Nintendo Wants to Punch Apple in the Mouth.

For the first quarter in over six years, the Japanese giant, Nintendo, lost money. Heads have to roll! It looks like they may have declared war upon Apple, since apparently, they’ve already defeated Sony.

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, is believed to have told his senior executives recently the war on Sony is victory. Time to focus on Apple, its iPhone and iPad devices, as the “enemy of the future”.

Last Christmas, almost twice as many Wii consoles were sold in the US as the PlayStation3. But games developers increasingly see Sony’s machine as having a large enough base of users to justify not making titles for the Nintendo machine. After all, the Wii hardware isn’t nearly as fast or badass as Sony’s.

So, Nintendo is at a fork in the road. What do they do? Do they create a Nintendo Phone? Do they get in the app business?

The world in 2010 is much different than 2006 when the Wii arrived on the scene.

Both Sony and Microsoft are getting into the more family-friendly gaming genre. But when you look at what is starting to take away from the profits, is the foothold that Apple is getting with it’s app store. Most people would rather carry around a bad ass smartphone instead of a Nintendo DS, although my 8 year old is begging me for a Nintendo 3DS, when it arrives on the scene.

To me, Nintendo is nostalgia. It has had a nice run. But unless it finds away to capture our imagination again and sucker us into some new ecosystem of awesome, I think Nintendo becomes irrelevant. So, they’d better have their eyes toward Apple. In my opinion, they should have taken notice 3 years ago. Methinks it may be too late.