Nintendo video game consoles
Although the company had earlier released Color TV Game and Game & Watch, which were their first and second systems respectfully, they did not achieve worldwide success until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1983. The NES restarted the video game industry after the video game crash of 1983, and was an international success. In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, which became the first handheld console to sell in large numbers. In the early 1990s, Nintendo's market lead began to decrease; although the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was a strong seller, the Mega Drive/Genesis was a very strong contender. Nintendo and Sega would both lose a significant portion of the console market towards the end of the 1990s, as Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation became the most popular console, beating the Nintendo 64, though Nintendo managed to sell more than Sega Saturn.
Super Mario 64
More than five years prior to the release of "Super Mario 64", producer and director Shigeru Miyamoto conceived a 3D "Mario" design during the development of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game "Star Fox" (1993), developed by Nintendo along with Argonaut Software. He considered using the Super FX chip to develop a SNES game which would have been called "Super Mario FX", with gameplay based on "an entire world in miniature, like miniature trains". Instead, he eventually reformulated the 3D "Mario" idea for the Nintendo 64 - not due to the next generation console's substantially greater power, but because its controller has more buttons for gameplay. According to former Argonaut engineer Dylan Cuthbert, no game titled "Super Mario FX" had ever entered development, but rather "Super Mario FX" was the internal code name of the Super FX chip itself. According to Argonaut founder Jez San, "Super Mario 64" was influenced by a prototype of a canceled Argonaut game starring the "Mario" character Yoshi, which later became the 1997 platform game "".