[larodi]

Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.

[Leynos]

Sadly, like everything, the arcades are now commodity hardware. Everyone just started putting out industrial PC based systems and shipping the games on hard drives

[jjice]

I think it's also a benefit in someways though. Preservation should be much easier and more accessible this way. Also maintainability.

[larodi]

Well what I mean is how they been printing PCBs and experimenting. Perhaps has lot to do with the then-very vivid generation. Sadly Japan is aging and very closed to outer influx, so this culture may as easily die at all.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Wild to see how far they've fallen. Although I think this was basically the turning point for Nintendo. The GC intentionally avoided competing(at least on graphics) and was still a financial success.

From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.

I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.

[fredoralive]

The Gamecube was competitive on graphics with PS2 and Xbox. It was the Wii where there console side moved away from keeping up in the cutting edge graphics race.

I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…

[mikkupikku]

> From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.

I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.