We stand on a new frontier, of sorts. Gamenikki, of course, has undergone a facelift. The pink is back, but more importantly, we have a new foundation from which we can more efficiently and effectively deliver compelling gaming news and content to you, Constant Reader. But in a larger sense, we stand collectively, as a community of gaming enthusiasts, on a larger, and greater, frontier.

The Industry has gone through several cycles, innumerable changes, euphoric highs, and disastrous lows, in the roughly three decades since its conception, and first true foray into the mass market. While Nolan Bushnell’s Pong put Atari on the map, it wasn’t until Time Warner bought the company from the entrepreneur, and invested $100 million into development, that the Atari 2600 found its way into retail outlets (it’s true that the Colecovision and Intellivision predated the Atari 2600, but it was the overwhelming later successes of games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man that turned home console gaming into a true market phenomenon).

Talk to ten different people involved, and you’ll likely get ten different answers as to what really happened, but the general consensus seems to be that Time Warner, after running Bushnell off (and forcing him to sign a non-compete agreement, no less), quickly found that they didn’t have the experience necessary to guide Atari in such a fledgling environment. In layman’s terms, they ran Atari into the ground. The coup de grâce was, in many people’s eyes, the release of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in late 1982. As the story goes, TWI spent a relative fortune – tens of millions of dollars – on the game license for the smash hit movie. The game, unfortunately, was pure and utter crap. No matter; TWI felt sure they could sell millions. So sure, in fact, that more copies of the E.T. cartridge were produced than there were installed units on which to play them! The unsold copies were later bulldozed into a New Mexico landfill (and later, evidently, destroyed), but the damage had been done. A flood of crappy ‘cash-in’ games hit the market in the next year and a half, and effectively put it on life-support. Time Warner recognized their mistake and sold Atari to Jack Tramiel, but the company was effectively finished as a relevant competitor in the games market for nearly a decade.

There’s a proverb about a pessimist and an optimist; the pessimist sees the glass as half empty, while the optimist…well, I’m sure you can guess what his take on the matter might be. At any rate, pessimistic observers might have declared the gaming industry dead on the scene after the crash of ’84.

Hiroshi Yamauchi has been called many things, but seldom a pessimist (as an aside, the early history of Nintendo has been dealt with in depth many other places, and much better than I could do here; instead, I’ll focus merely on Nintendo from 1980 to present day). He persuaded his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to start a North American subsidiary of Nintendo, known as Nintendo of America, in the early 1980s. The early going for NOA was rocky – and again, these misadventures are better documented elsewhere – but they finally found success after some persistence with the original Nintendo Entertainment System (known as the Famicom in Japan).

It was a renaissance of sorts for the gaming world. Parents who had thought the world of gaming more or less dead and buried suddenly found their children enthusing over a brand new game console, from a Japanese company nobody had ever heard of. It was, perhaps, one of the most ingenious pieces of marketing ever seen. Older, more ‘savvy’ consumers are more likely to ascribe to the philosophy of ‘once bitten, twice shy.’ Young children “don’t know any better,” as the adults like to say. Target the children, and you capture a new generation of hearts and minds, untainted by the failures of those who came before.

Again, a new frontier arose. It would be slightly foolish to say that the new genres that arose, and the changes that the gaming culture underwent were completely the result of Nintendo’s management, but their influence can’t be denied. A new world of games saw the light - particularly new genres. Console role-playing games such as Enix’s Dragon Warrior, Square’s Final Fantasy and Nintendo’s own Legend of Zelda were among the first of their kind, and the precedents they set, the groundwork they laid, can be seen today in the massive sales success of practically anything Square touches today. Children pestered, parents caved, and millions of dollars’ worth of games and hardware were sold over the course of the next seven years.

Time passed, and a new era dawned with the launch of Sega’s Genesis, the first true 16-bit machine, and the fist true threat to Nintendo’s newfound dominance. This was a new frontier of an altogether different sort. Rather than pushing the boundaries of what games could say or be, the competition between Nintendo and Sega from 1989 onward began to push the boundaries of what these machines could do. You have to understand that Nintendo’s corporate philosophy under Yamauchi began and ended with profit. As long as a machine was profitable – and indeed, the NES remained profitable well into the 1990s – Yamauchi was reluctant to relegate it to the scrap heap. At the same time, he risked Nintendo passing into irrelevance if he allowed a newcomer – ANY newcomer – to completely steal Nintendo’s thunder. The Super Nintendo was released, and despite the Genesis’ image as the machine of choice for the ‘cooler’ kids, managed to ultimately hang onto the dominant market share after a gutter fight with Sega, largely on the backs of the audience they cultivated, and grew to know so well – small children.

Now, up to this point, nobody can deny what an astounding success the Nintendo brand name had been, especially rising as it did from the ashes of a moribund industry. Nearly on the strength of his own will, as well as his uncanny sense for what would constitute a winning product, Yamauchi – and his counterpart at NoA, Arakawa – nearly single-handedly revived an industry many had left for dead, and in so doing, attracted the attention of some very large companies. Panasonic, Sony, Microsoft, as well as some of the largest entertainment companies…all of these began to once again pay interest to the video game industry. It’s hard, after all, to ignore a market whose total gross matches or exceeds the American box office in any given year.

Some of these companies found that it’s easier to say than to do, and eventually passed out of the market in any significant way. Others, such as Sony, became the focal point of the next revolution in gaming: from cartridge-based media to that magical word: multimedia. CD-based gaming. Larger, more expansive game worlds became possible as a result of the increased storage. Games were cheaper to produce, and could be produced without the restrictive controls enforced by Nintendo. Prices dropped, margins rose, and sales increased dramatically. Suddenly, the threat of forced irrelevance originally posed by Sega became a very real threat in the form of Sony’s PlayStation. The PlayStation, ironically, was originally intended to have been an add-on device for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; again, a story for another time and place, but certainly relevant in this context. By sticking with an outmoded form of technology, Nintendo handed control, and the dominant market share, to Sony. Perhaps they weren’t quite rendered irrelevant, but a paradigm shift had occurred, and was easily witnessed – parents who once sought ‘Nintendo’ for little Johnny swarmed retail locations begging for ‘PlayStation.’

Not so neatly, this brings us back more or less to the present day. We stand, as I said, on a new frontier. This is true, however, not just for ourselves as a media outlet, nor for you as gamers and readers, but for the industry as a whole, and perhaps most poignantly, for Nintendo. By now, most of you are well aware that the Nintendo GameCube, the console which was to have been Nintendo’s flagship product, and triumphant re-emergence into the console gaming world, has received a price cut down to $99. Whether or not such a move will revive Nintendo’s flagging prospects in the home console market remains to be seen. First and foremost, the mistakes of the past need to be rectified. The recent (relative) flood of AAA titles for the GameCube - F-Zero GX, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, Soul Calibur II, as well as the forthcoming Mario Kart: Double Dash, Viewtiful Joe and Kirby Air Ride represent a relative embarrassment of riches for GameCube owners. The thing is, there was a time when that many ‘hot, new!’ titles coming out for a Nintendo system was commonplace, not something to be shocked by.

Part of this derives from the rather poor relationship Nintendo has had with its third-party developers over the years, and its relative lack of success in drawing them back. They remember the iron fist Nintendo ruled by in the 1980s, and I have to think that they’re not particularly saddened by the position that the former giant now finds itself in. Second place worldwide isn’t necessarily anything to scoff at, true, but a couple things must first be considered.

First, mobile gaming is becoming a greater phenomenon in Japan, while the home console market shrinks. Dollar for dollar, if it hasn’t done so already, the American market will soon surpass the Japanese market in terms of total capitalization. Europe, once seen as the sleeping giant merely awaiting awakening, hasn’t become the formidable force envisioned when Nintendo of America was founded…yet, at least. As a result, the American market increasingly holds sway over the future of gaming. And there, Nintendo struggles. Not as drastically as Microsoft’s misadventures in Japan, to be sure, but struggles nonetheless.

Secondly, the current Nintendo market is effectively the same to which they’ve always catered: small children. Kids may have an indirect effect on the purchases of their parents, but that’s still a limited market. Nintendo needs to make a more concerted effort to recapture the gamers who misspent their youth in front of the NES and SNES, trying to defeat Ganondorf, or to rescue the princess from Bowser. There are a variety of ways that they can do this, but a few immediately jump to mind.

Firstly, more software is a must. If not now, then when the successor to GameCube launches. Library size is irrelevant in the sense that very few gamers will ever play EVERYTHING of worth in a console’s library, but choice is the important thing. It’s a matter of perception. When Joe Gamer, or Joe Gamer’s mama, looks at the game racks, he or she is going to immediately notice one thing: Nintendo’s selection positively pales next to PlayStation and, increasingly, Xbox. Part of that is sales-related. The games that don’t sell don’t get stocked, and with a small installed userbase, very few games will be million-sellers. Nintendo needs not only more first-party software, but more high-profile third-party games. Ports are helpful, of course, but there needs to be something significant to distinguish them from the competition’s ports. Exclusives, it goes without saying, are even better.

Secondly, online functionality of some kind is even more imperative. The world grows increasingly more interconnected, and the youth of today and tomorrow are coming of age in that world. We can send missives halfway around the world with a single click, and yet Nintendo still hasn’t displayed a way to let you play F-Zero against somebody a hundred miles away. Nintendo may not see the appeal here, but let’s be honest: for all that gaming has become a mass-culture hobby – due in no small part to their efforts – there will always be that segment of gaming culture that is made up, essentially, of loners. These people, both young and old, are those who were never properly at home in face-to-face, social situations. Gaming became their escape, and I’d wager that a fair bit of this article’s audience falls into that group. For such people, online play is a way to connect with others and yet remain within that comfort zone. If nothing else, it’s a means of immediate contact with Nintendo gamers, much the same way as Nintendo originally utilized Nintendo Power.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the console has to be relevant in some way to that older gaming crowd. Whether that means more fully integrating it into a home theater system, the way the Japanese Panasonic Q does, or some other feature that resonates with older, more technologically inclined gamers, remains to be seen. DVD playback might help, but might also appear to be a ‘too little, too late’ form of copycat-ism. Becoming the first truly wireless console might be a bold, relevant stand to take. You’ve already got the foundations of that in the inexpensive Wavebird controller; why not take the next step and build in not just RF receivers into the next Nintendo console, but also some form of wireless networking support? Whether it be 802.11 support, or something newer, that would take the extraordinary step of not only putting Nintendo’s 5th home console online, but also obviate the need for any sort of wired setup for LAN titles, such as the GameCube’s Mario Kart: Double Dash. You want to bring a community of gamers together? That’s a fantastic way to start.

We stand on a frontier. We, as gamers, look forward to a bright, vibrant industry powered by the innovation that only competition can inspire. Nintendo, as an icon, and as a relevant force for creativity and change, are at a crossroads that could decide the future of the entire company. Whether it’s the challenge posed by a return to prominence in the console industry, or facing down the threat to their GameBoy business that Sony’s impending portable represents, it’s imminently clear that Nintendo must do something to survive.

Twenty years from now, the frontiers will have changed. It is my fervent hope that Nintendo will be there to greet them with us.