Nintendo Has Something to Sell You

Nintendo 64GameCube

Looking for an Edge

History seemed to repeat itself when the Nintendo 64 arrived in 1996. The initial marketing was geared toward a new generation of young gamers, this time carrying the optimistic vision of the can-do attitude that followed the end of the Cold War.

“Yo, listen up, we will not live in a two-dimensional world. We won’t go in one direction or zig where we can zag,” a voice said in a television ad for the console’s premier release title, Super Mario 64, which emphasized the company’s shift to three-dimensional graphics. “We will be in control of something. We will change the system.”

Some ads from this era have aged poorly in their attempts to echo the edgy sitcom humor of the time. One commercial for Nintendo’s line of best-selling games — including Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64 — showed young boys looking through a peephole into the girls’ locker room. When an angry coach inspected the view, he found only a stack of monitors displaying video games in the showers.

In 2001, Nintendo opted for a more serious campaign to attract teenagers and young adults. The GameCube looked like a toy next to competitors like Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 2, requiring marketers to amplify its cool factor.

One of the resulting commercials was practically avant-garde. It included goth girls, formal dinnerware and bucket hats. Inside one glass cube, two samurai faced off; in another, a watercraft spun in circles. The camera jumped from scenes of older people slurping soup to men bobbing their heads in a convertible before concluding with an image of a half-naked man playing Pikmin in a luxury hotel and the slogan, “Life’s a game.”

This was a bold tagline for a disaffected audience, coming at the onset of the war on terrorism and the dashed hopes of globalization. Both the hardware and the commercials failed to resonate with audiences, however, leaving Nintendo with poor sales and good reason to reinvent itself in the next generation of consoles.

WiiWii U

Japanese Wonder

Investing more than $200 million into its advertising campaign, Nintendo hired the filmmaker Stephen Gaghan (“Traffic,” “Syriana”) to market the Wii in 2006 — not as the purveyor of futuristic technology geared almost exclusively to a male audience but as an export of Japanese imagination.

Arriving to the American suburbs via smart car in one ad, two salarymen rang the doorbell of a curious family. “We would like to play,” one of them said as they bow and present the Wiimote controller. Riffs from the electric guitar were replaced with the acoustic sounds of a Japanese biwa as the family learned to use the console’s innovative motion controls. The salarymen, having successfully reintroduced Nintendo to America, drove off into the sunset.

There was intense debate within Nintendo about releasing that commercial, according to a memoir by Reggie Fils-Aimé, the president of Nintendo of America at the time. In his book, the executive recalled having to convince his Japanese counterparts that it would not be considered inappropriate by Western audiences if businessmen approached a family’s home. He also persuaded leaders to package Wii Sports with the console for free in a successful effort to hook consumers.

The massive success of the Wii’s marketing campaign was followed in 2012 by the commercial failure of the Wii U, which Nintendo struggled to present as an entirely new console rather than a modest change. The console’s first commercials focused mainly on its controller’s functionality instead of actual games. It did not help that other ads referred to the Wii U as an upgrade, showcasing elaborate living room presentations where children tried to explain the difference to their parents.