>>11981890
>How did the Nintendo 64 have such a successful launch and yet still fail?
Well first off I'd point out that the N64 didn't really fail in the US, it was nearly 1:1 as popular as the proceeding Super Nintendo, North American accounted for almost 2/3rds of all N64 sales. It's in Europe and Japan where the N64 crashed and burned and anytime you see someone confused about why "the N64 has so much nostalgia" they are pretty much always European.
>NA: 20.63 million
>JP: 5.54 million
>EU/AU: 6.75 million
The big question is what caused the massive fall off in non US sales.

Most 3rd parties prioritizing Sony did not help and Japan's most popular genre, JRPG's, skipping the system was a death blow. Also the Japanese PlayStation got a lot more games than the US one, a ton never made it over here including a lot of arcade games, the N64's library on the other hand was smaller there than in the West... and it was already pretty small in the West.
As for Europe I guess at a few reasons. First off Nintendo was less entrenched there than the US and Japan, Micro Computers and Sega were bigger names. Second, the PlayStation had quite the head start launching in September 95 not far behind the US launch, the N64 didn't show up until March 97 and with only a handful of games while Sony was well established.
So I guess the last question is why did the N64 keep it's popularity in the US? Part of it was just the massive child population of the US and Nintendo's reputation as the kid friendly console. Another is that the US was rich enough that buying 2 consoles was not uncommon, a lot of people had both. The N64 was the 4 player party console and snowball rolling down a hill tends to grow, lots of people went over to their friends, played Mario Kart, Smash, Goldeneye, ect, and had to get one for themselves even if they had a PlayStation. Finally, unlike Japan, losing the JRPG and Arcade markets was not as big of a hit and a lot of popular US franchises made the jump.