Over all, at this point in time, my feelings toward Nintendo are a net positive.
I have a long history with Nintendo. I was born in the mid seventies. When arcade games started creeping into supermarkets, and not just pizza parlors and seedy arcades, Nintendo's games were some of the most vibrant offerings: both colorful and musical, loud bell-like tones advertising the presence of games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. to the world. Later, I played the arcade version of Super Mario Bros/ in a bowling alley not far from my elementary school while my parents ran errands; it was one of the most grand and sweeping games that I had ever played, and that the stages were advertised as "worlds" rather than "levels" seemed like more than just hyperbole.
Despite this, I never owned an NES. I occasionally coveted one; there was an enormous demo booth for the systems at a nearby mall. But I owned an Atari 2600 in the eighties, and a Commodore 64 later; the latter was probably better in terms of my long-term education, frankly. No one ever practiced typing on the NES, as far as I'm aware.
Later, two different friends had an SNES and a Sega Genesis. Reading through video game magazines of the time, I began to take a rather dim view of Nintendo. Their licensing fees for cartridges were high, their standards for what they would agree to license often harsh and even seemingly unfair. Accusations of price-fixing didn't help, and the blatant censoring of violence in games like Mortal Kombat seemed to reinforce the idea that Nintendo both distrusted their customers (who they seemed to view as only children) and was more than willing to exploit them to maximize their own profits.
I still played on my friend's SNES, of course, but I didn't covet one of my own (in part because by then I had moved on to PCs, or as they were called at the time, IBM PC compatibles.)
I half lost track of Nintendo for a while as they seemed to stumble over the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube. At a certain point I began hearing good things about the Nintendo DS and the interesting things Nintendo was doing with touch-screen gameplay. I purchased a DSi, and still have it to this day, a fine companion for long plane trips and a refreshing change of pace residing between the ham-handed controls of many phone and tablet games and the long minutes of loading and title screens of many PC releases.
I first played on a Wii in New Zealand, now the father of a four-year-old girl. It was different; it was a statement that games should be fun, physical, intuitive, social, public. A couple of years later, with my family returned to the United Staes, we purchased one for Christmas, in part convinced that the array of dance and exercise games meant that it could be a net positive to our household.
My daughter is soon to be a teenager, and she has a 3DS which is hers alone. We have a Wii-U, mostly used for watching Netflix, though we still play on it together as a family. Nintendo has made its share of mis-steps in the current generation, for sure- but it's still possibly the best system for a family or group of friends to gather around to play on together.
As I said elsewhere, Nintendo's stance on Youtube videos bothers me. And I wish they would figure out how to make the whole third-party software thing work for them; between the Wii's shovelware and the Wii-U's abandonment by most of the AAA publishers, it seems to be something big N just can't quite get to work.
But on the other hand, Iwata refused to downsize loyal employees to appease the bean-counters. And Shigeru Miyamoto is possibly the genius of the medium; while the Wrights, Molyneuxs, Camaracks and Romeros have all had significant stumbles and mis-steps, Miyamoto just keeps making games, keeps moving forward. Even on systems that were arguably themselves failures, his work continues to shine.
So I hope they can carry on; better yet, that they can mostly ignore the pressure of twerps like Pachter to follow the crowd into the mouth of micropayment-dominated game play and shallow social media tie-ins. I don't think it's an exaggeration to suggest that even if you aren't yourself a Nintendo "fan", per se, you should still recognize that their presence on the market, their way of doing things, is a positive force in the competitive and creative arenas, just in showing that there's more than one way things can be done.
