Topic: Nintendo's Golden Age and Dark Age

That's the Wii U/late Wii era.

That's like saying the 32X wasn't an era for Sega.

Just because it was Nintendo's worst product doesn't mean it should be disregarded.

Because it wasn't. It was part of the Genesis era.

I go with the NES-N64 the golden age or classic age
GameCube and Wii are the start of the spilt with the handheld golden age and Wii u is the darkest part
Switch is the rebirth period

The golden age of Nintendo is the Switch LiteAt the moment. Other ages would be all the other big systems Nintendo was successful with. The dark age was the Wii U.

Nintendo's Golden Age was the NES and Game Boy that saved them and also encouraged a healthy rivalry between Nintendo and Sega. Commercially, the second Golden Age was DS and Wii because easy-to-develop games sold +20 million copies.

For me, the biggest impact was Nintendo 64 because the first time you play 3D games as a kid is something that you will never forget, Super Mario 64, and you also feel immersed in games like never before and feel that you have more control and freedom. The SNES-N64-GameCube era is Nintendo's Golden Age in quality terms.

The Dark Age would easily be Wii U, soon after it was released, Nintendo abandoned it, merged the two hardware divisions and focused on games that never seemed to come. Eventually, Nintendo delayed Breath of the Wild one year so it would come out same day as Switch. Ironically, Wii U is Nintendo's most important console to own nowadays because it has HDMI, backwards compatibility with Wii, Virtual Console and can be soft-modded to run GameCube games in a native way. You have NES, SNES, N64, GC (total support via soft-mod), Wii (fully compatible with) and Wii U games running on the same console with some GBA games on top of that. Wii U is a treasure in my house.

Switch has seen better days than Wii U but it's the only Nintendo console that Nintendo is supporting while Wii U was there with 3DS that recovered after a rocky start. Switch is also a hybrid/handheld console. In spite of this, Switch hasn't reached 3DS numbers yet. So, while Switch is quite more successful than Wii U, considering these two facts, it is just performing well but can't be compared to Nintendo's dominance of days long gone.

One fact is misguided. The Switch is actually outpacing both 3DS and Wii U combined.

3DS 2011: 3.6 million.
3DS 2012: 13.53 million
3DS 2013: 13.95 million

Switch 2017: 10 million
Switch 2018: 22 million
Switch 2019: ~15 million

Wii U altogether: Not really worth mentioning.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262074/worldwide-sales-of...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/687059/nintendo-switch-un...
(Numbers from Nintendo)

Also, the Switch, while not dominant like the Wii, put Nintendo on the map for the right reasons. It’s selling on more merits than a simple gimmick or casual gaming, and it shows little to no sign of stopping.

@LzWinky That's what I said yet because I'm using current numbers and not future numbers.

That's speculative, not really the topic nor anything I have discussed here.

For me, the golden age was the SNES era (with obviously the Game Boy ticking along nicely in the background as well). Now, I was a kid during the SNES era (around ages 8-13), so I could never completely disprove that nostalgia isn't playing a part here, but bare in mind that I was also a kid during the NES era as well, and yet I don't have nearly the same amount of nostalgia for the NES as I do for the SNES. I think for me, the main reason why the SNES era is the best is because it was a perfect bridge between (at the time) the old and the new. By which I mean that it had moved away from some of the more archaic and frustrating aspects of the arcade-style of gameplay that NES games were very much based on, but still kept some of the good aspects of the arcade-style of gameplay that would perhaps be lost in subsequent generations. On the whole, I think in terms of how they play (and look) SNES games have aged much better than games from the generations that came immediately before them and immediately after them. SNES games were generally better and more advanced than NES games, but they still maintained much of the same simplicity and purity. Unlike many games nowadays with their convoluted systems and mechanics on top of more convoluted systems and mechanics, menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, upgrades, crafting, cooking, skill trees, skill slots, gem slots for skill slots, etc. etc. to the point where it feels less like a video game and more like an Excel spreadsheet management simulator. You don't really get all that with SNES games, they're still very much video games in the classic sense. Plus, franchises were still young and fresh so they hadn't yet succumbed to feature-bloat over time. They hadn't yet accumulated years and years' worth of new features for the sake of new features, years and years' worth of pointless clutter.

For me, the dark age would have to be the Wii, just because I hated motion controls so much. Everything you wouldn't want in video game controls; slow, clunky, laborious, unresponsive, unreliable, vague, ambiguous, distracting (thus immersion-breaking) all wrapped up in one control scheme (though to be fair, aiming was decent and hopefully we've now established that that's their niche). I just remember thinking at the time that going from the perfect elegant tactility of buttons to crude waggling and flailing was not how technological innovation is supposed to go. To go from button controls to motion controls was like going from a computer keyboard to carving letters into stone with a chisel and claiming that to be an advancement. I remember at the time Itagaki put it best when he said that "the reason video games are fun is because you get a big output from a small input". The DS was a bit better, but obviously still prone to extreme gimmickyness (Who remembers blowing and yelling into the microphone? Christ...) As with waggle, they were just confusing wackiness and goofiness with fun. As someone who had grown up with Nintendo as king, it was hard to see them so happy in their new role as Court Jester. "Nintendo consoles are so quirky LOL" Urgh...And let's not forget the cringy way they were presenting themselves during that era. The cheesy, aspirational lifestyle commercials that were inescapable at the time. They even redesigned their website to purge it of their usual colorful characters and franchises to suit their new bland image, I guess to appeal to their new audience of uber-casual grannies (which didn't turn out to be a great long-term strategy. Who'd have thought it...) So yeah, all in all, that generation was pretty painful for me.