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Dolphin: Does The World Need Another Nintendo Console?
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
Without question, Nintendo sells some of the world's best and most popular games, and has even done so in the last five years of PlayStation market dominance. Super Mario 64 essentially defined 3-D platform gaming, The Legend of Zelda defined 3-D action role-playing, and Goldeneye re-defined 3-D first-player shooting. And then, of course, there are the multi-million sellers Pokemon and Donkey Kong 64. Importantly, none of these games would have looked as good on the PlayStation - it's taken years since Mario was released for PlayStation titles to even approach the solidity of Nintendo's first N64 graphics engine. And no one has come close to the Zelda or Goldeneye experiences yet on a home console.
But a few breakthrough games scattered over 5 years do not alone make a console successful. What has come out for the Nintendo 64 in-between the hits has been far more chaff than wheat, a muddle of unimpressive third-party software and frequently unpolished first- and second-party titles. Popular genres such as racing, fighting and sports have been underwhelmingly developed by Nintendo and its partners, and much of the optimism once felt for the machine was sustained on the promise of titles which have taken far too long to release. Many have asked why Nintendo has to have its own games console when it doesn't seem capable these days of supporting a machine with more than a trickle of quality software; shouldn't Nintendo instead focus all of its efforts on developing high-quality software for someone else's home console, as former hardware makers SNK and 3DO have done? By analogy, imagine having to buy three televisions to watch NBC, ABC and CBS. Why should video game fans have to buy two or three different game consoles when a single console could be playing everything? Since Sony seems to be setting the standards that game developers want to support, why shouldn't Nintendo just jump on Sony's bandwagon?
The gut reaction of Nintendo's supporters is predictably antagonistic to this suggestion: arguably, every Nintendo machine to date has hosted games which just could not have been done on competing consoles of their eras, from the impossibility of Super Mario on an Atari machine to F-Zero on the Genesis and Zelda 64 on the PlayStation. Will this still be true tomorrow given the unmistakably incredible power of the PlayStation 2 and the fact that Nintendo has not been able to enunciate just how their new machine, codenamed Dolphin, will be superior? It's hard to tell. First, Nintendo has promised that the final Dolphin specification will be at least a little better than Sony's PS2; recently they've been unofficially floating the claim that the Dolphin will be 33% more powerful. But Nintendo's hardware claims in recent times have frequently panned out to be less dramatic than the company initially suggests.
Second, no matter how pronounced the actual difference between the two machines, Nintendo has in every situation proved capable of somehow exploiting the advantages of whatever machine they've developed. With the NES, the advantage was primarily frame rate - Nintendo games moved more smoothly than those on Atari machines - and a combination of higher resolution and a large on-screen color palette. With the SNES, this was primarily 3-D "Mode 7" effects, and a larger color palette than the Genesis. With the N64, the advantage was texture filtering and perspective-correct polygon manipulation, which made graphics look less jagged or likely to show seams than the PlayStation and Saturn. In recent times, however, the differences between Nintendo and its nearest competitor have been less valuable, and there have in fact been increasingly significant reasons to prefer their competitors' products - the SNES slowed down when it placed a large number of objects on the screen at once, and the N64 couldn't compete in music, storage capacity or polygon quantity with the PlayStation. Nintendo isn't afraid to shamelessly market a product with even glaring problems; specifically in the case of the Game Boy, they actually fought to popularize a standard that they knew to be inferior to that of their competitors, and the Virtual Boy had issues in every conceivable area. No matter what flaws you find in their machines, however, Nintendo has still made the most of blurry screens and textures, and has released enough good software over the lifetime of any machine to justify the purchase of their console.
Cutting clearly against Nintendo, however, is the third point. In the past, most of Nintendo's advantages were features requested by hungry, insatiable in-house and third-party game developers. Today, however, not a single game developer has come up with a title that even approaches the raw capabilities of the PS2, primarily because Sony exceeded all expectations in delivering the Emotion Engine chipset. Would Nintendo, of all companies, have been able to fully exploit Sony hardware that goes beyond the specifications of even top-shelf arcade machines? Could they do this with hardware that is reputably 33% more powerful than Sony's spec? Unlike PlayStation developers, who have been developing exceedingly complex polygonal models and animation sequences for pre-rendered movie scenes and newer arcade hardware, Nintendo's software has never run on hardware more complex than the Nintendo 64, and thus they have a distinct disadvantage in developing the high polygon count models necessary for the next generation of 3-D video games. More likely than not. Nintendo will have a hard time finding ways to tangibly demonstrate the superiority of its new machine to both consumers and third-party developers.
A number of other factors behind the scenes weigh against Nintendo in the upcoming hardware race. The company's legendary hard-nosed Japanese chairman, Hiroshi Yamauchi, is in the process of retiring and turning over complete control of Nintendo to his quiet but thoughtful heir Minoru Arakawa. This presents two concerns. First, Yamauchi is credited with negotiating all of Nintendo's most favorable deals, including everything from high-quantity purchases of RAM and ROM chips to the critical development licenses that made the NES a dynasty in the 1980's. While some may suggest that Yamauchi's reputed toughness has precluded the company's growth in the modern era, his strategy has unquestionably resulted repeatedly in low-cost, high-quality game hardware. He has also been credited with cracking the whip over developers in order to turn out quality products in time for holiday seasons. The absence of a bad cop to Arakawa's well-established good cop persona may present negotiating challenges and even deeper game development delays for Nintendo in the future. Second, according to industry gossip, Arakawa intends to run Nintendo from the United States when Yamauchi retires. It's uncertain what impact this will have upon the company's Japanese development teams, and with the exception of the recently unpredictable Rare, Nintendo doesn't have much to rely upon in either Europe or the United States.
Does the world really need another Nintendo console? If for no other reason than to keep the pressure on other companies to innovate and lower their prices, the answer could be yes. But the competitive theory can break down. Nintendo is rapidly reaching a point at which they cannot get third-party support for their own machine and their own software is not enough to sustain a dedicated games console. No matter how powerful on paper the Dolphin may be, if Nintendo fails to make the Dolphin truly competitive with the PS2 in software, Sony may well stop feeling pressure to lower prices or develop better games. The conclusion is clear: if Nintendo is going to release a new console, it's time to do it right. Get a broad base of developer support. Plan a dramatic selection of original software and sequels to popular games, and invest in getting it out on time. Make a real launch of the system. And price it fairly. The world will only need another Nintendo console if Nintendo can make it appeal to the world; otherwise the world will be more than content with what the competition has to offer.
