A complete history of Nintendo console launches

[Administrator]

Regular readers will know that I have an oft-repeated mantra: never rule out Nintendo. The company has been written off by the wider games industry more times than you can count and invariably bounces back with something surprising, sometimes even game-changing, that ensures its success for another decade or so.
Yet when I looked at the launch plans for Nintendo Switch last month, I was worried, and concluded that the strange new machine was in trouble. It wasn't the hardware itself, which was delightful, so much as the pricing, the software line-up and the marketing, along with a competitive environment that was hostile to Nintendo's unique, not to say quixotic, way of doing things.
But I remembered my mantra, and also remembered that a lot of this sounded awfully familiar. Hadn't we said much the same before? And been proven wrong at least half the time? With that in mind, I recruited my fellow Nintendo-watchers Martin Robinson and Tom Phillips and we set out to scour the Nintendo history books for comparisons. How does Switch really compare to Nintendo launches past, and what can we tell from those about its prospects for the future?
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