I have a long list of questions I wanted to ask all both of you who still post here regularly so in a fleeting effort to foster more discussion, here’s one of these new topics! 👍
Considering what old authentic Pokémon cartridges are going for these days, I wondered where Nintendo would be as a company if Pokémon never existed. Nintendo leaned hard on the handheld market during rough times, and Pokémon was a big part of Nintendo’s ability to do so. The company’s dominance in that market also allowed it to experiment more.
Hot take: I kind of feel like Nintendo would not be a hardware maker anymore without Pokémon. Nintendo wiped the floor with all pretenders to the throne in the early 90s. Tetris certainly put Game Boy on the map. However, handhelds from Sega, Atari, and NEC were bulky, battery devourers. It’s easy to see how Nintendo outsmarted everyone. Even original color choice was unique among the sea of black boxes. You always knew someone was playing a Game Boy. Furthermlre, opening up these bad Boys, it’s obvious Nintendo’s hardware design was far and away much better than the competition. Seriously, google pictures or watch video of a Game Gear tear down. It is a mess in there. I considered modding a Game Gear, and I cannot be bothered.
Once other companies figured out how to properly design a portable gaming device in the late 90s, it was too late. By then, Nintendo had Pokémon. The WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket Color were both really nicely designed handhelds and were designed by people who finally understood what Nintendo did like a decade before everyone else. The WonderSwan got roughly 2846826 hours of battery life on a single AA battery which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering it was famously designed by Game Boy creator, Gunpei Yokoi. As an even wilder hypothetical, if either Bandai or NEC got Pokémon instead, they could have taken a significant amount of market share from Nintendo.
Even if Nintendo survived them, I wonder if it could have survived PSP. Then again, without Pokémon, we also don’t know what Nintendo would have countered with instead. Maybe Project Atlantis actually comes out. Maybe Game Boy Color gets an exclusive Mario platformer. Maybe Nintendo fosters a different IP that ultimately died in this timeline. Lots of possibilities here.
I thought this would be a fun hypothetical. What do you think? How important has Pokémon been to Nintendo? I’d argue no other property has been more important as far as generating revenue, keeping the company in the social consciousness etc. The domino effect is pretty remarkable here. It isn’t just game sales and licensing. More people bought hardware to play Pokémon which also meant, more people bought the company’s other games.