To slightly alter a quote from the recently released Breath of the Wild, the history of Nintendo is also the history of the video game industry. They were here in the dark days, they were here when the console market boomed, they were here when the handheld market was pioneered, they were here for the HD era, and they are here even now. And for that to have happened, for Nintendo to have been a constant, significant fixture in the market for so long, they’d have to have done something right. A lot, actually, and there’s no denying that that is exactly what they have done.
But they’ve also made mistakes- a whole shitload of them, if we’re being honest. There’s two sides to every coin, and while Nintendo have been at the forefront of countless revolutions and changes in the industry, they’ve also royally messed up on a number of occasions. Here, in this feature, we’re going to take a look at the fifteen biggest fails in Nintendo’s long and storied history.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
VIRTUAL BOY
The 3DS was not the first time that Nintendo tried to play the stereoscopic 3D card. We’re speaking, of course, of the Virtual Boy, which remains probably Nintendo’s biggest failure in the hardware market to date. The Virtual Boy wanted to implement ideas that simply were not possible with the technology it had access to. People had to bend over and peer into the bulky goggles to look at the images, and the images themselves could only be produced in limited colours. The results, as you can imagine, weren’t pretty, and the Virtual Boy is considered to this day an absolute failure.
