Video Gamers Podcast - Nintendo Deep Dive! From Humble Beginnings To Video Game Overlords – Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Gaming hosts Ryan and John are rewinding time to explore the incredible history of Nintendo in this nostalgic-packed episode of the Video Gamers Podcast! From humble beginnings as a playing card company to becoming one of the most iconic names in gaming, we’re tracing Nintendo’s journey and how it changed the world. We’ll dive into its legendary consoles, unforgettable franchises like Mario and Zelda, and how it helped shape the modern landscape of video games. Whether you're a longtime Nintendo fan or just curious about its impact, this is a deep dive into gaming history you won’t want to miss. Join us for a celebration of innovation, creativity, and the global legacy of video games—only on the Video Gamers Podcast!   Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Disratory, Ol’ Jake, Gaius, and Phelps   Thanks to our Legendary Supporters: HypnoticPyro, Patrick, Jigglepuf and PeopleWonder   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.com/invite/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on X: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamersPod?sub_confirmation=1    Visit us on the web:https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No Frills delivers! Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFriills.ca. Hello fellow gamers and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Today we are grabbing our time machines, eating some power up mushrooms, and diving head first into the legendary journey of Nintendo. From handheld consoles to motion controls and million,, billion dollar franchises. How did a 130 year old company become one of the most beloved names in gaming? What were their biggest triumphs and their most shocking misfires? And why does Mario still run the gaming world nearly four decades later?

We're going to cover all of this and more, but first some introductions are in order. I am your host John and joining me is the master mastermind behind the idea of this episode who said and I quote, let's use this time while Josh is out of town to talk about Nintendo. It's Ryan. You're not supposed to tell that part. That was a that was under NDA man. Come come on I'm just kidding Josh you can't do nothing about it brother you're not here and we're gonna do whatever we want yeah Josh is a famous famously a Nintendo hater and we wanted to capitalize on this opportunity to just go eat some eat some some member berries here and and just just relish in all things Nintendo for for a good solid

Forty-five and he asked me about what he's like what you guys recording today, and I was like don't worry about it, brother You'll find out looks like everybody else So before we get going on the actual content of the show here Ryan, what was your first Nintendo console? Oh Man the first actual Nintendo console I owned gosh that was probably a switch dude I'm not it yeah I'm not even gonna lie like I had so many friends and family that all had Wii's SNES NES, NES, 64's. Everybody had all those things. I never ended up having one.

And so I think the first system that I actually personally owned was a switch other than like, um, I guess, I guess handheld, if you want to consider that, uh, like Game Boy and Game Boy Color and stuff like that. I would, I would consider those. I mean, I think, I think Nintendo really has stood out in a number of areas, but handheld gaming, they've dominated. Oh, for sure. I think at least in the past, I mean, it's getting a little more competitive now, but yeah, I would say I had the original Game Boy, the big old blocky brick thing where you couldn't play

it at night because there was no light and you had to have all the attachments and it looked like a super spy you know movie with all the stuff you had on that thing so yeah that I guess that was my first Nintendo system I personally owned that's awesome my first Nintendo was a Nintendo Entertainment System it came with the dual control dual cartridge of Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt and I had the orange light gun not the cool gray like oh but this was this was at a time when and we'll

cover this by the way fascinating stuff that came up during the research of this episode but at that time Nintendo was really the name of the game like gaming video gaming was Nintendo at the time that the Nintendo Entertainment System came out and it's interesting because you know I before kind of working on this episode before kind of working on this episode, thought that that was sort of their first venture

and it turns out that they had a far more circuitous beginning than I remember. And we're gonna cover all that today. We're gonna cover some of Nintendo's highlights, their lowlights, some real weird quirky things about this company and, you know, leading up to a very prosperous, but somewhat controversial present-day existence of Nintendo

So if you had to guess and I know this is kind of bearing the lead because you've read the show outline But would you have thought that Nintendo? started in 1889 never as a company never never in my life when I and like you said man Doing some of the research and looking at this stuff. I learned so much that I never ever knew about Nintendo But yeah, man, that is that is something I never ever would have guessed that it started that long ago I would have said 19 late 70s early 80s. Like that's that would have been my go-to Yeah, exactly my My thought on Nintendo was

that it started in the early 80s and as Nintendo Entertainment System and then all of these properties came up around it. I had no idea that there was this entity that functionally was Nintendo before it was called Nintendo, but they were called Hanafuda and they made Japanese playing cards. They're a bit smaller than American playing cards, but they have like different nature scenes and birds and that kind of thing in them. And it was this company that was founded by a person named Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889. Um, the name of the company was then changed to Nintendo, which in Japanese referral roughly means leave luck to heaven. Um, which I think was their way of imputing like, we are going to succeed through action

and like luck will leave to the gods, but we are gonna kind of create and find our own destiny here. Yeah. So in, and that company existed as a playing card company from 1889 to 1956. So we're talking almost 60 years Nintendo was a playing card company.

Like before they ever touched into any sort of other entertainment. Well, which is wild to me too, because obviously, you know, they branched off into other ventures, you know, to be a company for 50, 60 year plus years, and then just like, let's, let's do this, you know, and just go off into something else, you know, as they went, like, man, that's wild. behind this too. So in 1956, somebody who worked for Nintendo at the time named Hiroshi Yamauchi, which was I believe Fusajiro's heir. He visited the US playing card company and he realized that the overall industry, just the playing card industry in general was pretty

small and that if they wanted to achieve sort of like broader mainstream success or big success that they were going to need to start diversifying. And this is really interesting because this story somewhat parallels Sony's story where they had like an idea that they wanted to elevate the status of like Japanese commerce, but they didn't know exactly what to do. And so they like just kind of tried a whole bunch of stuff. In the sixties, Nintendo tried out making taxis. They tried out making instant rice. And then the first sort of like device,

electronics device they tried out was like a love tester. You remember those like carnival testers where like you like squeeze it and it gives you like a rank on a love scale? And mine always came up like dead fish. Yeah, slug. I'm like, oh, come on, give me my money back. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, so they tried all kinds of stuff in the 60s before they landed on toys and electrons

I have to give it have you ever done one of those love tester things? Oh gosh, maybe once or twice ever I don't remember what it said, but probably no nothing good So yeah, I I grew up near Disneyland and so I I've like done that thing a million times I could never figure out how to manipulate it man. Like I am to this day What I think was it just random? It had to have been, right? It definitely wasn't a grip test thing. Yeah.

I would try to squeeze it. Yeah, literally cheat it with both hands. Yeah. And it wouldn't make any difference. Oh, jeez. But yeah, can you imagine a world where Nintendo stayed like a playing card company like how much different? Do you think the gaming universe would be these days? Oh, man

I mean with the with the the innovations and the expansions that Nintendo has had over the you know Last just just few decades. Um, it would be a whole different world I mean, but having said that you know me and you, we like to work out, we like to exercise, we eat a lot of chicken and rice. If they stayed in the rice game, you know, who knows, man. It might've been some awesome rice. Who knows, dude? Yeah, I mean, we're talking about like,

Nintendo has some of the building blocks of gaming. We're talking like no Mario, no Zelda, like the conventional controller that we play on. None of that stuff would have existed if Nintendo hadn't gotten, or at least may be very different than what we know today. It's an interesting thing to think about. Absolutely, yeah.

But so from the 70s to 1983 Nintendo went through this period of time where they were like sort of experimenting with video game type things while they were building their toys and electronics division and 1977 they released a color TV game console that basically was like Pong clones. Like it was, you know, it was kind of like a knockoff and that, unfortunately, was something that was quite prevalent in Asia at the time and in the Eastern block. I just had this talk with a guy named Bobby Voiku who owns a company called MixRift and he grew up in Russia,

or I believe in Russia. Sorry Bobby if I messed that up. But his first gaming experience were all these weird Nintendo clones. Oh, okay. They didn't actually get Nintendos. They were just a little off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Like the swap meet Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then in 1981, Nintendo has its first hit. What do you think that was? 1981? Oh, gosh. I don't know. What was the first game that they came out with was it?

Don donkey Kong it was donkey. Okay, so yeah, I remember from from prior experience like this is uh, Donkey Kong is considered technically the first Game you can jump in so it's the first platformer, right? I Think so that checks out. yep sweet yeah cuz before that it had been like your pongs your Pac-Man's your Galaga's your asteroids like things things were your character was kind of like fixed to an XY axis it didn't like it didn't have like jump. Yeah sort of features so that was the first big hit that Nintendo had and also debuts Mario who at the time was known as jump man

It wasn't even more and I know and jump man was originally a carpenter not a plumber If you can believe that that's wild I wonder what made him do the change you know like I don't know about Carpenter let's let's make him a plumber. That'll be better I heard a rumor, and I haven't been able to substantiate this but that Mario was like a Landlord or something for an early Nintendo base of operations, there was a person named Mario and that they were like a good landlord and so they like named it after the guy.

I don't know if that's true or not. I feel like I've heard that too. Like it might be wildly, you know, bold claims or anything like that, but yeah, I feel like I've heard that same kind of scenario. Right. Yeah. It's a cool legend at the very least. Yeah.

We'll let it live. Here at the Video Games podcast. We don't care Yeah, so and the big evolution for Nintendo that I think really started to rocket their their Trajectory was in 1985 when the NES the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the USA Entertainment System was launched in the USA. Up until that point there was a lot of concerns and speculation that the home video game market was dying, that that Atari was failing, that there wasn't a successor to the throne, and people were sort of writing it off. And Nintendo absolutely changed the games. It happened to launch with a couple of titles that like we still like Know

and Love Today today Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt Excitebike, which I don't excite bike hasn't really had a refresh. That's that's interesting that such a legacy game that hasn't had a remake or something, but it was introduced into homes in 1985 and then at the same time Nintendo established what is called the Nintendo seal of quality Which was intended to identify something as the licensed Nintendo product and and discourage shovelware or like these You know the clones sort of things. This is where it all started ladies and gentlemen Right, this is the foundation of every argument Josh and I have had over

the last couple of weeks. This is why your Switch 2 is bricked right now because of this. No. Well, okay, but that raises an interesting point, right? So, like, their company was very clearly founded on this protection of IP. They were. So is it that Nintendo saved gaming or they just learned how to control it better? Personally, this is me here, I think it might be a mix of the two. I think that they definitely did something that had never been seen. They revolutionized what home consoles meant to a consumer. You know, it was just such a different world back then. So from

from then to now and the transition, it's just hard to say, but man, I definitely know that what they did, we wouldn't be where we are today without, you know, Nintendo. Yeah. And I think what they did also, it kind of followed a lot of the other industries in entertainment that had also established sort of like seals of quality like the gosh somebody's gonna butcher me for not remembering this but there's like a comic books code where like in the 80s and 90s there's like the stamp

of approval from the like American comic book so I'll remember it later but like the stamp of approval from the like American comic book. So I'll remember it later But like a stamp of approval saying it had been through some approval property the MPAA the Motion Picture Association Of America did it for movies and then you know Nintendo kind of had their own their own Seal of quality too. So I agree with you. It's probably a little bit of both You know, it's that they they probably it, but also probably just kind of learned how to control the industry a little better. Yeah. And then so in the late 80s, 1989, Game Boy was launched,

which, you know, I think that arguably all of Nintendo's best-selling, I shouldn't say all of them, but some of their best-selling products were their handheld. So like, I think the DS is one of the highest selling consoles of all time. Yeah, I believe so. I think once the DS came out, like that was kind of a whole different stratosphere for them. You know, it was that portable, high-powered handheld gaming, you could do and you could play these games. It was almost like that transition from cabinet games at the arcade to now you can play it at home.

You know, you have these games that you can play at home, now you can play them on the go. You know, and it's, it's similar graphics to the games you know and love. So, um, that transition and having the ability to do that, and I'm very well versed in that knowing, as a kid in the mid to late 90s too, playing these systems, it was something different having the ability to just game out and about.

People don't think about it now, and it's back in my day, you can throw that out there all day long. But you don't understand, like being able to play a video game, like when you're at the store and your mom's shopping, you're like, I'm just gonna park it here, mom, and play this game.

You know, there's something to be said about that. What magic is this? Yeah, like, whoa, what? I can bring gaming with me anyway? Yeah, I know, it's funny, we just totally take it for granted now. It's so casual, you just pop your phone out and play Candy Crush for two seconds. Yeah, I know. It's funny. We just totally take it for granted now It's so so casually just pop your phone out and play Candy Crush for two seconds You know, I mean, I know we preach about it all the time

but just whipping out my phone with the backbone and I'm playing alters like anywhere and it's this high graphic fidelity like beautiful game and I'm just on my phone playing it and I'm anywhere, you know, So it's wild, dude. The advancements we've made because of that. Yeah, I still see people play DSs by the way. Oh yeah. That thing aged well.

So anyway, 1989 Game Boy launched with Tetris. I don't know if you know this, but Tetris is the first game to be played in space, in outer space. Yes, I think I did see that. Was it, gosh, was it a Russian dude or who took it up there? I don't remember. I know that it was created by Russia.

There's a great documentary about Tetris on Netflix, by the way, but I don't know, this is a Tetris, I mean a trivia fact, my wife and I went to Bar Trivia last night and this is the answer. So I couldn't tell you the what't this is a Tetris. I mean a trivia fact my wife and I went to bar trivia last night nice This is an answer so I couldn't tell you the what's but I do know that at least reportedly Tetris was the first game to be played in space So that brings us to the 1990s and for me this was like the golden age of gaming 1991 the Super Nintendo launches and it sparked a console wars with Sega. This is where people really started to dig in

to their brand allegiances between Sega and Nintendo. And it's weird, cause like, I think you were very clearly going to be in one camp or the other. I knew very few people who had both a Sega or a Nintendo. It was like almost you had to choose a side. And I chose side Sega because my buddy Spud had a Sega and we loved Sonic and a lot of the first party games that they were developing. But I can't tell you how many times I would open up an EGM or a Game Informer and go,

man, those Nintendo games look awesome. That looks pretty cool. Dude, I don't even, I don't honestly remember getting our Sega. I feel like it might have been a Christmas thing. I might've just been a little bit too young, like a year too young, but I remember playing it. I remember my dad playing it and I'm like, oh cool, we got a Sega I guess. I'm like, this is a really neat thing.

And then I had, you know, my friend across the street had the Nintendo. So I had like both systems, but one was just, you know, 10 seconds away, like I just walked across street to play it, so. Which one did you end up playing more? Probably, probably the Nintendo. We went over, we played, we played a lot of Donkey Kong, Oh, probably, probably the Nintendo.

We went over, we played a lot of Donkey Kong country or whatever over at his Nintendo, you know, across the street, so. Yeah, yeah. I think at the time, at that age of my youth, the co-op element, like being able to play with my buddy was like the most important thing. Yeah. And so, you know, he just happened to have a Sega but if he would have had a Nintendo

I you know, that's where my loyalty would have lied You know, it just so happened that he had a Sega and I was very impressionable I want one too. Yeah, but so in 1994 we saw something really interesting happen. And I think this is where Nintendo started to carve out a unique identity and independence over the other consoles that it was competing against. So in 1994, the ESRB rating system was born. That's this like E for everyone, T for teen, A for Adult, so on and so forth.

And it was born partially because of the Nintendo versus Sega Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat was like the first, well actually it wasn't the first arcade game to feature a lot of blood, that was Time Killers, but it was the first really popular game to feature like blood, realistic blood and violence in a game and Nintendo and Sega almost like chose sides Sega chose to include a blood mode in their Genesis

cartridges and Nintendo had this weird like gray sweat stuff yeah would like like slime though yeah it was really weird. But it seems like Nintendo kind of really drew a line in the sand at that point in time and said like, this is who we are. We're gonna be focusing on family entertainment, even though we're talking about Mortal Kombat. Could've just not had this game on their system altogether. But I think that that decision ended up

helping to inform a lot of other decisions that they made specifically with their first party IPs going forward. Yeah, definitely. No, I think that they kind of set the standard there to where we're going to be more, uh, family oriented, um, kid based, like we're not going to have crazy gore and blood and guts. Yeah.

As my mom used to always call it, uh, shoot them up, kill them ups, you know, that type of stuff. We're going to, we're going to focus on these things. We'll have the game, which I think is still weird. Like you said, like they just wouldn't just not have it. They were like, Oh no, let's just make it gray. But yeah, I think that's what kind of steered them in that direction, which they kind of held true to

and we'll probably cover shortly with an upcoming system in games. Yeah, absolutely. It just seems like such a weird, like Sub-Zero's fatality is like he pulls your head off and then they like replaced it with like an uppercut. Like they should have just called the game like combat. Yeah. Or something, you know.

It's weird. So 1996, which is interesting how soon this was. So 1991 was Super Nintendo. 1996, in my opinion, quantum leap forward for gaming with the Nintendo 64 so you went from like 16-bit graphics basically confined to 2d to Nintendo 64 where like you see this just revolution in 3d gaming and you you go from like 2d Mario to 3d Mario you go from 2D Legend of Zelda to 3D Legend of Zelda. And those games were like so well received that I think that people still to this day would consider

both of those games like to be some of the best gaming experiences ever made. And like if you think about the quantum leap between Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 in five years, I can't remember the last time we had an advancement in technology that big. Yeah, that's the hard part is as technology advances, every leap, it's so quick, there's not those big jumps anymore like we experienced back then. Even with this, with the Nintendo 64, that came out, you know, it launches in 1996. Sony PlayStation has already been out for two years, you know, a year and a half, whatever

it is. And that's, and I thought it was such an interesting choice by Nintendo to stick with cartridges when Nintendo, or I mean, when Sony comes out with the CD-ROM, you know and you can do that you could put you could pack so much more on a disc than a cartridge and Nintendo's like now this is what we're gonna go with and then you know a Lot of the games were still pretty good like that that kind of goes back to nowadays with these friend slop game You know friend slops or whatever, but like if it's a good game It's a good game regardless it's a good game. Regardless of the graphics, regardless of what you, um, you know, are

able to do, it's like if it's fun and you're, it's enjoyable, you're going to love it and people are going to buy it. So, uh, yeah, that was, I mean, it was, it was weird to see those two systems battle though. Like that was, that was in my opinion the last true like Nintendo System console battle between like performance and in quality games You know, that's a really good point I actually had totally forgotten that PlayStation had already been out for two years by the time Nintendo 64 came out So like through the through the Nintendo lens the five years represents a big giant leap in technology, but like overall holistically in the gaming sphere like dude I mean like Resident Evil had already been out for a while and like

they were already doing like 3d polygon based games and you're right I mean you can fit a lot more data on a CD-ROM than you can on a cartridge and it's interesting that Nintendo very clearly was trying to, you know, plow their own path and create their own. Which they've always done, you know? Yeah, yeah, and sometimes better than others. It's funny, Nintendo 64, when I think about it, I think about it as this system

that everyone coveted and loved, but it was actually, I think, considered to be a commercial failure. I think so too, and that's the wild part is that, I have nothing but fond memories of the N64. Playing 007, Perfect Dark, Podracers, all of these legendary games, and for it to be considered a flop just seems wild to me,

but it was one of those systems that it hit the right spot at the right time for the people who needed it and wanted it. And it did well. Yeah, it did do well, but you mentioned this was the last era of the real Nintendo console wars against people. Who would you consider won that 90s console war? Oh, Sony. Yeah, I would say so Sony won it. Yeah, and I think and I think that's and obviously we're gonna get into this a little bit further when we talk about the more recent consoles that Nintendo's produced, but like I think that shaped their trajectory and where they decided to take Nintendo and their consoles and what they decided to do

with it they're like you know 64 really wasn't a powerhouse it has some amazing games some awesome stuff that that we all hold near and dear to our hearts but it was nowhere near PlayStation that came out two years prior. And then, you know, where did they follow up? So yeah, Sony won that one. 90s was the Sony PlayStation for sure. Yeah. And at the same time, they were also competing against other,

they were competing against the Sega Saturn, which was similar in graphical capabilities as the PlayStation. And then also, Sega was competing against itself because they were trying to do the Sega 32, what was it, 32X and the Sega CD sort of like multi-packaged thing at the same time. Sega made a series of really bad choices.

But you're right, Nintendo I think survived that console war, even though they lost the war. They survived the console war by producing a few really good quality titles, GoldenEye of course being another one of those. They produced a few really good quality titles that succeeded despite the fact that their technology was kind of behind the curve. Yeah.

Yeah, so interesting narrative. And we are going to be jumping into the 2000s with some risk reinvention and relevance right after this. All right, so now we're getting into the 2000s. In 2001, a really interesting little console was released called the GameCube. I never really understood what it was the GameCube was trying to do. With the Ninsendo 64, even though, you know, now that we're talking about this with kind of like our,

in the rear view mirror, I could see that their unique selling proposition was like, Hey, this is still a cartridge. So everything's going to load instantly. You don't have to worry about load times. We've got this unique controller that's going to provide both a digital up, down, left, right control, a D-pad, and also an analog control.

There's unique things about it. The GameCube, I don't really know what it was they were trying to achieve in the market. Do you know what? They were competing basically against the PS2 and the xbox at that point in time What what do you think the gamecube was like trying to go for? I think this was honestly their last hurrah at Hey, we can have performance too. We can keep up with the big guys. We're gonna go To cd, but of course in nintendo's fashion. They got to do it different so they go to the mini discs

Um, I know that I I believe in doing some, the mini discs only hold like 1.8 gigs and the other ones were like eight or nine gigs. So you could hold substantially more on a standard disc on these other systems. So a lot of times too, like you'd remove some features or have to compress these characters in these games but I think this was their take at like hey we could we can make a system we're gonna use CDs we're gonna make it you know you know perform almost on par with these other ones and I had fun with Gamecube dude like time splitters too dude I played that with Paul former host of the show I played so much time splitters on

on that Resident Evil 4 I played on Gamec, former host of the show. I played so much TimeSplitters on that Resident Evil 4, I played on GameCube. It was an awesome system back in the day, but I'm not really sure what they were doing with it. Yeah, see, I remember reading articles in Game Informer and EGM where they were releasing the console saying, hey, this clearly isn't going to keep up with a PS2 or an EGM where they were releasing the console saying like, hey, this clearly isn't going to keep up with a PS2 or an Xbox. I remember that. I don't know.

It was small and it was a bit cheaper. Those are kind of the only things I remember about it. Out of all the Nintendo properties, Nintendo consoles, the GameCube is the only one that I don't have really any like nostalgia for whatsoever At that point in time. I was very firmly an Xbox player Because the Dreamcast was like my Dreamcast was my system of choice, but it failed. Yeah And then I chose a side and it shows Xbox. But yeah the GameCube

That was interesting You want to know you want to know how I became an Xbox guy? How? So my little sister, Selena, I love you, kiddo, she needed braces. She went to the orthodontist and they put everybody into a raffle. She won the raffle and the prize was an Xbox system. And that's how we got an Xbox.

And that bad boy was in my room so fast Like you couldn't even imagine like I snatched. I think she's like that's mine. I'm like you can come in and play it Let's go come on That's awesome. Do you know how the Xbox became my system of choice too late on me a Game called dead or alive to was really on it and and there were very John was playing it. Yeah, well, no, I'm 20... I don't know, late teens, early 20s John, but very hormonal John. And then, yeah, and then Halo and some other games came out.

All those other ones. Yeah, exactly. For sure. So, 2004, we already touched on this, but the Nintendo DS launched with dual screens and a stylus. Huge success. Yeah. Nintendo basically ruling the handheld market at this time. There were a couple of like brief like footnotes in the handheld market at that time there was the Sega Game Gear, which was actually a cool little system. It was the first full color handheld, but it ate batteries like nobody's business

and ultimately failed. And then also the Atari Lynx, I think, was out at the same time and Atari just was collapsing. Dude, I wanted a Game Gear so bad as a kid. When I was a kid, dude, I was like, I want this, I want this. My friend Jeremy had one and it was like mind blowing, man. But like you could, you would get like an hour out of it,

bro. It would gobble up batteries. And it took like big batteries too, man. It was a brick. It was awesome having that cool little color screen, but it gobbled up batteries. So DS launches, huge success. The stylus, you know, an odd,

the stylus I think was their first foray into like introducing like non-controller peripherals into their gaming experience. And I think the success of the DS ended up informing a lot of their future decisions as far as how people actually interacted with the games. Because their next console was the Wii. Yes. Which was very much a big step away from them competing in a traditional way against the consoles at the time.

It is the first console, I think, that became sort of a generation smasher where it was like It doesn't matter who you are We're we are expecting that you're gonna be able to pick up one of these controllers and you know how to play already They did made this wonderful business decision to include Wii Sports in with it And if I had to guess, Wii Sports was like, for a lot of people who owned a Wii, may have been their only game. I think people juiced that game for tons.

And you had like four generations playing it. You had the babies and the kids and the parents and the grandparents all playing Wii's because everybody knows how to swing a bat. Everyone knows how to swing a golf club. Everyone knows how to swing a bat, everyone knows how to swing a golf club, everyone knows how to bowl. And it became a really, you know, really popular console because one of the top selling consoles of all time. Oh for sure and I think this is this is where

Nintendo really kind of held their anchors and set their direction on what they're gonna be like like for the future they're like we're not gonna compete with these high performance systems we're gonna create an experience and something to entertain the masses whatever that may be whatever we design but that's our goal we're gonna make something that people will be able to do as a group as a party and just have fun. And so that's what I remember with the Wii. Like, who didn't go and do Wii bowling with somebody?

Like, if you can go like this, you can Wii Bowl. Like, that's all you need to do. And it was just, I mean, you get, I don't know, I don't even have a remote around here, but like, it's just a rectangle. Like, you just pick it up, it looks like a remote control for a TV and you can get people been using remote for decades He's done it like you hold the a button and you can bowl like you can do all these things

And so it's not meant to compete with those. It was almost its own entity its own Subcategory of gaming but it was still it was still a blast, man. It was still so much fun, and it changed what gaming meant coming from Nintendo. Absolutely, and they did a really good job of advertising what it was, too. When people bought Wii, specifically with Wii Sports, people knew exactly what it was.

It was like this next generational sort of like entertainment device, not even necessarily a gaming device, but like an entertainment device that is intuitive and everybody knows how to play. To this day, my wife and I, primarily when we game together, which is not as often as I'd like,

but when we do get game together, it's on the Switch because she can pick it up and she knows exactly how to play.'s something this Nintendo's historically done really well so that was in 2006 that the Wii was released and Now cut to six years later, which tends to be about the usual life cycle for Nintendo's five six years They released the Wii U which was a complete flop years, they released the Wii U, which was a complete flop, absolute flop. To this day, they're worth selling home console. It introduced concepts like off-screen play and the Mi, like the amiibos and the Miiverse and stuff like that. Some really novel concepts that ended up

and stuff like that. Some really novel concepts that ended up serving them well in the future. But the Wii U was a smashing flop, man. This is, actually I said that GameCube was the one that I didn't have any nostalgia for. I basically had like no experience with the Wii U. Dude, that's where I'm at. And I honestly, I don't personally know anyone

that I'm at least close enough to know of this who has really good experience with the Wii U, like that has played it or remembers games fondly like I don't remember anything from the Wii U era. Like that was 2006. I was 18 years old. I was playing, you know, all kinds of games on Xbox and PlayStation and what have you. I have no knowledge of ever even touching the Wii U. And that shows how, I mean, I don't even know. I'm going to look it up here, but how many units were even sold? Like, come on.

Soterios Johnson Yeah, I don't have that figure in front of me. I'd love to have that. But it is low. I think it's one of the lowest. Maybe maybe the Jaguar is a lower selling the Atari Jaguar 13 million units sold worldwide Yeah, okay. So 13 million and you compare that to the switch which I think is like 140 million. Yeah, I mean Yeah, it's crazy That that is crazy. 152 million switches sold. Woo, baby!

Yeah, woo! It's a little bit of a difference. It is a little bit of a difference, and it's, I wonder what their profit and loss statement looked like at that point in time. You know, like, I don't wanna bury, I don't wanna, you know, kick the to kick a dead horse or whatever, however the expression goes.

We've talked about Nintendo very emotionally quite a bit here. But coming from the point of a company that has experienced really low lows like the Wii U, it at least doesn't surprise me that they're so protective of their IP and of their profit and loss statement. I think that they know that if they, it only takes a couple of bad decisions to create spectacular loss in a very competitive field and they learned it.

Luckily for them, they learned their lesson. So 2012 was the Wii U, spectacular failure, although they did introduce some good, novel, sustainable concepts. And in 2017, they took what they learned and they created the Switch, which was a huge success blending the handheld experience with the home console experience.

And to this day, like we said, 150 something million units sold which rivals the two other bestselling consoles of all time, which are the PS2 and the DS. And I wonder, would the Switch exist if without the Wii U? Like have they not failed without the, the Wii U like, have they not failed so hard with the weight Wii U what they have succeeded with the switch? That's, that's such a good point too. Cause like, um, I mean, you don't, you don't learn from success.

You learn from failure. So, you know, it's, it's, that's where you innovate. That's where you expand. That's where you develop new things, new features, new directions. So having that substantial failure, you know, and having the ability within your company, you know, the solvent nature to where they can say, hey, we got to do something good this time around, you know, we can't mess up again. And they just buckle down and they created an awesome system, man.

The switch is great. I do come COVID time. I didn't have a switch and I was looking at every store every couple of days to try to find a switch. I'm like, I need something to do and something to do with the family. And so that's what I looked for. You know, and, you know, I think a lot of people did the same. Oh, yeah. Like you touched on COVID.

My wife and I work for the same company and we went through a furlough period for the first like month when we were like locked down because all of our work just shut off like a process. Oh, for sure. And we had just hired my wife at that point in time. Sorry, honey. Well, yeah, exactly.

It was like, well, we can't have the boss's wife working here when we've just furloughed all these people. So she was one of these people that was temporarily furloughed also. And Animal Crossing basically became her job. She is somebody who needs to be productive. And I would leave with her playing Animal Crossing on the couch and then come home 10 to 12 hours later and she'd be in the same exact spot on the couch. Still like fishing and picking clams out of the sand and cutting trees in Animal Crossing. Which is again, that's an interesting side narrative there.

The Switch was successful on launch, but like how much more successful did they become because of the timing of these titles with this global shutdown, you know? I think it was, I honestly, I think it was a huge factor. Cause I mean, it personally got me someone who probably would not have purchased a Switch. Maybe I would have got one down the road or something if some certain game, but I've never been a huge Nintendo guy like in the last 10-15 years. Like the old school days of course, because that was what was big. But I mean, I've played all the Marios, the new Marios are the same as the old Marios. Like, you know, all the games were kind of similar.

It's all the same IP. You love it. You know it, but like, is that going to make me buy a system? But COVID happened. I'm like, Oh, I can't do anything. And I'm like, I haven't played the Animal Crossing since I was a little kid. I'm like, let's go buy it. You know?

And so I finally got a system and I played it. And so I wonder how many other people did the same thing and purchase these system, purchase these games purchased these games because of that. So it's, dude, timing is so big. Well, right. And this was just like the right little dose of positivity. That's the thing too. Nintendo's happy and fun and you're with your friends or with your family and they've built

that over years. I give them credit they've built that over over decades of This is what this is just enjoyable. This is fun. There's not you don't get those greasy sweats You know in Nintendo most of the time so like that's what people tend to go to you know unless you're playing Smash yeah, I was gonna say Smash Brothers We're gonna get to some of this in just a second here, but yeah, like when you get into Nintendo's controversial period, like Smash Brothers, like the aggressive takedown of mods and fan games and stuff is a big part of that.

But yeah, Animal Crossing, you know, luck is categorically, not categorically, luck is said to be the intersection of opportunity and preparedness. And it just so happens that while COVID was very bad luck for lots of businesses, it happened to be exceptionally good luck for the Switch and for Nintendo in that they had this like just cozy comforting social experience that happened to be timed

towards one of the most awkward periods of human social evolution in recent memory. But, you know, so I think at that point in time, most people, if they had any complaint about Nintendo, it was that they weren't available enough. Switches were hard to come by. They were. Trust me. But coming out of COVID, now we enter their controversy period. So we already touched on the, you know, the mods of smash and stuff like that. People, the, the really greasy sweat sort of like culture that

developed around smash brothers. But you also get into joy con drift lawsuits. You get into, um, backlash over, you know, the switch two was just released and we've covered that sort of ad nauseam. So I don't want to like cover it too much, but you get, you talk about the switch twos, uh, first party IP pricing where they're jumping the prices from 60 bucks to 70 or 80 bucks. And now the whole industry is following suit.

And of course this, you know, but aggressive policy where rather than just denying you access to a game or to a carved out experience, if they detect that you're misusing or suspect that you're misusing your system in any way, they're like completely shutting it down. And you know, that's an interesting part of the, uh, of the overall dialogue here. We have a, we have a company that's 140 years old that has survived some really notable failures through protection of their IP and, and through learning some very valuable lessons, you know,

focusing on the gaming experience and learning from their losses, but then developing a really interesting relationship with their with their fans their customers that Seems pretty strict, you know, I I don't want to we just did a whole game court episode on this Not that we're not getting into that again. That's for sure But but I have to acknowledge it's an interesting part of their most recent legacy Do you think that? Nintendo is overall held in positive or negative

Emotion with with like gamers in general right now. Oh man, um, I think that It's it's Nintendo is is very unique as to where I believe that They have their people who love Nintendo They love Nintendo. They are gonna be no tendo fans for no matter what Nintendo can do no wrong and they were gonna

hold true to that and then a lot of the other people are kind of swayed back and forth, like to where, you know, if you're a PlayStation fan or an Xbox fan or whatever, you know, if one of the other comes with a cool feature or a cool game or something, you may switch and it's not that big of a change to you. I think Nintendo did such a good job at creating a core base of solid, such a good job at creating a core base of solid, devoted, like customers and fans of their system and their IP and what they are and who they are that, man, I honestly don't remember the question, but like I'm telling you that.

No, it's like the cult of Nintendo basically. Yeah, it's just what it is. Like Nintendo is, it's, Nintendo people are Nintendo people and that's the bottom line and I think that, that Nintendo would have to do a lot wrong to lose those. They are toeing the line here and there, but they're also, I think staying true to what they are. They're not like Sony or Microsoft with Xbox.

Like they are different. They're going to do things different. If you don't like it tough, that's Nintendo. And that's just who they are. And it may work, it may not. Look at the Wii U, but then look at the Switch. Yep, and Switch 2 is doing well too. Yeah, I think like them or hate them,

which I definitely think there's a line there for most people. I think you're either on the Nintendo bus or not. But whether you like them or hate them, you have to agree that it is a divisive topic. For sure. It's one of the most divisive topics in Nintendo. We're running a bit long here, Ryan, but I wanted to ask you, what is your favorite Nintendo memory? Oh man, that's a good one. Gosh, gosh, I have 4 million Nintendo memories on the 64, but probably back to,

uh, playing, uh, pod racer on N64 with, uh, uh, back at, I, I would go to my Aunt Mary's house, uh, every weekend and then like all summer, um, Paul's wife, which is my cousin I basically live there on the weekends and over summer like and we just we were all around the same age we'd all play video games and I played so much pod racer there and that was just like the game that we would just play non-stop and that was right in the prequels right after it came out you know and so that's that's probably one of my favorite Nintendo memories that's a that's a really good one mine

It's interesting because mine mine come came at a time when I was like actually having a really bad time was having like really bad like anxious depressed stuff going on uh-huh and Like if it weren't for the Nintendo Wii and Super Mario Brothers Wii and my buddy Josh, like, you know, who knows what John's life would be like or not be like without that experience. But in the rear view mirror, I'm like, hold it with just such fondness, you know, like I could, it's one of those memories where I can like see it crystal clear even though it's been like a good 15 years or so since that happened But I man I have a I probably have more nostalgic now. I shouldn't say that

I have more nostalgia memories tied up in PlayStation 2 probably but yeah lots of Nintendo memories out there and then plus dude I used to do a lot of traveling and like that of the handhelds the Nintendo handhelds for for travel Oh, uh, bro It's such a such a great relief such a great way to enjoy gaming on the go. Yep. Absolutely Well Everybody listening. I want to take the opportunity to thank you for your time We know you've got a lot of choices here and it is just so rad that you took the time to tune into video gamers podcast Here if you like what you've heard And it is just so rad that you took the time to tune into video gamers podcast here

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