Nintendo Thrives on "Good Enough" Gaming

Jeremy Parish, of 1up.com, celebrates the 20-year anniversary of Nintendo's Game Boy and points out how the technologically deficient hand-held reveals its parent company's business philosophy:

The secret of Game Boy's success was that it demonstrated Nintendo's uncanny grasp of "good enough." In fact, the philosophy creator Gumpei Yokoi employed in designing the system has been the key to all of Nintendo's greatest successes. Epyx (like most hardware makers) simply aimed to give Handy raw power and impressive specs, offering a portable machine with the muscle to rival a home system. But it seems they never stopped to consider the overall experience, the need to balance horsepower with the practical limitations of handheld gaming. When Lynx launched, it was twice the price of Game Boy and incurred a secondary cost consideration as well: it guzzled large, expensive C-cell batteries in a matter of hours. (Correction: it used AAs, but it burned through six of them in a couple of hours.) The fact is, Lynx was probably doomed to runner-up status from the start. Even before either system launched, Electronic Gaming Monthly called the race for Game Boy way back in the magazine's second issue: "With a rumored retail tag of around $160 bucks for the system and thirty dollar games, the Epyx unit appears to have priced itself out of existance [sic] in the face of Nintendo's competing Game Boy machine."

Not surprisingly, the Nintendo Wii--which is basically an enhanced Gamecube with reinvented controls--consistently outsells any other game system this cycle.