"Yamauchi admitted at the 2001 Nintendo Space World event that he had intentionally ordered the Nintendo 64 to be difficult to program games for. The idea was to repel untalented third-party developers from the console, and hence tighten the quality of third-party games. However, his plan backfired and merely increased the number of poorly developed games for the console. As a result of this, the Nintendo Gamecube was to take a step in the other direction, and provide an easy, smooth and intuitive programming environment for game developers.[6][9]"
It would have been interesting to see Yamauchi-san carry on through the Wii and Wii U/3DS eras -- what would he have done differently than Iwata? (On a side-note about the Crash, E.T. gets shit on a lot when it's arguably not so bad a game and ahead of its time in many respects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NgL5H2RdI4 with fixes for common complaints: http://www.neocomputer.org)/projects/et/)