It was Christmas morning 1986. I remember it was bitter cold outside with sleet making the roads more treacherous by the minute. Luckily for us, we were hosting Christmas at our house that year.
Under the tree were stacks upon stacks of presents, no different than any other year. I’m sure there were GI JOE toys, maybe some LEGOs, storybooks, and clothes, but my attention and my brother’s was squarely focused on the large rectangular package near the back of the pile. We knew what it was, not because we snooped (though we probably did), but because our parents always spoiled us rotten on Christmas and birthdays. We weren’t a wealthy family or anything, but they always went all-out. Our parents handed us gift after gift, discarding crumpled and torn wrapping paper into a large trash bag, and we said our thank yous until finally my dad lifted that giant box and handed it to my brother.
It was technically his gift, though he was instructed to share it with me. He tore the wrapping paper off and was greeted with a robotic visage haloed in purple light. Rushing to his room, we hooked the NES Deluxe Set up to to his television – the Atari 2600 in the living room already a relic of the past – and tried in vain to figure out Gyromite with our Robotic Operating Buddy. We were amazed by the graphics, which looked light years beyond what the Atari was capable of, and the music, and even by the robot’s ability to interact with the game (as slow as he was). We weren’t very good at it, unfortunately (until a while later when we realized we didn’t need the robot and we could operate the giant buttons without him or his gyros). Plugging in Duck Hunt and the gray Zapper, the whole family took turns shooting ducks, amazed by the realistic quacking sound, and trying to shoot that damn dog every time he laughed at us. Two games in and we already forgot about the dozens of 2600 carts we had.
But that wasn’t all. Three more wrapped packages contained Baseball, 10-Yard-Fight, and Super Mario Bros. My brother, ever the sports gamer, was ecstatic for Baseball. We had seen the commercials on TV, and it was what made him want the system in the first place. I had to admit, it was pretty cool and a far better representation of the sport than the Atari had been capable of, but I was becoming a little impatient. It was his gift, but I wanted to see Super Mario Bros.!
I waited and waited for what seemed like an eternity until he finally slid that cart into the system, and from the moment he turned the power on I was hooked for life. The Atari had introduced me to video games, and arcades were awesome, but this was different. This wasn’t just a diversion. This was a game with amazing graphics, bright colors, unforgettable music, complex gameplay – and a story (however simple it may have been)! It was a new world come to life. The black backgrounds and block walls of Atari games had been replaced by bright blue sky, red bricks that broke apart when you hit them, flashing question mark blocks, and distinguishable enemies with facial expressions. There was music and complex sound effects, not just simple beeps, bloops, and buzzes. It was a revelation, and it was right there in my home.
The NES introduced me to platformers as we know them today. I had experienced single-screen games like Donkey Kong in the arcades, but the concept of sidescrolling run and jump games was new to me. The NES introduced me to RPGs with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Both games influenced my love of fantasy and directly led to my interest in Dungeons & Dragons several years later. The artwork in both games was so stunning that I took to drawing each and every enemy in both games for homemade strategy guides in spiral notebooks. The NES allowed me to play some of my favorite arcade games at home. They weren’t completely accurate, but they were much better representations than the Atari versions I was used to.
A console is defined by its games and the NES’ legacy is vast. Everyone knows Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and Contra. All but the last of those franchises effectively started life on the NES and went on to become legendary. But there was a plethora of hidden gems – games like Rare’s R.C. Pro-Am, speedboat racer Cobra Triangle, adventure/platformer A Boy and His Blob, ports of Infocom’s MacVenture titles Shadowgate, Déjà Vu, and Uninvited, and anime-inspired action in Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode.
No matter what you were into, the NES had something for you. There were plenty of sports titles for people like my brother, even though most of them leaned towards arcade-style gameplay than being pure simulations. There were arcade classics like Pac-Man, Paperboy, and Millipede. There were shoot ‘em ups like Gradius, Lifeforce, and Legendary Wings. There were puzzle games like Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Pipe Dream. There were even ports of PC games like King’s Quest V, Archon, and Pool of Radiance.
As the system became more and more popular, stores began to realize video games had become lucrative again. Video rental stores began renting Nintendo games. I still remember the morning my local store, a Mammoth Video, began renting them. My mom let me skip school as a reward for my good grades and we headed to the store minutes after they opened, intent on renting Gauntlet. I had pored over the spread in the debut issue of Nintendo Power magazine and I couldn’t wait to get home with my copy. Less than ten minutes after opening, we arrived to find the shelves picked clean of all but one game – Deadly Towers. I looked at the cool armor-clad warrior on the cover and thought, “This couldn’t be too bad.” Oh, how naïve I was. For those who aren’t familiar, Deadly Towers is universally reviled as one of the worst games ever made. I couldn’t even figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and I didn’t even keep the game for the full two day rental period.
I remember the night our dad surprised us with a copy of the newly released Ice Hockey, and the Christmas when my parents somehow managed to secure a copy of Super Mario Bros. 2. I had spent weeks poring over the inaugural issue of Nintendo Power, drooling over every screenshot, and being the spoiled brat I was, I was crushed when all my presents appeared to be opened and Mario 2 wasn’t among them. Then my dad reached deep into the hallway closet and produced one final package. Leaving my house to attend the family get-together was never harder. I remember buying Bases Loaded at Kay-Bee Toys and marveling at the early digitized graphics and sound, declaring that “graphics will never get better than this!”
In those days, being a gamer wasn’t fashionable or nerd-chic – it was just nerdy, and a lot of gamers were seen as social outcasts. We had our own cliques though. We would often trade games temporarily, and recesses were usually spent discussing hidden secrets or new games. Two decades before online play became commonplace, social gaming meant sitting side-by-side with a friend and passing the controller back and forth – unless you had one of the amazing simultaneous two-player games like Contra or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game.
Nintendo became a cultural phenomenon. Mario (and The Legend of Zelda’s Link) graced cereal boxes, underwear, bed sheets, and appeared in several TV shows, including a live-action one starring retired professional wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano as the mustachioed mascot himself. Mario became as recognizable as Mickey Mouse, even to people who’d never played a video game before. By the time Super Mario Bros. 3 came out, the television spot where legions of gamers shouted his name while the camera zoomed out to reveal the plumber’s face covering the earth wasn’t too far from the truth. The game was so in-demand that my brother had to quell a near-riot at the toy store he worked at after they sold out and irate customers started chanting “burn the store down!” The video game section of any given toy store had turned into the “Nintendo” section. Grandparents and parents referred to video games as “Nintendo,” regardless of who made them. If you were one of the few kids with a Sega Master System, you owned a “Nintendo” as far as they were concerned. The term just became synonymous with “video games.”
It wasn't long before many stores realized there was also a growing market for second-hand carts. If you had a local comic book or record store near you, chances are they carried used Nintendo games. For me, that store was Flipside Records in Clawson, MI, where loose carts could be purchased for $8 each. This was perfect for a kid with a $10 allowance. We had already been frequent customers of the store, thanks to their selection of music bootlegs, and the owner was kind enough to let me try out the games before spending my hard-earned allowance. My childhood best friend and I even offered to do odd jobs for neighbors to earn extra cash for more games.
If the NES had one failing it’s that it wasn’t built to last. Due to the unorthodox nature of its cartridge slot, the connector pins inside the machine would often bend to the point where the system couldn’t make contact with the PCB inside the cart. This led to the famous – some might say infamous – blowing trick. Frustrated by blinking screens, children would naturally assume dust was the problem and took to blowing inside the cart (and sometimes the system), never realizing that the moisture could (and would) eventually corrode the cartridge and the internal connection further. But hey, it seemed to work, and kids are all about results. These days, educated gamers know how to properly care for their cartridges and consoles, and pin connectors are easily replaced for systems that are simply too worn out. I still cringe a little every time I see an employee at a game shop blow into a cartridge though.
To combat this problem, Nintendo eventually revised the NES’ design. The top-loader is much smaller, though the large cartridges still make it tall when inserted, but considerably more reliable. Due to the cartridge slot’s more standard design, the connector pins are much harder to bend and the 10NES lockout chip, which aimed to prevent companies from releasing NES games without Nintendo’s approval and hardware, was removed entirely. It also came with a redesigned controller, similar in form to the Super NES pads, affectionately referred to as “the dogbone.” Released after the Super Nintendo had gone to market, the top-loader is now something of a collector’s item but it’s not without its own issues. To keep manufacturing costs down, Nintendo eliminated the composite video output from the system, opting for RF-only connections. The cheaper quality of the internal hardware also resulted in noticeable jail bars on the screen. Some of these issues could be alleviated by running the system through a VCR that output through standard composite (yellow, red, white cables) video, but the vertical lines still plagued the video signal. Nintendo did release a very small amount of top-loaders with composite output, mostly to customers who called their service line. Today, these systems are incredibly rare and expensive, though a standard top-loader can be fairly easily modded by hobbyists at a cheaper cost.
With a library of nearly 800 games, the Nintendo Entertainment System excelled at entertaining. It remains one of the most beloved and culturally significant gaming consoles ever produced to this day. It solidified Nintendo as the dominant force in the fledgling gaming industry. Atari and Sega both attempted to compete with the NES, and both failed miserably – at least until the following console generation when Sega’s aggressive marketing took Nintendo by surprise. At one point, Nintendo accounted for 10% of all of Wal-Mart’s profit. They completely revived an industry everyone had written off as a fad that’s time had come and gone, and video gaming hasn’t been the same since. It was far from the first gaming console, but it really was the one that birthed the hobby as we know and love it today.
Comments