The Nintendo 64: Nintendo's Adult Platform? The Dichotomy Of Nintendo And Children's Video Games

Introduction When the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996, TIME Magazine gave it the distinction of “Machine of the Year,” arguing that Nintendo had revitalized the somewhat stagnant video game console market of the 1990s, which had offered little more than incremental hardware upgrades and mostly unsuccessful add-on devices. In his enthusiastic end-of-year review of the console, TIME’s Michael Krantz contended that “Nintendo's marquee product will be the machine that most fully influences our children's introduction to the mind-boggling potential of digital technology,” and that the platform represented “the first glimpse of [the] future” of video game hardware (73).