Graphic artist Jillain Kristen has a good perspective on Nintendo, exchanging the gray-scaled consoles with her colorful nostalgia of playing with them as a kid.
The result is this series of prints, all delightfully colorful. She explains the inspiration to me in an email:
I wanted to design out the consoles in really child-like and friendly colors, different from the black or grayscale colors the consoles really are - these designs are what I thought they should've looked like. It was a happy part of my growing up, so I thought treating them differently and in a more friendly and approchable (and even "girly-er") way would be fun to experiment with. It just looks... happy. And that's why it fit my image of Nintendo so well.
The designs definitely evoke a more accurate portrayal of my own memories with the respective devices, so much so that I wish they'd come in these designs. There's still time, Nintendo! People like retro things, right people? We'd buy them? I'd buy them. I'd at least buy the prints of them.
Jillian elaborated on her design choice:
The years on each piece are when they came to America, which is when I was introduced to them in my life, and the textures were meant to make it look more "vintage" or as if they were printed on canvas already.
And she promises there are more designs—like the Wii!—to come.
Nintendo Series [Jillian Kristen via Moon 83]