10 Worst Decisions Nintendo Ever Made 

The content creators programme sounds less like the actions of a child having a tantrum and more like the actions of a small time gangster running a protection racket.

Comments: You always leave Nintendo off your lists! TripleJump: oh don't worry, we have a Nintendo List for you.

2:35 I greatly enjoyed seeing The IT Crowd in this video

The WiiU had a great game library considering most of the best games on the switch are WiiU games

Speaking of the GameCube, why are there no GameCube games on any virtual console? I would love to play Eternal Darkness, Pokémon Coliseum and XD, and many more that I can't anymore because the disks are expensive as hell and the games themselves aren't available anywhere else.

Taking Mario 35 out was the biggest middle finger nintendo ever gave me

I miss Rare :(

So happy to not have seen yet ANOTHER video talking about the naming of the Wii U or the existence of the Virtual Boy

Sony deal should not be on there. it appears on lists like this all the time. People need to do a bit more research. Nintendo pulled out because Sony tried to screw them over in the contract. They added a clause that they would have the rights to mario and Zelda on CD. they also added that they would not have to pay nintendo any rights or gain any approval for cd software. meaning all the publishers could go through Sony, and then nintendo would get nothing. If anything it would have been a far worse decision to NOT pull out of the deal.

Letting Rare slip away is/was extremely disappointing, especially with the type of games they have done since. I would love to have seen what games they could have made for the Switch.

The worst decision of all is not including a double dash mode in Mario Kart 8.

That being said, the GameCube had a great library

Glad I picked up the "bad decision" Wii U which not only can play in Wii mode but plays some exclusives that include some of my favorite games such as Xenoblade Chronicles X. The gamepad is great with games especially as a map device or items pouch. Breath of the Wild would have been great on the Wii U if as originally intended it utilized the gamepad ie. Sheikah Slate.

Another 10 worst decisions: 1. Putting "This game stinks" for Earthbound. 2. Not making Princess Peach playable in NSMBW, NSMBU, SMO, and SMM2. 3. Not letting Mario appear in the Wreck-it Ralph franchise. 4. Rejecting my good ideas.

Microsoft Rare made one of my favorite games of all time, Viva Pinata. I do wish they were actually making games.

That Caddicarus Joke caught me off guard, made me laugh for the first time in a while

Speaking for the N64, other than the storage medium, how the hell was is not forward thinking? Built in 4 controller ports, made true 3D a standard, setting resolution benchmarks with F-Zero X running at 60 FPS

Nintendo got rid of Rare because well...they weren't making very good games anymore and Nintendo saw the writing on the wall and they handed the keys to Microsoft and said "good luck suckers"

I'm glad Nintendo goofed up and screwed Sony. The wonderful times I've had with playstation games over the last 25 years... just amazing.

The MOST foolish thing is clearly not making Wario Land 5

1. Wii U name, Moms didn’t know what it was, they just figured it was a Wii. If they named it something else probably would have sold better, even me walking in store didn’t even think about it, thought it was just another Wii with fancy black case

That Superman 64 metaphor was on point, my guy.

You could make a list of 50 worst decisions. Nintendo has some all time great games but they are one of the most greedy, anti consumer companies in the industry

This editing team is crazy good

I swear Nintendo is allergic to money. I can't believe it took this long for them to start making an open world Pokemon game.

I remember being enraged as a child that Ruby and Sapphire didn't have Johto and Kanto in them, although I guess that's more Game Freak's fault.

I don’t actually think Nintendo were wrong to sell Rare, in fact I think they sold Rare at exactly the right time. Rare had their time in the 90s but they started to steadily decline in the early 2000s and Nintendo rightly decided that it was time to cash in. Rare haven’t made anything worthwhile since.

Rare was already leaking talent before being bought by Microsoft. For example half of the development team left the company before the release of Perfect Dark to form Free radical, The studio behind Timesplitters.

0:24 I love that I'm not the only one who thinks of this scene from the IT Crowd whenever a fight is mentioned. Best on-screen brawl since They Live, and somehow even funnier

Letting Sony becoming a gaming manufacturer, was the best thing they did lol.

To be fair regarding Rare, many of the original staff, including the founders, were leaving or had left the company, so Nintendo knew the company was worthless when they sold. The proof is in the pudding considering Rare’s weak output since being owned by Microsoft.

Nintendo did release a disc drive attachment for the N64, though it wasn’t released outside of Japan and was discontinued 14 months after release. After witnessing Sega and Atari release a disc drive peripheral for the Genesis/Mega Drive and Jaguar and seeing the abysmal sales figures, the execs probably concluded that an international release of the N64 DD wouldn’t be any more successful.

Nintendo ditching Rare was INITIALLY disappointing, but it was obvious by the time Star Fox Adventures came and went, and the games to come later on down the road, their glory days were, and still are, long in the past. At least they spared the poor Gamecube "Grabbed by the Goulies"... The only true disappointment is them not having the rights to their N64 catalogue.

Video starts at 0:50.

Loving the caddy reference

Also, they didn't own rare to begin with, thier mistake was not buying them. And even then a lot of thier original team left and started Free Radical Design.

The worst mistakes are ongoing ones that continue to plague us, like not localizing Mother 3 and region locking stuff.

Modded my Wii U and it’s the best system ever now..

the sony/philipps problem is much more complicated than some try to make it whoever made the deal for nintendo with sony handed out some terrible deal that would give sony all the revenue from 3rd partys and making the addon worthless for nintendo the deal with philipps was just to get out of the deal with sony and the wait on the follow up to the famicom in japan was because nintendo wanted to do it right after the pc engine launched they started to develop the super famicom and after years of proper development released it as the masterpiece it was ment to be I actually understand Nintendo being omegalevel protective of their IPs if they let one thing slip through they could face problems later on when someone tries to push their luck I still can't believe how dense the tournement organisers were when they told Nintendo no to their plea to not use the illegal mod... whoever thought that was a viable strategy should get fired everyone knows how protective nintendo is of their IPs if you manage to slip under radar good for you. but the instand you are spotted you back the fk off. remember the dude who made a fangame based on the ocarina of time engine and when nintendo handed him the cease & desist he just put the game up again just without advertisements on the downloadpage? god that guy was optimistic at best. he even wanted to know some lawyer fees because he wanted to up against them in court. no it doesn't matter that you don't make a profit if you try to fight Nintendo of for being protective over their IPs I lose all sympathy. It reminds me of a child playing with fire and burning itself.

Re: "Genesis vs NES" - Umm, it's a bit of a stretch to call Nintendo not bringing out the SNES immediately after Sega released the Mega Drive a bad decision. History has certainly vindicated it, with both the NES and SNES (and for that matter the N64) outselling the Mega Drive in the end. Nintendo have rarely competed on the basis of having the most powerful system on the market, a strategy which goes back to at least the original Gameboy, and it usually pays off for them. Plus... It's not like companies just have console designs sitting in warehouses for years waiting to go on sale. The SNES we eventually got just wouldn't have been ready at that point. A SNES released two years earlier would've meant hardware two years less advanced, two years less design and development, two years less notice for internal and external dev teams working on games for it. That theoretical Mega-Drive-launch-window-matching SNES just wouldn't be the SNES that we know, love, and bought about 20 million more than the Mega Drive of. Seems like a good choice to me. On a semi-related note: 10:10 - "From this double bout of indecision, Nintendo unwittingly created the most successful console manufacturer ever..." ...I'm not sure what metric you're going by here, but purely on systems sold, Nintendo *is* the most successful console manufacturer ever, by several hundred million. I mean, unless you meant "the manufacturer of the most successful console" which, yes, Sony, but that's not quite the same thing. Assuming you meant what you said though... in what sense? The only way I could get this to work is by limiting it to home consoles, AND only those since the PS1 came out, which is basically saying "Nintendo aren't the most successful console manufacturer, as long as you don't count some of their most successful consoles", which is a little bit silly if you ask me. It's not like there wasn't an obvious other mistake to bring up. The Virtual Boy is conspicuous by it's absence in this vid! One of the most famous flops of all time; where is it?

The thing with Rare kills me... I detest the practice in the industry of, when you actually have competition of someone making good games, that you buy the studio to destroy it. I mean, at the VERY least you have to admit the people working there are talented and the games they are making are selling... otherwise they wouldn't bother buying out the competition. So then, instead of utilizing the great talent and franchises they just picked up, they nuke the whole thing.

Nintendo never owned Rare. Rare was always a second party company with no ownership from Nintendo apart from having the the permission to use the DK license. If they owned Rare they would have also owned Conker, Banjo and perfect dark which they never did In 2002 Microsoft was able to purchase them with no real say from Nintendo other then Rare losing the rights to make DK games.

Nintendo didn't sell rare. Rare was an independent company and was bought by Microsoft. Then they lost their creative control and many employees broke off into their own companies. Rare effectively died that day and they never made a single great game for Xbox. They had great plans for the GameCube.

There is no way Nintendo dumping the Nintendo Playstation for Philips doesn't take top spot

Great Caddy cameo! :D

Was there a mention of Virtual Boy?

How about Nintendo Sees Red. The Virtual Boy being released with a disclaimer stating not to play for too long as the product we brought to market and extensively playtested can cause headaches.

Noobs: The Cartridge format held back the true potential of the N64 MVG: 4kb texture cache is what held it back (including other technical bottlenecks and issues from the machine itself and having less to do with the format chosen.)

i lol'd when he said "remember black mesa!?"

Triple Jump really got their money's worth for that Ben-in-Sunglasses pic 😅😅

that Princess Tomato shout out got me...wish I had a working NES so I could play my copy again. also: modern Paper Mario. Sticker Star onward just feel soulless compared to the first 3 games not localizing so many titles ( not just Mother 3... ) shoving gyro/motion controls into damn near EVERYTHING since the Wii launched Star Fox Zero's asinine controls...as well as it's status as yet another remake of the SNES original ( 64 was a remake too ) prioritizing generic basic enemies in Mario spin-offs over actual unique characters most of what they've done on mobile

I agree with everything on this list except for calling the Game Cube outdated tech. That beautiful machine was the last time Nintendo competed in the high end console scene. The Game Cube has the best looking games of that console generation. (Rogue Squadron, Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4) Resident Evil 4 on PS2 looks like shit.

Letting Rare get purchased by Microsoft was the absolute worst thing they did, considering they’ve helped develop the best games ever while giving DK his iconic redesign after the transition from the arcade games. Rare also carried the N64 as they knew how to develop for it. It’s why I love Starfox Adventures so much, their last hurrah with Nintendo but omg more Rare Support on the GameCube and even the Wii would’ve been Legendary. The rest is history.

Many long time Nintendo fans from the 80s and 90s abandoned Nintendo after RARE was sold to Microsoft. It may have been for financial benefits to Nintendo as well as helping to mend bridges with Square-Enix and Capcom in the short term during the GameCube and Wii eras. But the cost was so many dedicated Nintendo fans who were burnt so much during the N64 era but still had some massive games, they lost RARE and therefore lost the older Nintendo Fans who wanted further RARE games. I for one stuck with the GameCube, but wanted to go Multiplatform once when the RARE games started appearing more regularly and that was what I did during the Wii era where I brought an XBox360 for the few RARE games as well as Dead or Alive series. While I also brought a PS3 for the Japanese JRPGs and other Anime type games.

Nintendo pulled out of the Sony partnership because Sony wanted complete control of licensing. That for anyone with a brain, meant it was DOA.

I thought that Superman analogy was pretty good! Let down by 'jumping', I suppose.

I'm happy I'm not the only one that remembers Princess Tomato In The Salad Kingdom.

1. NOT making a Nintendo 64 classic edition!

Conkurs Bad Fur Day was one of the best things Nintendo did. I loved that game. It was like a Mario game but with Chainsaws.

The worst thing Nintendo has ever done is sacking my uncle for revealing insider secrets

Cartridges instead of CDs for the N64. That cost them massive third party support which they never got back.

Oh my god I can't hear this Rare stuff anymore. Just take a look at the games they have made since then, NINTENDO MADE THE RIGHT MOVE. Even the last game they made for Nintendo, Starfox Adventures, was rather mediocre. Also: Third-Party Support on the Switch is "choppy at best"?? It's probably the best Third-Party support any Nintendo console has had since the Super Nintendo rofl (not counting mountains of Shovelware on the Wii).

8:08 It had an amazing game library! That's why so much was ported to switch.

Nintendo trolling the Smash community was a direct response to how the community reacted to Nintendo wanting the RNG to be a consistent part of Smash. When people look up Smash and all they see are matches without items, without hazards, without anything beyond basic stages and "screw up once and get punished for a whole stock" type gameplay, they're going to want to reduce the skill gap a bit - which they did with Brawl (though admittedly TOO much) - and that just pissed off the competitive community which said "screw your new game, we'll keep playing the old one, no new sales for you from us" and therein lies Nintendo wanting to bitchslap competitive Smash as the community ran it out of the world. If Sakurai's vision for Smash was something closer to 4P smash on The Great Cave Offensive with crazy shit going on all around the map, and all we see is the meme of no items fox only final destination, I could see why they'd overcorrect. I wish they wouldn't have backed down on the ruleset in their events, Nintendo-ran tournaments that had that stuff on were the only reason I had to tune in and watch, as it was finally something different.

Genesis vs enisis (NES), GREAT rhyme opportunity

Lost it at the quick summary lmao

What a bad, bad take on Rare.

2:12 It is rather "not buying the rest of Rare" making the owners look for another company to buy them out.

Finally porting goldeneye...then plopped with control's

Microsoft did nothing with Rare, what a waste.

not having functional online is mind boggling. It's why I sold my Wii U and why I never got a Switch. I wonder how many more like me there are

Nintendo is like that one washed up singer who had 2 good songs and still thinks they are top dog, failing to get with the times and fail to realize the golden years left decades ago

I still want to get my hands on one of the Game & Watch reissues. I'm going to pay dearly for it, but I still will.

Guys, when are you getting Simon Miller on the team? Every time he pops up he's one step closer to making videos for Triplejump

Most of these it's unclear to me why should be considered "worst decisions". 1) Super Mario 3D All-Stars was beloved by fans and sold 9 million units during the short anniversary period. 2) To buy the 51% shares of Rare Nintendo would have had to spend a hundred million while at the same time Rare games sales were declining. Instead Nintendo had just bought Retro Studios for $1 million and the rest is history. 3) NES profits in North America peaked in 1990, only a stupid would have killed the golden goose too early. 6) Nintendo never stopped innovating. The N64 was created to tackle full 3D experience and to achieve it introduced analogue stick, rumble, 4 local multiplayer and a slew of groundbreaking games. 9) Sony wanted a royalty fee for every CD sold on the "Play Station", including Nintendo's own games. Going forward with the clause would have weakened Nintendo, Sony was a big corporation ready to absorbe the smaller "videogame companies" and eat their lunch (in fact Sony offered Sega to become a "special" third-party for PlayStation, just like Namco was treated in exchange to stop compete with them in the console business). Nintendo is the most profitable console manufacturer in history, abdicating to Sony conditions would have been a pretty stupid move. Not only Nintendo is more profitable than Sony's PlayStation division but overall Nintendo has sold more console than Sony.

Nintendo didn't sell rare. You can't sell something you never owned in the first place. Most of the best developers had already left Rare to form Retro Studios who exclusively make Nintendo games. Rare have made nothing of note for Xbox

Correction it was an emulator not a mod, emulator's allow you to play the original games unmodified its pretty much the System hardware in a program and a mod is a Modification of whatever game has been changed, not that it really matters.

Naming the successor to the Wii the Wii U, giving the GameCube a Mini DVD disc drive instead of a regular DVD drive, pricing the 3DS at $250 in 2011, and releasing the Virtual Boy is a handy list of other terrible decisions they made.

Number 11 their games aren't even that good if you're not nostalgic for them.

1. Selling Rare was a good decision for them since many of those developers behind their classics and the founders were on their way out of the company by that time. 2. Friend codes are superior to usernames because let’s be honest, nobody you ask ever remembers how it’s exactly spelled and it turns into guesswork, trying all sorts of substitutions for letters and finally being told that there’s an underscore in there somewhere. Plus, it lets you set your online name to anything want and change it whenever you want.

bold of you to suggest Nintendo needs advertising

I feel bad for saying the limited time run of Mario 35 didnt bother me, buy it if you want to, if you don’t don’t, is what it is

Virtual boy? How is that not one of the worst decisions in gaming history? Also, didn't they go to atari to distribute the NES in North America? Atari turned them down, but if they didn't, Nintendo may have opened the door for another competitor in the home gaming market. Atari would have had the name recognition and finances to attempt a real Renaissance, not what they did with the jaguar.

No corporation is your friend but Nintendo are the most not your friend.

Was there ever a reason why there's three top 10s a week?

The worst mostake decision made was not putting blood and gore in Mortal Kombat 1. Clearly that game was far better than the Sega version but it had no blood and for that the biggest tease in gaming history.

You make it sound like Sea of Thieves was bad, it's actually Rare's most successful game by far.

I miss super Mario 35 so much…

You can literally find dozens of copies of Super Mario 3D All-Stars and the Game & Watch at any Walmart, Target, or Best Buy.

Worst thing is letting Rare go

It’s simply not true that the N64 & GameCube were underpowered and not innovative; in fact it’s a load of rubbish! The N64 was the most powerful system of the generation (albeit limited storage capacity on cartridge vs CDs) & the GameCube was more powerful than the PS2. They were both very innovative too; N64 controlling 3D objects with a joystick (not just Atari’s version which was a stick on a D-pad, but a stick that reacted to soft vs hard input in a completely 3D setting was brand new (same with rumble pack, game boy transfer pack and microphone). GameCube’s games were very innovative and the controller brand new.

I don't get the Kid Icarus bit. What's the joke?

Nintendo is such a strange company. A lot of the stuff they do, you just look at it and think "what the fuck?" Still, I love my GBC, DS lite and Switch.

A wild Simon Miller appeared!

00:39 a young Hilary???

3:41 HAHA!

Rare made all the N64 games that were great. Killer instinct is still my fav fighter, the werewolf and orchid, cinder too, just great fighters

Hard to take Nintendo seriously when their games use to be hard but now if you die too many times in Mario you get a golden Pwing and skip the whole level.

Not mention of the last thing that Gunpei Yokoi created? The virtual boy.

Nintendo the Disney of video games