While there have been a great many triumphs written about video games (the first game developed jointly by MIT and Harvard; the wild success of Pong at a rather seedy bar in Sunnyvale, CA; the Golden Age of Videogames; and the growing prominence of video games over screen-based entertainment mediums), there of course had to be failures and the Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) was the beginning of Nintendo's downfall. This is a book about Nintendo, and how it lived the "16-bit console wars" that saw it go from being the undisputed industry leader in the 8-bit generation of consoles with more than a 90% market share in 1989 to a marginally leading top player with a 60% share of the video game market at the end of the 16-bit console war, and all the way down to its Nintendo 64 selling a little less than one-third as many units as Sony's dominating PlayStation console. (Malik 1997) Ultimately, it is a critical history of Nintendo's fall from grace, from the height of a period I dub the ReNESsance (1985-1990) all the way down to the Nintendo Dark Age (1996-2006).