The Nintendo Console Launches, Ranked From Worst To Best

Few console launches have become cautionary tales the way the Wii U’s has. Fresh off the incomprehensibly successful Wii, Nintendo had quite the act to follow in 2012. However, the system itself didn’t have much to offer at the outset that you couldn’t find on consoles you probably already had. New Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendo Land were decent exclusives, but the majority of the launch line-up was third-party games that had been out for months or years on the PS3 and 360. The system also launched at the worst possible time. The PS4 and Xbox One were looming, the Wii U was only about as powerful as systems people had been playing since 2005, and unlike the Wii or the Switch, the system’s gimmick was hardly a system-seller. The gamepad was a novel way to try and bring the “second screen” experience to home consoles after the surge of tablets and other mobile devices in the early 2010s, but it didn’t have the immediate appeal of the systems that came before and after.

I remember when my brother was picking up our Wii U on launch night, and the Walmart cashier (bless her heart) said it was a touchscreen accessory for the original Wii, rather than a new console. There’s nothing quite as damning as the person selling your product not knowing what it is, and that came down to a branding problem above all else. Perhaps that’s why Nintendo went with the numerical naming convention for the Switch 2, rather than something that could have seen it misconstrued as a peripheral. The Wii U never really gained any momentum after it stumbled onto store shelves, even with some excellent games. — Kenneth Shepard

Some of Nintendo’s consoles had sparse launch line-ups but were carried by heavy hitters. While Super Smash Bros. Melee loomed just a few weeks post-launch, the GameCube’s actual day-and-date catalog was a bit underwhelming. The lunchbox-shaped console was novel with its quirky design and ugly-as-sin controllers that many people still swear by 24 years later, but its first wave of games was pretty weak. Luigi’s Mansion led the pack alongside Super Monkey Ball and Wave Race: Blue Storm, but most of the history books will remember Melee’s fashionably late arrival as the moment the console’s “real” killer app arrived. Sure, I could count it as one of the most culturally significant games in Nintendo history (even if the company doesn’t want you to view it as such), but to keep things clear and manageable here, I’m only considering actual launch games, not games released throughout a console’s ambiguous “launch window.” The GameCube had some real bona fide classics by the time the Wii launched in 2006, but that first month wasn’t so promising. — Kenneth Shepard

We’re still kind of in the Switch 2’s launch period, given Nintendo’s second console/handheld hybrid is just about two weeks old, but despite record-breaking sales right out of the gate, the Switch 2’s arrival has hardly felt like a red carpet affair. Part of this is because Nintendo has managed to provide a solid supply for the demand, meaning it feels like a nice thing to have, rather than a hot commodity people are still scrambling for, and I’m not complaining about that. Another is that the Switch 2 is just…the original Switch, but bigger and better. That’s also a good thing, to be clear, but it’s not quite as electrifying as the original Switch, with all of its novelty, felt in 2017. All that being said, the launch line-up is rock solid and showcases the device’s power. Mario Kart World is the headliner and is one of the finest kart-racing experiences Nintendo has put to cartridge, and impressive third-party ports like Cyberpunk 2077 and Street Fighter 6 show the system has legs. It’s been a bit underwhelming, but it’s also a smooth, pain-free console launch at a time when most things are bad, actually. — Kenneth Shepard

The years between the collapse of the market for Atari video games in the early 1980s and the arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986 were long and harrowing for me, as a child whose earliest memories saw me developing a love for video games only for them to largely evaporate from the marketplace, their future uncertain. When they returned, it wasn’t with all the hype and fanfare we associate with console launches today. It was, for a bit, tentative and awkward, a case of the culture feeling out this new contender in the space. Nintendo, despite being the makers of beloved games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., both of which I’d played in arcades and on Atari 2600, wasn’t a name Americans were familiar with (my mom, god bless her, always pronounced it “Intendo”), and the initial arrival of the NES leaned heavily on R.O.B., a robot who looked cool and futuristic in advertisements but was somewhat frustrating to actually use. (In retrospect, however, I’ve come to appreciate R.O.B. as a wonderful novelty who may have been essential to securing Nintendo a foothold in the American market, letting the NES take up shelf space as a “toy” at a time when “game consoles” felt like poison to retailers.)

The moment I knew I wanted one—and first believed that video games were about to be back in a big way—was when I saw a big display kiosk touting the console at the Sears department store (RIP) in the Northridge Fashion Center. All the games looked colorful and amazing, leaps and bounds beyond what Atari had been able to deliver, but the one that looked like pure magic was Super Mario Bros. I’d already seen it in an arcade cabinet at my local 7-Eleven, this extraordinary game in which the little mustachioed hero of Donkey Kong now ran to the right into a whole world of mystery and adventure, and here was the promise of that same incredible experience at home. Before too long, Nintendo went from being largely unknown in the States to being a household name (even if my mom never learned to pronounce it correctly), and soon we were all reading issues of Nintendo Power and getting hyped for upcoming releases. It may not have been the most knock-your-socks-off launch in Nintendo’s history, but I think it was probably their most tactical, and it may always be their most historically significant. — Carolyn Petit

By the time the SNES rolled around, Nintendo had millions of loyal young American fans, and it could do a proper build-up and launch in the States for the first time. Our hype was fueled by that commercial starring Paul Rudd—we didn’t know he was Paul Rudd at the time, of course, but he looked awesome playing and enjoying those games, and we, too, wanted a taste of this “Super Power” the new console promised. For many parents, meanwhile, the SNES seemed like a scam, an effort to extort even more money from their Nintendo-addled kids. (For an incredible, time-capsule glimpse of what the period surrounding the SNES launch was like as many parents lamented the hold that video games had developed over their children, you simply must watch this video of a local news report from 1991.)

But for those of us who were firmly in Nintendo’s grasp, the arrival of the SNES was cause for excitement, not concern. Today, game console launches often feel incremental; the PS5 felt like an important technological step up from the PS4, for instance, but not an awe-inspiring one. In the SNES era, however, new hardware could still inspire genuine awe. Oh my god, look at that 3D effect on those tracks in F-Zero! Look at all that color in Super Mario World! Sega’s Genesis had arrived two years prior, stepping up the technology that powered the games we played. Here, with the release of the SNES, Nintendo was firing its own salvo in the 16-bit wars, and once again, Mario was leading the way. The launch bundle included Super Mario World, maybe the best console pack-in of all time, giving players hours and hours of wonderful SNES gameplay right out of the box in a game that remains an enduring classic to this day. Now that’s how you make people feel good about their new console purchase, and eager to seek out the many wonderful new experiences that will be arriving for it in the months to come. — Carolyn Petit

The Nintendo 64 is one of the best examples of a launch immediately giving new players all they’ll really need by offering an incredible, generation-defining game right out the gate. Most consoles can’t claim to have the kind of system seller that Super Mario 64 was back in 1996. It didn’t matter that the Nintendo 64’s controller is the kind of sin that god will judge humanity for when we reach the pearly gates; Mario’s first leap into 3D felt like a true generational leap of the kind that’s become increasingly rare in recent decades. One game made such a succinct case for the console that some reasonably argue the N64 never surpassed it. In reality, as they arrived in the years that followed, games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye similarly demonstrated the capabilities and potential of the N64, but most companies don’t have this kind of paradigm shift on store shelves the same day their new console lands. Nintendo had done it twice before, though, with the NES having Super Mario Bros. right out of the gate and the SNES launching with the one-two punch of Super Mario World and F-Zero. And the company would go on to pull off this feat at least twice more, too… — Kenneth Shepard

When the Switch was unveiled, it sounded like some fanfiction futuristic device you’d made up as a kid. You’d whine to your friends that you wished you could play your Nintendo 64 games on long drives to grandma’s house, and then you’d draw up some impractical machinery that would allow you to pull your games off the TV and onto a handheld contraption. It seemed like science fiction growing up, and then Nintendo released a system that did just that. It wasn’t as powerful as the PS4 or Xbox One, but the portability gave it some actual utility that separated it from the competition and prevented it from falling into the same awkward catch-up phase the Wii U had. On top of it being such an incredible new device, it launched alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which, in addition to being a fulcrum point for open-world design as we know it, showed that the Switch also had the juice to host console-quality experiences on the go. It’s a double-edged sword that the Switch has become such an important pillar of the console market that Nintendo can’t really pivot away from it to make something new and experimental with the Switch 2, but the company pulled off something that felt like magic in 2017. As soon as it hit store shelves and people got a taste of a brand-new Zelda game in the palm of their hands, it was over. — Kenneth Shepard

All that being said, I don’t think we’ll ever have a launch quite like the Wii’s again. One of the smartest business decisions anyone at Nintendo ever made was to package Wii Sports with every Wii. One of the biggest hurdles video games must overcome is teaching someone how to play. The more complicated a game is, the more likely you are to lose someone in all the minutiae. Some of the best marketing Nintendo ever did was the “Wii Would Like To Play” commercials that showed Nintendo employees bringing the system and its motion-controlled remotes into different families’ homes and showing them playing Wii Sports. As moms, dads, kids, and grandparents all swing the Wii-motes around and their movements are reflected on screen, everyone instantly understands what the system is about. Somehow, this pack-in collection of motion-controlled, sports-based games was a bigger system-seller than the new Zelda that launched alongside the console, and the possibilities seemed so endless. Eventually, the Wii became a dumping ground for shovelware, and Nintendo’s decision to stick with the device’s name for brand recognition with the Wii U ended up biting it in the ass. Still, unless Nintendo or another company comes up with something so intuitive that even your grandmother is hopping on to play, no one is catching lightning in a bottle this way ever again. — Kenneth Shepard