Ranking EVERY Nintendo Console From Worst To Best
The House of Mario’s hardware legacy.
Nintendo have had a long history in the console market. Starting off as a card games manufacturer in 1889, the Kyoto-based company moved towards video games in the 1970s with their Color-TV Game console, containing a single game between its four versions. They later moved to the wildly successful Game & Watch console, and arcade releases such as Donkey Kong.
But it wasn’t until the Nintendo Entertainment System that Nintendo established themselves as one of the big companies within the home hardware industry. The system is widely credited with moving the industry away from the crash which had threatened to kill the business in 1983.
Since then, hardware has remained a high priority for Nintendo, boosted by a strong first party games library that captured home and handheld console markets alike, with the recent Nintendo Switch looking to cover both. It’s not always been smooth sailing however, with a variety of challengers competing over the decades for the top position and an experimental history that’s ranged from innovative to critical failures.
It was a key philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi, the game designer that helped bring Nintendo into games development, that production should focus on “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology”. This involved prioritising use of existing technologies in new ways as opposed to chasing expensive cutting edge technology trends. It’s an approach evident with the majority of Nintendo hardware. But which did it best?
14. Virtual Boy
Chances are that if you’ve heard about the Virtual Boy before, you’re aware why this ranks as the worst Nintendo console of all-time. Marketed as the first 3D console, it released back in 1995 across Japan and North America, working as a table-top portable system. Making use of stereoscopic 3D graphics through a head-mounted display and a parallax effect to create depth illusion, it was the first “virtual reality” experience on consoles.
Commercially and critically, the Virtual Boy was a complete failure and only saw 22 games released in its lifetime. Even after cost-cutting measures by Nintendo, such as utilising a red monochrome display as opposed to full colour, retail cost was a significant factor (Especially when compared to the Game Boy), being seen as too high for a system that critics viewed as a stop-gap between the SNES and N64.
It was also rushed to market, with internal resources being increasingly favoured to the N64 at this time. It became widely criticised for lack of portability, the monochrome display, minimal immersion and for health concerns, with a lot of players reporting headaches and nausea after use. Nintendo laid blame on Gunpei Yokoi for the Virtual Boy’s failure, who resigned shortly after, and the console was quickly discontinued less than a year later.