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While not an exact example, it matches GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." The idea is that you find widely understood tech, which is inexpensive due to its widespread use in other areas, and find a way to use it in making games. Everything from using calculator LED displays for the Game & Watch to using an accelerometer in a Wii Remote follows that principle.

Sourcing a bunch of inexpensive parts and throwing together something like the NES Classic Edition to fill the gap in an otherwise Nintendo-less holiday season seems to fit that mantra.

Yokoi made some of the first toys (for personal enjoyment, out of spare parts in a factory) which, when Nintendo's young president Yamauchi saw them, convinced him to really commit to the consumer toy space.

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Cellphone screens for VR is a more recent example of this.

Yeah, but it seems like Nintendo could just move to a slightly newer SoC (say the Allwinner H3) with the same software stack and keep putting these out at a $2 premium to cover the more expensive SoC.

A similar board to what was in the NES Classic, the OrangePi One, is $9.99 retail, and I'm sure Nintendo could put in under 20hrs of work total to add what they need to the board and stay within a dollar or two of that board's price point.

20 hours of work? Are you kidding me? You are going to need to spin the PCB, re-validate signal integrity, deal with the situation of purchasing over 100k of the part, re-tool your manufacturing setup, make whatever software changes are required and re-validate SW, and probably a whole lot of other things.

These are the same kind of delusional people who think Twitter is a weekend project.

And in LED projectors.

The only question is why aren't there chinese made FullHD LED projectors in the cheaper price range?

Maybe as people still buy the 320x200, 800x400 and HD (1280x800) LED projectors. It would take one chinese manufacturer to change the cycle, if he releases a 1920x1080 FullHD LED projector for $300 or less.

>an accelerometer in a Wii Remote

I don't think this is the best example, accelerometers were not a cheap common part at the time. The Wii predates the iPhone, MEMS accelerometers were not anywhere near as widely deployed as they are now and they cost an order of magnitude or two more.

I can remember hobbyists buying Wii Remotes after launch just to rip out the sensors :)

IMO, perfect example is the B&W LCD on the original DMG Gameboy. A generation behind the competition, but cheap and low-power for the time.

The Wii Remote is more an example of Iwata's Blue Ocean strategy.

The rest of the Wii hardware however..

A Gamecube with an extra chip...

Exactly, nobody said that proven and established hardware couldn't be your own hardware after all

The Wii was one of the projects where another company came to them with an idea (of motion controls), IIRC.

Definitely not as widely deployed as now, but I believe they were widespread in laptops to allow shutoff of harddrives during fall detection.

and that's why Nintendo hardware is a letdown -- instead of designing ideal experiences, they take solutions and go hunting for problems.

But are the games a letdown? That's probably the question you need to ask...

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