Topic: Is Nintendo really not welcome in the UK?

I've also posted this on reddit, and am posting it here just to get a bigger picture of Nintendo's reputation here.

Here in the UK, I am here, a HUGE Nintendo fan, and have owned every console from the NES in my younger years, and have started with gaming again. The amount of enthusiasm for their products I'm seeing in the country I'm based in is a bit disappointing to say the least. Are we the most biggest most underappreciated country for Nintendo here? I'm very underwhelmed, actually.

The Switch was the biggest selling console in the UK last year, there's a difference between the people you directly talk to not being Ninty fans and the entire country.

Although Nintendo tradicionally not selling particularly well in the UK (as in most of europe Sega and Sony sold/sell better) when I was living in london until end of 2019, in my office it went from me as the only person with a Switch to more than 15 when I left (we used to do Mario kart tournaments after work!)

I think the Switch seems to be doing quite well in the UK. Pretty much everyone I game with has got one as a secondary console and some have it as their only console.
Maybe you are just talking to the wrong people about it.

@NintendoGamerGuy
My country Indonesia is basically PlayStation Land with Nintendo as secondary important thing. XBOX is dead brand in Indonesia.

The Switch is a massively popular console. The sales data showing this are right at your fingertips

There's even articles about it on this very site such as this: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/03/switch_shifted_1_5_...

I think your statement about the enthusiasm you are seeing in "your country" should be altered to state the enthusiasm in your "direct social circles", as otherwise it's just factually incorrect by all available metrics.

I hope the above doesn't come across as rude but I'm 99% certain that you're the person who posts this exact thing to these forums every few weeks or months ad nauseum 😅

As someone whose association with Nintendo stretches right back to playing NES on displays in shops and GameBoy in primary school I think the best way to look at the UK’s relationship with Nintendo has been one of a constant presence but not a phenomenon.

It is a marked contrast to the states, where the NES and SNES were cultural phenomenons but Nintendo never really put in the same effort to capture a British audience as it did with the USA. In fact, as many fans of my age will tell you it wasn’t Nintendo vs SEGA so much as SEGA vs Amiga and everyone else in the early 90s!

Nevertheless, as a Nintendo fan I’ve never struggled to find the stuff on sale or to meet other fans; my friends and I all played N64 in the late 90s, the PlayStation, whilst huge, wasn’t even a blip on my radar in my teenage years. I think the big N still suffers from the kiddy image it has been (wrongly) stuck with for years. The Switch does so well because it has such a broad audience. I haven’t heard anyone saying ‘it’s rubbish compared to PS5 or Xbox’ (and I work in a high school); kids tend to have one if the other consoles and a Switch and think it’s awesome in a different way. After all; you can’t play a PS5 on the bus...

Nintendo can only enter your country if you invite them in, have you tried that? Maybe they’re just kind of shuffling around outside the gate waiting to be let in?

Form what I have read (I don't know I live in the US), that video games console in the late 80s to early 90s weren't big in the UK it was more about personal computers and gaming on those then a dedicated system like Nintendo. IIRC Sega consoles always were more popular then Nintendo in Europe during the 8 and 16 bit era too.

So it's probably not that Nintendo isn't welcomed it's just not as popular as in other places in the world. I don't think that Nintendo didn't get popular till say the GameCube era. Maybe @Antdickens or @Damo can elaborate more since they are from the UK.

Nintendo is still massively popular here, just proportionately less so than in NA/Japan.

Anecdotally (I'm from the London and born in 1991, so I have my own experience but probably don't know the full picture), SNES was reasonably popular here, but seemingly less so than in the US and Japan (fewer people in the UK will stay they grew up with the console, for example, as compared with Sega Megadrive or PC). N64 was less popular., being massively overshadowed by the PS1 at the time (while Saturn was basically unheard of).

Nintendo did have quite a presence with the Gameboy, especially when Pokemon came out. It was quite common for casual gamers here to have a Gameboy, and later the DS.

It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo home consoles truly felt mainstream in the UK. But even then, the Wii was treated very differently in the general population to XB360 and PS3.

In summary: Nintendo have probably historically been received less favourably in the UK than USA, but it's not like they're completely hated here. And with the Switch they're probably as popular as ever in the UK.

@Tasuki yeah, you’re right about personal computers; they were all the rage in the 80s by the time consoles as we know them came along.

SEGA was much more popular (or was much more common as far as I can remember) but Mario was well known. The Gameboy was very popular here from 1990 onwards, so most of my Nintendo memories come from that system. We still got to play Mario, Zelda and Metroid, but it was the GameBoy versions that my friends had.

I do remember wanting a NES, but that was for Ninja Turtles more than anything else. Pretty soon everyone I know wanted a Mega Drive. Then it split to N64 and PS1. SEGA Saturn was a flop.

I grew up in the UK and can vouch for the NES not being much of a success there. It came relatively late to the country, not launching until around 1986, into a market that was already largely sewn up between the popular home computers of the time such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. The Sega Master System did a bit better but most of us didn't get consoles until the following generation.

However, other early Nintendo hardware, such as the Game and Watch series, GameBoy, and SNES seemed to sell well enough. They certainly didn't have to wait until the GameCube for success; indeed, I'd be surprised if it did that well at all, given how much of a slow seller it was globally. Overall, the handhelds seemed far more popular until the time of the Wii.

I certainly didn't hear about consoles.... Cousin had the Donkey Kong g&w but Wii got everywhere & Switch is doing very well now here

@timleon I’m a bit older than you, so by the time the 16 bit consoles came around I was very much in the target audience. The SNES wasn’t seen too much as far as I can remember (though I’m from up North so I apologise if London was a bit different in terms of how popular the SNES was).

Anecdotally, the NES was pretty well known (I remember at least three friends where we found one in their attic or cupboard whilst playing. We were like ‘what is this old thing?’)

I can remember SEGA adverts on tv as far back as the Master System when I was in primary school (we all used to chant ‘do me a favour! Plug me into a Sega!’ from the TV ads). Nintendo I don’t remember really advertising, more so from playing the systems in shops (the Gameboy booths were fantastic).

Again, I knew more people with N64s than PS1s but I’m not going to deny that the PS was the more popular console (I was mainly playing PC in those days and the PS couldn’t match what our computer could do).

Nintendo’s presence in the 80s/90s was mainly through cartoons that were on (the Gamesmaster/Super Mario bros show/the legend of Zelda) so my friends and I knew of the properties even if we hadn’t played the games. As I said before though, by 1990/1991 the Gameboy was everywhere!

I think the UK has always embraced Nintendo as much as we have every other game system to some extent, it’s just that it still seen by many as the safe, family company. SEGA kickstarted the whole ‘attitude’ and ‘coolness’ of games which is still followed by everyone else it seems. However, I think the Switch had really tapped into the nation’s nostalgia because, regardless of what you might have played in the past, Nintendo was always there one way or another.

@Gamecuber I think also Nintendo was seeing as a shining light here in NA due to the Video Game Crash. Other companies like Sega figured the market was dead here in NA so didn't aggressively promote their systems here like Nintendo did, but even Nintendo was careful on how they promoted the NES never using words like Video game or cartridges or video game system.

To be honest I never heard of anything like a video game system before NES. My cousin had an Atari but it was more of a novelty item then a thing to do. We would maybe play a game of baseball on it then that was it. Personal computers here also weren't seeing as gaming machines here it was mostly a machine for business like for keeping track of the checkbook or doing homework on not for gaming and if there were games on it they were education games mostly. Honestly it wasn't till I heard of Doom on the PC that I thought a PC could be a decent gaming console.

But then the NES hit and OMG!!! All we ever heard was NES this and NES that, and once Gameboy came out it was Gameboy. I never heard of Sega till the Genesis and by then it didn't have quite the following as Nintendo did here.

It's funny because as a British kid growing up in the 90s, the SNES was a lot more popular at my school than the Mega Drive, so I was surprised when I found out later on that the Mega Drive had actually been more successful here, as that hadn't been my experience. It's true that during the 80s and early 90s, the UK was more for Sega than Nintendo, but that isn't to say that Nintendo was unpopular here (and of course in the handheld space, the Game Boy crushed the Game Gear as it did everywhere). After that though, the success of Nintendo consoles in the UK has pretty much aligned with other parts of the world. It always made me laugh when the weekly UK charts would come out on this site during the Wii U era and the comments would be full of people bashing the UK for our supposed Nintendo-hate. As if the UK was sort of anomaly and the Wii U was killing it in every other country...

Also, I may be wrong, but I believe the biggest selling console in UK history is the DS, whereas in a lot of other places it's still the PS2. I also believe that there was a point in time when (just counting single SKUs) Mario Kart Wii was the biggest selling game in UK history.

From the UK. Born in 1986. I grew up with an Amiga, so didn’t get a console until the N64.

My memory is that Sega with Sonic was more popular in the earlier 90s. However, I remember my mate having a SNES and playing Mario Kart, DKC, all-stars. I’d say it was probably 60/40 in sega favour. Consoles/gaming weren’t that big back then though. Gameboys were massively popular though. However, I owned a sega game gear lol.

The PlayStation was way more popular than the n64 unfortunately. Mostly due to the quantity of games they had, and the fact you could get chipped games for peanuts. However, there was a few of mates who owned a 64 so I always had mates to play Mario Kart, Party, Tennis, Golf and Goldeneye/Perfect Dark with. N64 was quality over quantity IMO and that’s why I preferred it.

GameCube was a failure. Nintendo seemed all kiddy-friendly this era. Cel-da didn’t help this view. PS2 won this era comfortably and all the 64 fans that liked Rare and were a bit more mature probably swayed over the the XBox with Halo etc. I stuck with GameCube exclusive but was disappointed. Looking back, the games have aged well but at the time the perception was lacking.

The Wii became huge. I got one, as did the whole world. I disliked the waggle controls over time and ended up buying a PS3 to go along with it. PS3 very popular along with it. And the Xbox had some market share. The Wii was a phenomenon but when it all died down, what were Nintendo to do?

The Wii U was the first Nintendo console I haven’t owned since the N64. I didn’t even know it existed. Not very popular here, or anywhere really. I owned a PS4 instead.

Got the Switch and haven’t looked back. My favourite console ever. With NES/SNES online to go with the n64/GameCube/wii I still own, I have access to all good things Nintendo. Seems very popular, but Nintendo have always been popular handheld over here, so I believe a lot of people have a Switch to go along with their PS5/Xbox. Nintendo wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight, as seen by the Wii U, if it were console only. Ingenious system really.

@Gamecuber
Don't forget those legendary Nintendo Rik Mayall ads!

@Slowdive
Indeed, aside from my purely anecdotal evidence, the fact that there were so many UK Nintendo mags at the time shows that there was clearly a decent-sized market. I'd love it if anyone had solid UK-specific numbers for that era (I'd imagine they're pretty hard to come by), but I'd wager that the Nintendo/SEGA war in the UK was actually closer than the popular narrative (ie. that SEGA destroyed Nintendo in the UK) would suggest.

@Haywired or the nutty SEGA tv ads around the time of the MEGA CD add on.

Come to think of it, it was largely in the magazines (SEGA Power, Mean Machines, Games Master, Sonic the Comic etc) that the SEGA vs Nintendo rivalry played out. I can recall a couple of times there were playground arguments about SNES vs Mega Drive, but so few people had the SNES (or either system as it was still quite a niche hobby).

I can remember in primary school that I had a Game Gear and one of my best friends had a Game Boy. We ended up swapping for a couple of weeks as he loved the full colour screen on mine and I loved the battery life on his 🤣