I don't understand, seems like you are contradicting yourself here?

In any case, I'd say that Nintendo is the one that mainstreamed game consoles and made a profit/successful business model at doing it. (Atari kind of imploded financially as I understand it) Sony then took that and built on that market and established a huge install base.

Originally, as I understand it there was to be a partnership between Sony and Nintendo, with Sony producing some hardware for Nintendo (a CD add on for one of the Nintendo consoles (Super NES?). That I believe Nintendo terminated. And then the rest is history, with Sony going on to produce the playstation themselves.

Regardless, I am very happy that there are 3 major players in the market. I'm happy to play most of the games I like on the 360, and that it has some titles for my 8 year old that we can enjoy together. I'm also happy that Nintendo is around and produces top quality games, as I have a GC that my son/daughter and I spend time on, along with their handhelds (GBAs, and a DS). I'm also happy that Sony is around as while I do not currently own a Sony game console, the competition they provide to the market makes everyone better.

I firmly believe that if there was only one major player in the market we would not have the online environment that is Xbox Live. We may not have the innovation that Nintendo has brought with the Wii (I say may, because Nintendo has always done some very innovative things), and we would probably not have all the third party game studios bringing games to market without the massive install base that Sony has established.

That and games would probably cost substantially more than they do today.

Yes, Nintendo was working with Sony to create a SNES-CD to compete with the Sega-CD. Sega's came out first and failed big time. This scared Nintendo, it and was the reason why for so many years they felt that the CD format was not good for video games and why they stuck with cartridges for the N64.

Nintendo scrapped their SNES-CD project. This pissed off Sony because they had spent so much time and money on it. So, Sony takes that technology and converts it into a standalone video game console and renames it the PlayStation.

Basically, Nintendo indirectly brought about their own defeat.

Nah, even back in the SNES days, we had M rated games on the PC with Wolfenstein and Doom and such.

It's funnier to me to think that Sega brought on Nintendo's defeat by first ruining their own company.

No -- I see how you're reading my statement to make you think so, but that's not what I was saying. Let's try a short summary of what we had here:

* Somebody else wrote something to the effect that video games might not be in the mainstream if Nintendo adopted CDs and in so doing beat the Sony Playstation.

* I disagreed, citing several factors involving developers with quality concepts and early gamers who now had both children and disposable income. At the end of it, I say that I could see how something like a terrorist attack that was so bad it disrupted supplies of CDs and similar discs might cause a setback but not Nintendo over Sony.

* You started talking at this point.

As to the rest of what you say, I tend to agree with you. I hope this is helpful and that we can now just drop this thread about what I may have said.

To assert that all of Nintendo's games feature Mario shows a great ignorance about any of their consoles.

Let's be fair here: Nintendo makes a shocking number of Mario games. They have other franchises to be sure, but neither M$ nor Sony have anything that approaches the Mario series that now stretches back 5 consoles and 4 handhelds.

Give Microsoft some time. They have said that Halo 3 ends the FPS portion of the Halo franchise but that they will branch out into other genres with Halo. They are working on the RTS "Halo Wars." Maybe after that we will get Halo Kart or Halo Golf.

Well if defeat means being profitable, I'll take it...

Nintendo does what Nintendo wants to do and makes a good profit in their market. Being number 1 is great, but being profitable for the long term in your market is ultimately the most important.

I don't think anyone could call Nintendo defeated.

And Sony has been the market leader in other technologies/markets and lost it. Can anyone say Walkman?

What I meant was that they were defeated in the PS1/N64 era. That was Nintendo's first loss.

The NES and SNES were huge successes. The N64 was not. I think most people would agree that the N64 was pretty much a failure.

But, yes, Nintendo has rebounded from the N64, so they were not permanently defeated.

I think you have to be a bit more specific when you say failure. Was Nintendo profitable in the N64 era? I don't know, but it's difficult to call a profitable company a failure. They certainly lost market share, but market share isn't everything.

I'm also not entirely sure that Nintendo has won any sort of market share war in the console market. They're doing really well with the Wii right now, but will it be a fad? We'll know much more about that next year this time than we do now.