It always amused me when I read comments like "Nintendo would have died during the N64 period without Pokémon" which parrot a baseless perception caused by PS1 outselling handily N64 and the absolutely huge success of Pokémon.
However if we look at Nintendo financials and first-party software sales it's easy to conclude that Nintendo wasn't in danger to become unprofitable during that period of time.
In fact while Pokémon was absolutely huge, Nintendo kept selling a lot of other games.
A few years ago I was curious to somewhat quantify how much was Pokémon impact on Nintendo back in the '90s (at the peak of Pokémon craze) and since I had the complete million seller list, which as I previously stated can give a good approximation on Nintendo first-party sales, I decided to run the calculation to find how much Pokèmon games units sold represented of the total units sold by Nintendo games.
I only took the Nintendo published games (that sold more than 1 million) released between 1996 (when Pokémon was released in Japan, in US Pokémon would land only in 1998 while in Europe in 1999) and 2001 (year of demise of both N64 and GB/C) on N64 and GB/C.
Between 1996 and 2001 Pokèmon games represented about 12% of the entire Nintendo software sold on N64, the rest of the first-party software sales (about 88%) was composed by other Nintendo games.
Between 1996 and 2001 Pokèmon games represented about 75% of the entire Nintendo software sold on GB/C, the rest of the first-party software sales (about 25%) was composed by other Nintendo games.
Combining both the Nintendo software sales (only million sellers) on N64 and GB/C between 1996 and 2001 Pokémon games represented about 43% of the entire Nintendo software sales, the rest of the first-party software sales (about 57%) was composed by other Nintendo games.
These statistics show that Pokèmon was indeed huge for Nintendo but at the same time Nintendo was already selling big quantities of other games.
Of course these statistics based on "unit sold" can't highlight parameters like profitability, revenue, earning from merchandising and other collateral effects but I thought it was still interesting and worth to share with the community.