Oops. Looks like they weren't doing well. The N64 launch was pretty miserable, though the sheer awesomeness of Mario 64 was able to carry it for a lot of people. It's easy to forget that the Virtual Boy had debuted a year earlier (many people deliberately try to forget the Virtual Boy), and the first major failure on Nintendo's part no doubt shook the confidence of many fans.

For the record, of the "Missing in Action" list at the bottom: Body Harvest came out in October 1998, Buggie Boogie was cancelled, Ken Griffey became Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr and shipped May 1998, Goldeneye shipped August 1997, and Mario Kart 64 hit February 1997. The N64's early library was kind of a mess.

Presented here: The aforementioned shaken confidence, in convenient pie chart form. It's strange to see how few were willing to wait it out; either you were with Nintendo or against them. Then again, this was a survey conducted on the Internet in 1996, a harsh realm where refraining from making a rushed yet definitive judgment was a sign of weakness.

Elsewhere, Sega had their own problems, replacing the much anticipated Sonic X-Treme with a Saturn port of the unpleasant Sonic 3D Blast. Later, they cancelled X-Treme altogether. Also, how the hell did Wipeout XL get to be more anticipated than Final Fantasy VII?

On Sony's side, rumblings began over the mysterious and exciting Playstation 2. Sure, the PS2 ended up selling 111 million units worldwide, but just imagine how many more they would've sold if it still had a chipset called Highlander instead of Emotion Engine. If you'd like to compare the rumored specs to the final, the PS2 Wikipedia entry has many letters and numbers arranged in such ways as to be meaningful to some.

Onward and upward to five years ago and the Japanese Gamecube launch, of which EGM paints a less than rosy picture. The Gamecube was the first Nintendo console to launch without a Mario, and that undoubtedly had some effect on sales. Note that the Cube launched in Japan in September and in the US in November, and all told Nintendo planned to have 2.2 million units shipped out worldwide by the end of the year. They plan to ship almost twice that before the end of the year for the Wii.

Of course, there was one other issue that effected the Japanese Cube launch, and that was the September 11th attacks just three days prior. This page isn't really related to launches of any kind, I just threw it in as a reminder of how things changed in the wake of the event.

The supposed "minor" edits of GTA3 included changing the police car color scheme from NYPD to LAPD and the removal of Darkel, a "revolutionary urchin" who was to give you some of the darker, more.. well, more terrorist-y missions. I think that may mark the first use of the word "terrorist-y", I'd like that noted for the record.

Metal Gear Solid 2 also removed a scene of Arsenal Gear crashing through buildings in New York, and Propeller Arena was cancelled completely, not seeing the light of day until a disc image was leaked years later.

EGM had a long feature comparing the Xbox to the Gamecube, but I didn't scan it all because most of it's pretty obvious to us now -- which system has online, what the games look like, etc. But I've put up the last page, where each editor explains which console they chose and why. In the end, EGM picked the Xbox as the "winner" for which console you should pick up at launch if you can only get one. To be honest, I think both systems had a long suckage drought during their early years -- the Gamecube had no software, and the Xbox had a lot of software but it was all crap.

I think Nintendo has, at least in part, learned from their past mistakes with the Wii. It's important that people seem to be excited about the system itself and its possbilities, whereas people mainly looked to the N64 and especially the Gamecube as that thing you had to get to play Mario and Zelda. How well Nintendo's little experiment will work out is still unknown, but I'd say they've got a much better chance than they've had in the last ten years.