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Journalism of Courage
For over 40 years, Nintendo has been the king of the gaming world. The Japanese company has given many hits, from Game Boy, Wii, Switch to the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. Its games are playful, cute, and memorable. Its characters developed in the 1980s are still relevant and have a cult-like following. But once in a while, the “Apple of Asia” has given a few duds as well that failed miserably. Here are five of Nintendo’s most embarrassing failures.
Once upon a time, Nintendo had a big idea: how to bring virtual reality (VR) to the masses. It came with the Virtual Boy which turned out to be its biggest failure of all time. Back in 1995, Nintendo released its ill-fated Virtual Boy, a stilt-legged tabletop gaming machine, which offered stereoscopic 3D graphics. Unfortunately, the device was not a commercial success and was discontinued just a year later. Nintendo’s VR failure was mostly attributed to the game console’s high price, limited games, and monochrome display. However, the basic issue with Virtual Boy was that the 3D aspect didn’t add much to the gaming experience. Years later, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy is now a collector’s heaven. Despite being a commercial failure, Virtual Boy showed Nintendo’s ability to think out of the box and take risks to create something original.
Pitched as a successor to the mega-hit Wii, the Wii U was a colossal flop. Launched in 2012, the Wii U was a weird game console with a tablet-like controller aimed at casual gamers. True to Nintendo style, the Wii U was designed as a home console that works with a main controller. However, the controller looked like a smaller, thicker, lower-resolution iPad. It’s essentially like a tablet, but users still need a base console. The concept was novel, as it brought new ways to play games but it never hit with the masses. The Wii U wasn’t a bad console, but what worked against Wii U’s failure was the marketing. Many thought the Wii U’s controller was a new accessory for the Wii, creating confusion in the minds of casual gamers. The Wii U sold fewer than 15 million units over the course of five years and was declared a commercial flop. Nintendo certainly understood why the Wii U failed to catch on. Years later, when the Switch hit the market, Nintendo acknowledged that the Wii U was a “failure forward” to its hit hybrid console.
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The Nintendo 64 or N64 as it’s commonly known, was a technical marvel. It was a successful console, but an add-on for the N64 didn’t go as planned for Nintendo. At the time, Nintendo was in a furious battle with Sony and wanted to compete with PlayStation which came with a disk drive. Nintendo’s answer to the PlayStation dominance was the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, or the 64DD for short, which offered an expansion for the N64 that could connect online and more data storage. The add-on not only looked weird design-wise but Nintendo clearly failed to communicate the purpose of the expansion slot. Just 10 games were released on the N64DD, partly because the peripheral took a long time to develop. When it did finally hit retail shelves in 1999, it was limited to Japan — and it sold just 15,000 units before Nintendo discontinued it in 2000.
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No, Nintendo never tried to make a Kindle competitor but did end up developing the e-Reader accessory for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. It was essentially a peripheral for the Game Boy Advance that allowed users to scan specially encoded cards in order to play games and unlock bonus content in certain GameCube and Game Boy Advance titles. The e-Reader was pretty unique, letting gamers simply slide the cards through the add-on accessory that would automatically upload the game or bonus content to the system. However, due to high price and poor durability of cards led to low sales of the e-Reader in the US. In fact, its European launch was cancelled by Nintendo after the lukewarm response received globally.
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When first teased at E3 2009, Nintendo made a big deal about the Vitality Sensor for its Wii console and its commitment towards health tech. The device was a fingertip pulse oximeter sensor for measuring the levels of oxygen in the blood and pulse rate. Nintendo has a history of pioneering fitness and health with its consoles and games. But four years after the announcement, Nintendo announced that its pulse-sensing Wii Vitality Sensor would never see the day of light. “After a large-scale test of a prototype inside the company, we found out that for some people the sensor did not work as expected,” Nintendo then-president Satoru Iwata explained in a recent investor Q&A. The product never shipped, and Nintendo too had moved on. Had the Wii Vitality Sensor been shipped, it could have been used within horror games to measure how scared you were.
