By Abhijit Asad
Despite having been a hardcore PC gamer all my life, I have always followed the developments of the gaming console market with a great deal of interest. The myriad of developments in the console industry have often trickled into the PC gaming industry (and vice versa) in one form or another and the industries have enriched each other considerably over the years.
While the PC gaming industry has undergone its share of changes and divergences, the changes on that particular plane have been nowhere near the tumultuous shifts that have ravaged the console scene since the emergence of the first home consoles. Atari, a major player in the console market in its infancy, was wiped out of the console hardware business by a ruthless market and disastrous sales, and the same fate also befell Sega, another console giant, in the late ’90s. Sony rose to fame in the same era with its PlayStation range of consoles (which helped to usher in a new age of 3D graphics before the masses), and the turn of the new millennium saw the rise of Microsoft with its Xbox series of consoles. Both Microsoft and Sony continue to remain major driving forces in the console industry of today, pushing gaming technology to their limits (although still lagging woefully behind what can be done on gaming PCs, but that is a story for another day).
However, one stalwart company has existed from nearly the beginning of the age of home consoles, witnessing the rise and fall of dozens of competitors of all sizes across the eras, while continuing to grow and to innovate. Nintendo first took the market by storm after the release of their Famicom console (also known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in western markets) in the early ’80s, which became a huge favorite worldwide after the release of its flagship title ‘Super Mario Bros.’. The series has become one of Nintendo’s most successful series to date, giving rise to dozens of titles, with eye-watering collective sales figures that were in excess of 240 million games. Near the end of the ’80s, Nintendo also came up with the Game Boy, a simple portable gaming console that all but became an icon of the generation that grew up with it.
Following the success of the Famicom, Nintendo went on to develop the Super Famicom (a.k.a. the Super Nintendo Entertainment System), another fantastic console that was easily the champion of the 16-bit era with titles that are spoken of lovingly to this very day. The next console, the mighty Nintendo 64 ‒ the first 64-bit gaming system ‒ was also very well-received. But by this time, Nintendo’s main competitor had also changed, following Sega dethronement by Sony, and in an attempt to stay relevant, they came up with the Nintendo GameCube, a solid offering which enjoyed considerable success. However, by the end of the GameCube’s life cycle, it was obvious that Sony and Microsoft were more than capable of taking on Nintendo, and in order for it to survive; it needed to evolve ‒ drastically.
And evolve Nintendo did. Their new 2006 console, the whimsically named Wii, was a very different beast from its predecessors, moving away from conventional controllers and opting for a control system that was based on detecting the physical motions of the gamer using a unique pair of wand-like controllers. Rather than focusing on stunning graphics, the Wii was focused on touting its utterly novel gameplay experience front and center, which it did to tremendous success, managing to capture entirely new demographics who had never even bothered to touch a console earlier through its radical control mechanism. Needless to say, the Wii outsold both its contemporary competitors Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 combined, despite having poorer graphics and tamer specs on paper, proving once and for all that the experience of the games matters far more than their graphics.
The Wii’s successor, the Wii U (just when you thought the names couldn’t get any weirder), attempted to innovate upon the Wii by introducing a touchscreen-centric controller, and while it was successful, it came nowhere to matching the ridiculous sales figures of the Wii, necessitating the need for another massive development from Nintendo’s drawing boards.
Due to make an appearance in March 2017, the Switch is Nintendo’s latest foray into console design, and this time, it takes the design rulebook and mulches it with great abandon. Instead of designing separate consoles for home use and portable use, Nintendo has opted to blur the line and create something new and wonderful that works both ways. The console is modular to the point of absurdity, with a central 720p touchscreen display flanked by a pair of detachable controllers called Joy-Cons. What makes the switch unique is that the console can be used in a great number of ways.
Games can be played directly on the touchscreen or by using the Joy-Cons attached to its edges. For multiplayer purposes, the screen can be set down on a surface and the Joy-Cons detached for use by players for competitive or cooperative gaming. The whole experience can also be sent into home console mode by hooking up the tablet to a TV using its dock, allowing you to enjoy the games on a giant screen in 1080p from the luxury of your living room sofa. The experience gets notched up yet another step when you realize that the Joy-Cons also double as motion controllers à la the Wii, opening up yet another new way for the same game to be experienced on the Switch. When in handheld mode, the Switch also intelligently scales down its performance to battery-friendly levels, offering up to six hours of gaming on a charge.
Ever since its reveal, the Switch has been making massive waves in the console scene, and after seeing the extents of its versatility, it’s not hard to guess why that is so. However, with Microsoft and Sony also making innovations of their own by integrating cutting-edge elements of technology such as virtual reality, the Switch is also facing some serious competition, so whether its immense flexibility would end up being instrumental to its success still remains to be seen.
