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Despite the 64's outstanding debut, Nintendo is in for a fierce fight against Sony's PlayStation and Sega's Saturn. While Nintendo has produced just five games for the 64, Sony boasts 150 and Sega close to 200. As a result, the product's full market reception won't be clear until after the holidays, when the mass consumer audience, as opposed to the perpetually tech-starved early adopters, decides whether to offer Mario's latest incarnation an honored place beneath the collective American Christmas tree, or whether he'll be supplanted by titles for PlayStation. "It depends whether you want quality or quantity," says Jeff Lundrigan of gaming magazine Next Generation. "Nintendo's betting on quality."
Whoever wins, though, the Nintendo 64 appears to have served one great purpose, at least temporarily reversing the market trend away from game machines and thereby rescuing this industry from the dustbin of entertainment history. Retail video-gaming sales for the calendar year 1995, including hardware and software, were $3.1 billion, down 13% from 1994, according to Ed Roth of New York's NPD Group.
Through September, by contrast, the industry was up 9.3% for 1996, with September alone accounting for a 40% gain from last year--a trend Roth expects only to accelerate in '97: "Interest in video games has seemed to be waning, and some of it was going over to the PC." Nintendo has helped change all that; while early figures this year had finally shown a 50-50 market-share split between entertainment software for game machines and that for PCs, the dawn of the 64 appears to have returned the numbers to a 65-35 video-game lead. "The video game," concludes Roth, "is still the No. 1 platform for entertainment software."
What's more important, this new boon is being delivered not by a $3,500 PC but by a $200 game player. Yet another suite of machines that's getting a lot of press this year is the "network computer," a stripped-down, sub-$1,000 "information appliance" that will, in theory, bring the wonders of the Net home to millions of users who either can't afford a PC or simply don't want to assume the headaches of actually using one. NCs, according to the hype from its promoters, are computers for the two-thirds of all American homes that have refused to join the PC revolution. Which leaves Nintendo...where, exactly? Just getting itself installed into hundreds of thousands of homes, precisely the families NC makers want so badly to reach.