Coasting Rabbits

So the History of Nintendo does get better with its typos, and certainly nothing of the calibur of that first entry has shown up. Yet.

Anyway, as someone who's at least got some background knowledge of Nintendo's consoles and video games over the years (I've been playing video games since I was 4, after all), seeing and reading about their toys has been pretty amazing.

Curiously their biggest success - the Ultra Hand - has just had some cameo appearances in a few minigames sold mostly via Club Nintendo [confirm/check availability]. Yet, another of their great works, the Rabbit Coaster, where a bunch of little weighted bags are raced down a set track, has seen a little more exposure in mainstream games. Let me go out on a limb here.

Mario Party 1 and 2 and Nintendo Land feature slot car racing minigames. As far as this book has explained, Nintendo never released their own slot cars (unless they did so after 1980...), and so I'm going to go ahead and guess that modern slot car minigames in Nintendo games are call backs to one of their greatest hit toys - the Rabbit Coaster.

In general though, it seems like Nintendo rehashed a lot of its old ideas when they got into making video games. Or, at the least, all of their experience with toys and the like prepared them to simply walk into the console business.

I mean, from the range of games and the like that they had - almost all of which were released in "mini" travel-sized versions, I might add (hello stone age Game Boy predecessors) - they definitely would have had a strong sense of how interactive entertainment could best be pulled off.