Almost 10 years ago, the consumer electronics world was upended by two inventions in the space of a couple of months. The first was Nintendo's Wii, released in November 2006, which pioneered a new way of playing video games that brought the industry away from its roots as a pursuit for children, teenagers and young adults, and towards a living room family activity.
With its innovative wand-style controller and games like Wii Sports that were easy to pick up and play for just a few minutes, it went on to sell over 100 million units and became the best-selling console of its generation.
Just two months after the Wii's release, Steve Jobs stood up on stage at a special event in California and unveiled the iPhone. Its multi-touch interface was, like the Wii's remote, unique for its industry. And of course, it also went on to become a best-seller.
A decade later, the iPhone is still here but Nintendo's Wii is barely hanging on. The console's successor, the Wii U, has sold a fraction of the earlier product, and looks set to be ditched in the coming months.
Nintendo has Apple to blame for a lot of this. The casual gamers that the Japanese company so successfully captured in the Wii's early days have not gone away, but are instead playing games on their smartphones and tablets, the industry that Apple created.
Games such as Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans became the new Wii Sports, creating massively successful companies such as King Digital, recently acquired by Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn (pounds 4.5bn) and Finland's Supercell, valued at $10.2bn.
Meanwhile, Nintendo has stuttered. Poor sales of the Wii U, which launched with a less-than-inspiring roster of games, have led it to post successive annual losses, and its share price fell to a level one sixth of its 2007 high. A generation of gamers still profess to have a place in their hearts for the company's iconic characters - Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong - but they have not shown it with their wallets.
Nintendo trod water for years. Fans clamoured for it to develop games for the smartphone, where it could build a new legion of players, but the 127-year-old company, steeped in Japanese tradition, prevaricated. Like Apple, Nintendo has always made a point of controlling both the hardware and the software of its products, and while it continued to develop critically acclaimed games only for its own consoles, the world began to leave it behind. Satoru Iwata, chief executive until his death last year, summed up the strategy. "If we did this," he said in 2011 about the prospect of making mobile games, "Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo."
So last week, at another of Apple's events, the image of Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese company's hallowed design chief, announcing that a Mario game would finally come to the iPhone was a tremendous moment. Even as Apple unveiled a new iPhone, Miyamoto's cameo drew one of the most frenzied responses of the event and the following day Nintendo's shares rose 13pc.
It has been clear for some time that Nintendo was finally getting interested in the small screen. Last year it signed a deal with DeNA, a Japanese mobile developer, to bring games to the iPhone, and released its first - a social network-type game called Miitomo - earlier this year.
Then came this summer's wild success of Pokemon Go, which rebooted the 20-year-old franchise and has been downloaded by more than 500 million people. Although the game was not developed by Nintendo but two affiliated companies, it showed definite potential.
None the less it was unclear exactly how grand the Japanese group's mobile ambitions were, and the real test of whether Nintendo was serious would be whether one of its most popular characters like Mario would get an outing on the smartphone. Wednesday night's demo Super Mario Run, in which the portly plumber somersaults through a world of green pipes and Koopa Troopas, finally made it clear. It will be instantly familiar to those of us who whiled away their childhood evenings in the warm glow of a Game Boy.
"There was a time when Nintendo's platforms were the most popular in the world; now we see smartphones are the most popular device in the world," Miyamoto told The Daily Telegraph.
The pressing matter now is whether Nintendo can make it a success. Since the launch of the iPhone App Store, the smartphone games industry has been both incredibly lucrative and fickle.
Companies such as OMGPop and Rovio, the creators of previous hits Draw Something and Angry Birds respectively, have risen and fallen almost overnight. Even Pokemon Go has become stale for many.
But Nintendo, with its legacy of repeated hits and infinite capacity for nostalgia, will probably avoid such a fate with its own creations. That millions of people will pay for a Mario iPhone game is as close to a nailed-on bet as you can get.
The other question is whether the compromise will cannibalise what exists of Nintendo's remaining business, which is still healthy, at least in terms of its handheld consoles.
For answers, we could look again to Apple, which wrestled with a similar question in 2002 when Steve Jobs decided to allow a new version of the iPod to work with Windows, as well as Apple's own Mac.
The result was a huge leap in sales that set Apple on course to become the company it is today. Nintendo can only hope for a similar revival, but at least it has made a step in the right direction.