[segasaturn]

Actually Nintendo consoles used to be powerhouses until recently. The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were all considered state-of-the-art in terms of performance. It wasn't until the Wii when they began cutting down on performance in favor of fun features like they had been doing in the handheld space.

[Laremere]

That doesn't match my recollection. The Gameboy is a early counter example: it was black and white during a time where the game gear had color, yet the Gameboy was far more popular. Also I believe the Xbox was more powerful than the GameCube.

[einr]

The Game Gear didn't come out until one and a half year later. It's easy to see how it wasn't even remotely practical to release a color handheld system in 1989, and it's easy to argue that it wasn't practical in 1990 either, but Sega did it anyway.

So when the Game Boy came out it was easily the most powerful handheld system on the market (admittedly by virtue of being essentially the only one worth mentioning)

[imp0cat]

Also, the color screen on the Game Gear wasn't that great and the battery life was terrible. I think Sega had realized this, because later on they were selling an external battery pack as an official accessory.

[lapetitejort]

The Atari Lynx came out a few months after the Game Boy with a backlit color screen

[nilamo]

And we're all still talking about that one regularly...

[barbecue_sauce]

I remember thinking the commercials made it look cool when I was 4 or 5 (I vividly remember some sort of surfing game), but then I never encountered a single person who owned one. Same with the TurboGrafx-16.

[JNRowe]

"Some sort of surfing game" immediately screams California Games¹ to me. There was surfing² plus a few other sports, and it is still good fun if you find yourself at a museum/nerd house that has one.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Games

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql2S-wXa-H8

[mejutoco]

I remember kids with the game gear. Hardly ever saw them playing because of the batteries. For a portable console I think it was a choice on battery life.

[tadbit]

The game gear was extremely lousy to use. Too small of a screen, ate through batteries incredibly quickly, the original, external battery pack (not included) was poorly made and didn't help that much either.

And the game selection early on was pretty lousy too. Sonic was only fun for a while.

People are doing amazing things with game gear hardware as of late, though. All of that addressed spectacularly.

[barbecue_sauce]

Also huge in size compared to the screen dimensions. Could barely get my hands around it as a little kid.

Then the Nomad was even bigger!

[stavros]

And it only took thirty-five years!

[imp0cat]

A "wall wart" power source was a necessity.

[callalex]

The game boy got almost 30hours out of 4xAA whereas the game gear got about an hour or two of life out of 6xAA. I hated that about the game gear and it meant I hardly ever got to play it.

[hansoolo]

I found my Gameboy recently, but I did not find my games... Sad times...

[Keyframe]

Especially N64 - SGI indy in a small box. They did change the narrative after they couldn't or wouldn't compete on those numbers (rightfully so it turned out), however, they were always experimenting with controls and were highly influential in doing so.

appropriate username, btw, but that console is for another topic!

[to11mtm]

NES? Yes.

SNES... Somewhat? I think there were tradeoffs here between that and the genesis; You got more colors and could get better sound out of the SNES... On the flip side people did -amazing- things with the YM2612 and for all the SNES RPG Soundtracks I love, they don't slap like the Streets of Rage series or Sanic.

N64 had pretty good perf but the Cartridge format made it -very- expensive to do anything very fancy; this is one of the reasons that lots of folks feel PS1 had better looking games despite N64's superior specs.

GameCube... Sits in a very weird spot IMO, but that whole generation was a bit Zany due to how everyone was experimenting with different 'paths to faster/better 3d'. Dreamcast had lots of 'special' stuff, GC was unique in it's own right, PS2's biggest stumble IIRC was too little ram for the GS...

To me, the bigger 'paradigm shift' that Nintendo made with the Wii was preferring more COTS-y stuff versus more special custom things...

NES had the Special Ricoh 6502 variant. SNES had the SPC. N64... TBH was mostly SGI based so possibly the exception. Gamecube had a custom GPU (Flipper)...

Wii is for the most part an 'incremental' upgrade from GC Hardware, and the Switch uses a not-that-special Tegra AFAIK.

[andrepd]

Nintendo's first example of this is probably the most famous: the Gameboy was very underpowered compared to its competitor and absolutely trounced them on its way to become a household name and one of the most popular consoles of all time.

[blkhp19]

"recently" as in nearly 25 years ago

[Andrex]

Yes, in terms of their video game history, Nintendo has been blue ocean (2004-2024+) longer than they were red (1983-2003).

[ekianjo]

the Gamecube certainly not. it was on par with other consoles of the time but released later so nothing that you could call SOTA

[ssl-3]

Recently?

My dude, the GameCube was released nearly 23 years ago.

There is a wider time delta betwixt the GameCube's release and today than there is between the NES and the GameCube.

[Frenchgeek]

Pretty sure the NES was designed to a price point first and foremost. Especially after the video game crash. Hence the dirt-cheap 6502 derivative in it.

[einr]

The NES -- as far as its basic hardware architecture -- was not designed for a market where the video game crash had even occurred. It was designed for release in Japan in 1983 as the Famicom, undoubtedly the most powerful console in the market at the time -- a time where by the way I'm not sure what else you would even put in a console other than a 6502 or Z80.

If you wanted cheap above all, you could have gone for a plain 6502 or a cut-down variant (like the 6507 in the Atari VCS), but they also didn't do that -- the Ricoh 2A03 is a custom part that includes custom sound hardware.

[monocasa]

> If you wanted cheap above all, you could have gone for a plain 6502 or a cut-down variant (like the 6507 in the Atari VCS), but they also didn't do that -- the Ricoh 2A03 is a custom part that includes custom sound hardware.

The higher integration on a single chip for the 2A03 was absolutely a cost saving move.