I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360)

Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!

Certainly the N64 (immediately prior to Gamecube) was supposed to be super high tech. They actually stressed the partnership with SGI in the marketing, and literally named the console after the word size of its CPU. In retrospect the former was pretty weird, since the public would not have known that name or anything.

Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.

The 90s console wars were all about bits, even though no one knew what it meant other than "more bits = better". It was really Sega that started the bit-wars, releasing the Genesis while Nintendo was still selling the NES. They were very successful with getting kids to compare how powerful their console was to Nintendo's by slapping a giant "16-BIT" front-and-center on the top of the console and mentioning it in all the advertising. And that kinda stuck around for years.

Most of those kids didn't know what 64-bit meant, but they knew it must be better than their old 16-bit piece of junk. That's 4x the amount of bits, therefore the console was 4x better!

It was NEC that started the bit wars with the PC Engine in Japan. They heavily marketed its graphics as 16-bits, to have a quick way to explain the quality improvements over the Famicom.

> Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition

It gets forgotten about because it didn’t sell all that well and because the tiny little 1.8GB discs kept most of the multi-platform blockbusters off it, but the GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 (though not as powerful as the Xbox).

There was an amazing effort post back when G4TV forums existed explaining why GC was on par or better than xbox using examples like Rogue Squadron and technical details. The main issue was that third party games didn't exist or were low effort ports to GC.

I wish I knew how to find the text of that post. The G4TV forums seem erased from history.

> I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360)

I think that's when they really started leaning into it again, but Gunpei Yokoi (Gameboy inventor) was a big proponent of the idea, which he called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology". So it's been a part of Nintendos design process for a while before that.

It was fairly true for the NES and SNES generations as well. Each used a CPU five years old by then and a RAM size that was common in computers eight years prior. Really, for only the N64 console generation did Nintendo ever try to outdo its competitors on hardware specs.

What was the competition though? The NES pretty much single-handedly revitalized the home console market after the video game crash of 1983 by marketing it as a toy that happened to hook into a TV (R.O.B. the Robot, the light gun, all sold together), so it didn't really have any competition. Sega ended up slipping a 16-bit machine to market before Nintendo by a couple years with the Genesis, but the Genesis and SNES were directly competing for each of their respective lifespans, and both were fairly comparable, each having their own advantages in different areas.

I suppose you could compare to the Neo Geo which was far superior technically, but it was at such a high price point that it never made much of a dent in the market. That generation was pretty much defined by the SNES and Genesis.

There were also the Atari consoles. The 7800 was contemporary with the NES with slightly better specs, there was also the XEGS, and the Panther was in development at the same time as the SNES before it was cancelled for the Jaguar instead. They all flopped in the market, of course, but Nintendo didn't know that would happen while developing theirs, but they kept their hardware simple rather than ultimately overreaching like the Jaguar.

It doesn't matter how the NES compared to computers, because computers cost much more. Also, less RAM is required if the program is on a cartridge.

I'd argue that first time Nintendo exhibited that mentality was with GameBoy.

I think their Game and Watch systems show it too.

Not always, the N64 was more powerful and more expensive (Game carts) than the competition. So was the GameCube (It was more powerful than the PS2).

Maybe the cpu was more powerful (honestly idk) but the low memory of the N64 limited the textures and video features (never saw any video in an N64 game) in the games (see how flat texture-wise the textures of Mario64 are).

Iconic meaning no new IP, just nostalgia hacking.