The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013)

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday/

by tosh • 8 years ago

152 74 8 years ago

chriselles• 8 years ago

Interesting.

I distinctly remember a BIG gap in home video game systems between the death of Atari 2600 in the early 80’a and market acceptance of the NES in the mid-late 80’s.

Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

vidarh• 8 years ago

For most kids I knew the C64 was the dominant 'video games system' of that era. Consoles seemed dumb and limited. First time anyone I knew got a console was when the Nintendo64 came out.

In retrospect it seems these things were very regional and driven by network effects - a lot of my friends bought computers based on having friends they could copy or borrow from.

mieseratte• 8 years ago

Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

Reminds me I have / had a small graveyard of Ice Hockey cartridges. I got my start programming in the mid 00's doing homebrew NES dev, and Ice Hockey was a readily available, cheap cartridge with the NROM PCB layout

I still feel a little guilt for taking all those poor cartridges out of the world, and keep an old Ice Hockey PCB sans CHR and PRG ROMs on my desk as a totem / reminder.

sien2• 8 years ago

The NES is very significant.

But without it the Amiga kept gaming going happily. It was a great system. I remember the first time I saw an NES and the comparison to the Amiga wasn't great.

The Amiga had a lot of great games in the 1980s too. Kick Off, Speedball, Xenon, Marble Madness, Bubble Bobble, Populous, F18, F16 Falcon, the Lucasarts Adventure games.

occams_chainsaw• 8 years ago

How did it keep it going?

ekianjo2• 8 years ago

Yes, and much earlier than the SuperNES too, which came out quite late in comparison. As for the NES you could also take the C64 as a comparator that had a very decent library of original games too.

dleslie• 8 years ago

The Amiga wasn't nearly as influential in NA as it was in EU.

sien2• 8 years ago

Sure.

But it would have kept the industry going in the US as well.

Electronic Arts targeted the Amiga quite a bit.

As did Spectrum Holobyte.

orionblastar• 8 years ago

The Amiga CD32 was going to dominate the industry but had an IP suit against it.

When the Amiga 500 dropped below $300 in the USA it entered video console territory.

jacobush2• 8 years ago

CD32 was launched a bit late, but also marketed too little. Commodore was dying by then, too many business jets, too few financially sound decisions.

detritus• 8 years ago

That's not at all how I remember it - the CD32 was a last ditch effort, and one which whilst trying to maintain some sense of heritage (mainly in the awful styling - even at the time I wondered what they were doing) entirely misplaced the value of the Amiga in teenagers minds: creativity and piracy, neither of which were to be found.

For me the CD32 was a final confirmation that the haydays of my beloved Amiga were past.

At that point, I'd already seen Comanche running on a lowly office PC and knew that things were fast changing.

sametmax• 8 years ago

Yes but the nes was faster to setup, more child proof and had better joypad. Even without the fantastic games, it made a huge difference.

Keyframe• 8 years ago

Amiga 500, which launched the same year as NES was also 4 times the price of NES.

ekianjo2• 8 years ago

It would be great if we could stop glorifying Nintendo as if they were the only valid actor from some kind of dark ages of video games. It was just so NOT the case, having lived thru that time.

nsxwolf• 8 years ago

In the US console market? There was the Sega Master System, which I loved, but it didn’t make much of a dent here. What else was there? Atari XE and 7800?

Computer games never stopped - in fact they kept picking up steam during the crash. I know you said “video games” and not consoles but consoles had a huge impact on gaming.

bsaul• 8 years ago

you probably have this impression because of the time it took for nes to enter western market. I lived through that period as well and had a japaneese friend that had a famicom ( and pretty much everything that was released in japan, as soon as it was released). I was very much into computers and consoles , but i remember going to his appartment with a feeling of seeing something from the future.

Jeema101• 8 years ago

I feel like in the US it was. I still remember the first time I saw Super Mario Bros. at my friend's house. It's hard to overstate how mind blowing that game was to me as a kid after being exposed to mostly single-screen arcade and console games prior to that.

crtasm2• 8 years ago

Same clear memory for me too. We had a BBC Micro and some great games but Mario still stood out.

CM30• 8 years ago

In the US it saved the industry. Outside of the US computer games and mini computers were selling fine, and gaming was going through its own golden age (especially in the UK). Hell, even Japan offered more competition for the Famicom than the US did for the NES.

America is not the only place in the world, and the video game crash was not a worldwide phenomena.

bartread• 8 years ago

I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era in America, which were getting long in the tooth and were quite underpowered, especially (but not only) the Atari 2600. I get rather fed up of hearing people refer to it as a universal, industry destroying event.

The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were capable of running. People became bored of them.

There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving games.

By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different: here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory, and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more expensive.)

greggman• 8 years ago

I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game. Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month.

Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality

jdietrich3• 8 years ago

I think Nintendo's quality control gets too much credit. The European market was flooded with C64 and Spectrum games of wildly varying quality, but a) they were cheap and b) there were credible, independent games magazines. The European computer games market in the mid-80s wasn't too dissimilar from the PC games market of the mid-90s.

A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money.

Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games.

Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.

phire2• 8 years ago

The Japanese called it "Atari shock" and I suspect this is a much better name for the phenomenon.

It wasn't a problem with people getting sick of video games. It was a problem with Americans getting sick of the Atari 2600, other similar video game consoles and the distribution model of cartridges sold in toy stores

The sales of home computers in the US massively increased during the "video game crash", especially sales of the Commodore 64. I suspect those C64s spent the majority of their time playing video games, off floppy disks.

Nintendo must have done their market research, because they clearly identified the source of the problem and cleverly marketed the NES as "Not a video game console" and "Completely different from the Atari 2600".

pmarin• 8 years ago

In Spain the video game industry for microcomputers were doing really well with a very healthy internal market.

PhasmaFelis• 8 years ago

IIRC, the US desktop computer game market was also unaffected. It should be called "The great US console game crash of 1984."

GedByrne• 8 years ago

Exactly, the only video game Crash here in the UK was Newsfield’s magazine.

emodendroket4• 8 years ago

Alright, but the audience of this site is mostly American and the US is the largest market for games.

danmg• 8 years ago

Alternative perspective: the popularity of the NES in North America stopped the C64 from being the defacto gaming computer/console.

If they put more emphasis on releasing cartage based titles, bundled a game pad, and made the keyboard an accessory and got the timing right, it would have been a much better device to have in every living room in the 1980s and early 90s.

pjmlp2• 8 years ago

NES was mostly an US phenomenon I guess.

In Europe we were focused on ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, depending on the country, and then moved into a mix of PC, Atari and Amiga.

In Portugal the only games console that some kinds cared about were the Sega one's.

jacobush2• 8 years ago

NES was big in Europe too, but it was a bit of a rich kid thing. The games were expensive, 2 to 3 times as much as a computer game, plus I knew at least 20 kids with a home computer and maybe a handful of games were bought for them - in total, like Christmas presents and such. The rest, hundreds of titles, were copied.

szatkus• 8 years ago

In '90s there were also Pegasus and others which were just terrible clones of NES.

pinoyathletics• 8 years ago

I remember having a silver star which was looking back was a terrible console in general.

ionised2• 8 years ago

Nah, the NES was big in the UK too. Most kids I knew had one when I was young.

I had mine 'chipped' and could use this two-piece cartride that had like 3000 games on it. Most were awful clones or whatever but some were weird and wonderful.

pcardoso• 8 years ago

I guess it depended on your social circle.. :)

There were also lots of NES clones with 100+ games built-in, and they were big with my friends. They happily ran my US NES games. A bit slower than my US NES, but they didn't have the hassle of having to get a NTSC TV like I did...

I had my NES years before they were available here, but I knew they were sold in France at the time, at least.

The Megadrive/Genesis was also a big hit, no question about it.

pcurve• 8 years ago

Growing up in the 80s in Korea, NES wasn't big at all. Early to mid 80s console was mainly dominated by bootleg versions of Sega Master. Then in 1987, the NEC PC-Engine (turbographx16) came along and blew everything out of the water with its slick form factor. Then many jumped on the MegaDrive (Genesis). Good old days. :)

jayflux• 8 years ago

Seriously? Maybe this is a generation thing but I remember the opposite, the NES was big in the UK, they were everywhere.

pjmlp2• 8 years ago

Yep, on the 80's and 90's Iberian Peninsula I hardly saw NES on sale.

I migrated from a Timex 2068 (Spectrum clone) to PC 386 SX around 1991, but already used a couple of Amiga 500 at some demoscene meetings by then.

emodendroket4• 8 years ago

The Master System only really caught on in Europe and Latin America; in the US and Japan the NES was far more successful. They also had Japanese PC games, but they were on different, Japan-only machines that were capable of displaying Japanese characters and had a much larger portion of indie games and pornographic games.

digi_owl4• 8 years ago

Europe was a mixed bag, at least i have the impression that Nintendo was the big seller in the Nordics.

I knew several people, myself included, that had a NES, but only one that had a Master System. And i don't know of anyone that had a Gensis/Mega Drive, but again several with a SNES.

elboru• 8 years ago

In Mexico I never heard of Master System, my first console was a NES and it was not until the SEGA Dreamcast and PlayStation came out that I knew of other consoles. Nintendo had a monopoly over here.

jbverschoor• 8 years ago

Wow that thing looks an aweful lot like an MSX. Both the console, the cartridge and the joystick

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

I find notions of 'saving' things, particularly industries, to be disingenuous. If the NES flopped, or never existed, it's not like the console gaming industry would not exist. There is clearly a market for it and so we would simply have different names to recall as the 'saviors' of the industry. This is also why companies failing is not a bad thing, nor something that should aim to be avoided.

For instance with our massive automotive bailout. If these companies went out of business it might have been a rocky few years, but clearly there is a demand for vehicles and this would have created a vacuum enabling new companies, perhaps with more innovative ideas, to take their place. Instead we propped up a failing industry for no apparent gain. It could have even been detrimental in the longrun. Not all automobile companies were failing -- Hyundai-Kia were booming for instance. And had we let the dinosaurs go extinct it's entirely possible that today most cars being sold would have been much more fuel efficient. Instead, as soon as gas prices dropped we ran right back to giant gas guzzlers. Ford, for instance, even recently announced they've decided to stop making all passenger cars... except the Mustang. So what happens the next time gas prices spike? Deciding to save the company has predictably incentivized myopic behavior.

scarface74• 8 years ago

Ford was the only US automaker that didn’t need to be bailed out.

Besides, people who buy Mustangs aren’t that sensitive to gas prices.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

No, they didn't receive the TARP funds. Instead they received a $5.9 billion dollar loan from the taxpayer for the stated purpose of developing more fuel efficient vehicles - and, without which, they likely would have gone bankrupt. It was granted with a subinflation 0.25% interest rate and has still not been paid back.

bluedino• 8 years ago

Atari basically created, and then almost single-handedly destroyed the entire American console industry.

Despite their early success it was so poorly ran. Management was horrible. They were releasing piles of shit as games, like Pacman and ET. Programmers left the company in droves because of poor pay and treatment. Atari poorly handled the third party developer situation.

Their hardware was terrible. The 5200 and 7800 were flops. They couldn't get any traction in the home computer business.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 8 years ago

Bugs aside, ET actually isn't a bad 2600 game at all. A lot of the crap it gets is purely meme driven.

joezydeco• 8 years ago

And the bugs have been fixed:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

ra88it• 8 years ago

Does anybody have recommendations for books or documentaries that evoke the general vibe of this era?

Famicoman• 8 years ago

The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001) is amazing, if that's the angle you are looking for. Over 600 pages of great stories and information about the industry. I've read it twice and still think there sre things in there I haven't fully digested. I have a few other video game books pushed in the early to mid 2000s, but this is the only one I'd actually recommend. There are a lot of newer books, but they seem to approach video games from a more sensationalized space. One exception I would make are the works of Brian Bagnall, who writes about Commodore/Amiga. I haven't read his books but I hear they are amazing.

For documentaries, not exactly the same, but I enjoy the Bedrooms to Billions series (feature films, 2 are out) and to a slightly lesser extant Viva Amiga (2017) and the 8-Bit Generation series (feature films, 2 are out). These can be a bit more computer-focused though. I do not recommend Video Games: The Movie (2014), it feels like a VH1 special with little actual information.

tripplethrendo• 8 years ago

I agree with you that Video Games: The Movie was trash.

crtasm2• 8 years ago

From Bedrooms to Billions (2014), on the British video games industry 1979-

Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound (2016), more about composition and working within constraints but the hardware gets a look in.

kilbuz• 8 years ago

For those interested in the cultural and technical history of bringing the Famicom to the West, I can highly recommend "I am Error" by Nathan Altice. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-error

DerekL• 8 years ago

This discussion about how dominant the NES was in which countries reminds me of a question I've had for a while. Is there hard data on the popularity of each game platform (computer or console, home or handheld, etc.), globally or for each country?

I think the best way to measure it is by software sales. You could also include hardware and accessories, but that would inflate the share of some platforms because of uses beside gaming (productivity and the Internet on computers, or Blu-ray playing on the PlayStation 3).

The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013)

Related Stories