nintendo is not only relevant today; they are still an industry leader, if not the industry leader, and if popular opinion is correct they may one day reclaim their scepter.