Video Games have been around for a long while, and because of that,
you'd be right to imagine that lots of systems have been released throughout the years.
There are popular systems, there are underrated systems.
Some of them sell a ton, others really don't.
Some gain attention after their commercial life,
while others remain classics in people's eyes
and others are doomed to be ignored, unless mocked.
and others are doomed to be ignored, unless mocked.
And depending on each individual's own history with this medium,
certain systems made a mark more than others.
But whatever your path in gaming was and / or is,
there's one system that we should feel thankful for,
for you see, not every system can say that did something
as important as saving and revitalizing the industry.
Who knows what would have been of gaming without the
Nintendo Entertainment System, or Family Computer.
And that's because this old thing symbolizes many things, a mix of it's importance in video game history and what games can offer to us today. But I am getting ahead of myself here.
I mentioned that this System "saved the industry". I'm really not exaggerating with that, even if it sounds hyperbolic at first. The North American Video Game Crash of 1983 was quite a big event that I'll try to tell in a "short" way.
I wont enter in so much detail for other systems introductions, but I find this quite important because it shaped gaming into what we know today. Sorry if you find it a bit too long!
You see, back in the late 70's and early 80s, companies like Atari already made a name for themselves by creating the home consoles like the Atari 2600, showing that video games in home where a business that could be indeed possible using this medium.
And, as you may expect, whenever there is the chance to make money, you'll find people. abusing it, screwing it up and then raising their arms to the sky wondering how could it happen.
This translated into a huge flood of different systems being released attempting to grab attention from consumers.
And I mean a flood, so many systems were released back then: Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600, Bally Astrocade, Magnavox Odyssey, Intellivision, Colecovision, RCA Studio II, the Vectrex and quite a few more. And that's not even counting clone systems like the Coleco Gemini or Tele-Games... Or the adapters that made possible to play one system's games on another.
And yes, where there is a system, there is a library for it. Think of today, and how easy is to see for which system was a game when you walk into a store.
Now imagine going to a store and having a small selection (as games weren't nearly as big as today for stores to have too much space for them) between those more than 10 systems with their own games, games that for the most part were copies of each other. Games made without control or quality tests. Rushed ports and even games that didn't work were put in stores. In fact there were people asking stores to put their unofficial games on shelves too (made all the worse because companies like Atari didn't want to let developers to put credits in their games).
I mean, look at this:
This does not even take account for systems released from 1976 to 1979.
I mean, look at this:
This does not even take account for systems released from 1976 to 1979.
And all this without the source of information that it is the internet today to at least know what you're getting into.
Can you imagine what type of hell was that?
Well, store owners weren't happy, and neither were consumers. The latter would go back to stores to return games that weren't happy with, and stores started to have too many games and systems eating their space. So business started to go down, as the interest of consumers was diminishing, and because of that stores were selling less and less.
When stores tried to return these products and asked the publishers to refund them, they discovered that couldn't get back their money, or even a product to sell in exchange for the non-successful things they already had, because those publishers had nothing, making a bunch of them fold and disappear right there.
With all the merchandise not selling, stores put all those systems and games on bargain bins in an attempt to make them disappear. Game prices for new releases would get a prize cut so big that you could buy them for a measly 5 bucks.
David Crane, an Atari game developer, which would later go to fund Activision, was quoted saying "Those awful games flooded the market at huge discounts, and ruined the video games business".
And he was right, investors weren't happy, at all. Interest for this market dissolved like sugar on water, and video games were seen as a dead market, a big no for people trying to invest money. All was going down. The video game market fell from 3.2 billion dollars to less than 100 million. A drop around 97%. Absolute madness.
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| The price of the 2600 went down so fast that started to get "gifted" like crazy too. |
While many companies and publishes were hurt badly (although a good chunk of those made that to themselves by peddling low quality stuff), Atari was one of the ones hurt the most, thinking that "core games" that were ready for release in 1982 would become huge successes that would alleviate the situation.
Imagine the shock when those didn't sell the way they wanted. Which games were those, you ask? Well, a horrible port of Pac-Man and the adaptation of E.T. The Extraterrestrial, both for the Atari 2600, which, as of today, are infamous. Atari ended up being in serious problems, and even buried some of the E.T. copies in New Mexico, something that became an urban legend that ended being true (Although a bit overblown). Atari also was caught lying on the amount of systems sold. It sadly wouldn't be the last failed move of the company throughout this story.
In the end, we had investors not trusting the video game industry, stores not wanting to sell anything video game related, and consumers not interested in this form of entertainment (Except the very, very few enthusiasts out there). Even Arcades were dwindling down in interest because of this.
Not a great scenario, right? Well, thankfully, that's not the end of this story.
At the time of all this happening in America; on a different part of this world, Japan, a company named Nintendo back then was relatively known for their arcade games, like Popeye and, of course, Donkey Kong. These guys jumped from the toy making business to the video game industry, which was a great asset that would come in handy not too far into the future.
Because of these successes, they started playing with the idea of creating a system with interchangeable "game units". The original idea was to make a 16-Bit machine, a computer with keyboard and floppy disks; but the president of the company at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, opted for something simpler, as he thought things like keyboards and floppy disks were daunting for people not used to computed, and also cheaper, going with an 8-Bit system.
The duty of designing this system would fall on Nintendo Engineer Masayuki Uemura. This man is quite interesting all by himself, as his story is quite surprising (and also a bit sad). Without entering in too much detail, as a child he was quite poor (as expected in the time he was born), so he didn't had the chance to buy toys. But he was technically minded to the point where he was able to create toys for himself, some impressive, like remote planes with spare parts found in the trash. Later he would end up in the prestigious Technology Institute of Chiba, where he graduated.
He ended up in Nintendo because the company he worked on at that time, Sharp, asked him to go ask Nintendo to see if they wanted to have a deal with semiconductors, and in that business meeting he met Gunpei Yokoi, another important figure on Nintendo.
They seemed to become friends because when Sharp wanted Masayuki to move to another city, he said no and renounced to his job in Sharp, just to go directly to Gunpei and get hired by Nintendo.
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| This is the "Advanced Video System", an early prototype that had accessories that the final system wouldn't have. |
The name of the project was initially, "GameCom", a sort of reference ot "Pasokon" in Japanese, which is, simply put, Personal Computer, but Uemura's wife proposed Famicom (from Family Computer), arguing that Personal Computer wouldn't really define what this machine would end up being.
That idea ended up sticking, and we need to thank her for it.
The development involved many aspects, from controllers and the hardware of the system itself, to the cartridges and the pin connectors of the console (which had to be tested thoroughly, I read that there was people in charge to put in and pull out cartridges for thousands of times to see how connectors would work with extended use). The ideal goal was to make this system able to play a good version of Donkey Kong, so that's where the hardware was aimed to, originally.
Uemura even added an eject lever to the system for the simple reason that he thought people (specially children) would find satisfying to pop out cartridges that way. It wasn't necessary at all, but there it was.
And so, the system was released in Japan on the 15th of July, on 1983.
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| This amalgamation of things is the Famicom with the Famicom Disk Drive, an accessory that never left Japan, but was quite interesting. |
While at the very beginning, a fault on the hardware (that was fixed fast enough) and a small selection of games (Popeye, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr) made it have a slow start, once more games started to show up it's popularity sky-rocketed, and by the end of 1984 the Famicom was the hottest thing around.
Not only became popular but companies that made games in arcade machines started porting their games into it, getting many arcade experiences into a cartridge you could play at home.
Because of this success, Nintendo started to consider the idea to launch the Famicom outside Japan, with America first, and then Europe (We europeans were the last thing back then, oh well).
There was a big, big problem though: While in Japan video games were growing, and becoming a more important thing, in America it was the complete opposite thing. If you remember what I said earlier, all three, investors, stores and consumers were burnt out, tired, or even angry at video games because of the flood of mediocre software and superfluous hardware ruining their confidence in this type of entertainment and / or their business, depending on what group you were in.
Nintendo needed not only to prove that video games where pretty much alive to consumers, but they needed first to convince stores and investors of the validity of video games as a business in order to sell the system there.
Hell, not even that, they needed to enter a market that wasn't very keen to them, and I mean as Japanese. The U.S. Anti-Japanese sentiment that was formed during the WW2 came back during the 70's and 80's, as a result of Japan growing as a major economic power, which didn't make things any easier when you were entering a market that went down on their territory.
And if you think it's weird that I'm mentioning that, wait to see this:
Hell, not even that, they needed to enter a market that wasn't very keen to them, and I mean as Japanese. The U.S. Anti-Japanese sentiment that was formed during the WW2 came back during the 70's and 80's, as a result of Japan growing as a major economic power, which didn't make things any easier when you were entering a market that went down on their territory.
And if you think it's weird that I'm mentioning that, wait to see this:
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| I don't even know what to say. The entire pamphlet is full of crazy. |
So yeah... That was no walk in the park.
...Leaving the last point for another time entirely (one that actually ties with censorship of games during that time or trying to remove japanese things from games), this is where Nintendo's previous experience as a toy maker would help tremendously to market the Famicom, not to consumers, but to retailers. And so they did, changing the Famicom's design and adding things to make it more similar to a toy.
There's a reason why the system was launched with a Deluxe pack containing a big robot toy, a bunch of accessories for it, a toy gun... And also received a name and image change.
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| Do you see it? Cover the "computer" with toys and it will be easier to slip through! |
It is a very ingenious piece of hardware for such limited technology, and much more interesting to study that to use, at least for me, but the real mission it was created for was to make Nintendo's first console more appealing to retailers.
Actually, pretty much everything changed from the japanese Family Computer to the international Nintendo Entertainment System to make it more well liked. The system itself, the controllers, the cartridges, the way you put them into the system... Everything, really.
Initially, the idea Nintendo had was to make an alliance with Atari in order to sell the system in North America. Negotiations started, and It would be named the Nintendo Advanced Video Gaming System, and the deal was to be finalized after the summer of 1983... But something happened.
That something was one of the earlier rivals of Atari, Coleco, showing a new system named the Coleco Adam. That presentation took place during the Consumer Electronic Show 1983, and had a "nasty" surprise for Atari, as the game that was showed running on the system was a version of Donkey Kong.
This made Atari angry and put the entire deal on delay, and subsequently, cancelled. This would be a huge mistake on Atari's part, not only because maybe the could had a better future if they made the deal with Nintendo...
...But because the version of Donkey Kong Coleco showed was an unofficial one, or, in other words, one that Nintendo didn't licensed or produced, and knew nothing about. Atari killed a, probably, fantastic deal for no reason at all.The CEO of Atari, Ray Kassar, was fired the month after the deal being cancelled.
This change ended up making Nintendo to want to release the system for themselves.
When it was presented in 1985, there was some lukewarm reception from the press. Electronic Games magazine said "The Video Game market in America has virtually disappeared", and also "This could be a miscalculation on Nintendo's part".
Fortunately, there was also another nice card to play in this game: Because the NES would be released quite a bit later than the Famicom, by more than 2 years of difference, software was already developed for the system, and it could be launched with a decent number of titles the same day it went live. Compared to the three launch games on the Famicom, it was a substantial improvement.
Nintendo brought a rather varied bunch of games, which would become the "Black Box Set". The games selected were, for the most part, chosen to appeal to americans, adding games like Baseball, Tennis, 10-Yard Fight and Golf, as sports games where somewhat popular on older systems, but there were definite stand-outs, those being Kung Fu, which was already famous thanks to its arcade version, Duck Hunt for its showing of the NES Zapper, and, of course, Super Mario Bros, a game changer that served as inspiration for years to come for many developers.
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| These were the first batch of Nintendo games released on the U.S. |
One of the interesting things about these first NES games is that their boxes were designed to show what was in the game, not only in concept, but visually. No exaggerated hand-drawn artwork that may not even resemble the game itself, like many games had before (and part of what made consumers wary of buying games), they showed pixel art that resembled their games.
This was one of the several actions Nintendo would take in order to raise confidence in video games by, for example, restricting publishers from selling unlicensed games that didn't go through a process of approval, process that incremented the quality in software and helped to change the attitude towards video games that caused the crash back in 1983... Although that caused Nintendo some issues down the line. I feel that even if some of the guidelines were a bit to severe, it was for the greater good in the end (getting video games in decent shape again), and even if those can be criticised, later platform creators would do the same things anyway (Sony, Microsoft, Sega...). I don't know, I find it a very grey subject.
In any case, the NES had a small release on 18th October 1985 on New York, as a test. Things worked out, and by February 1986, a full N.A. scale release took place. And let's say that the thing caught on.
By 1988, the market for NES games was bigger than the entirety of home computer software. The NES sold 7 million on North America from 1988 to 1989, and by 1990 30% of american house holds had a NES. The system would become a huge hit with over 60 millions of units sold worldwide and a huge library of games released, and Nintendo would become famous and renowned.
The success of this system made very clear that people still cared about games, renewing interest and giving a new start to this industry.
Even more than that, the NES would do other good things for gaming, like setting in stone the way controllers were made. Before it, each system made something very different from each other, with most being really uncomfortable and cumbersome, resembling more phones than actual controllers.
The NES controller was a simple yet effective controller. Using the D-Pad developed by Nintendo for the Game & Watch, it offered a MUCH better way to move around or select things than a joystick, and was easier and faster to control than a keyboard or those weird circular things some controllers (like those above) had.
You had two buttons only, which removed a lot of the frustration with older controllers (and again, keyboards) that, more often than not, needed overlays to know what the hell you were doing, and also were more than, let's say, the buttons on the Atari 2600 controller. It also had the Start and Select buttons, which ere equally nice additions (Pausing a game was quite the novel idea back then!).
The form factor of the controller was simple, small and easy to hold, which, again, was a nice change. It was the first safe stepping stone into the comfortability that today's controllers can offer us.
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| Man, what a difference, not only in how it looks, but in how it plays too. That said 2600's version of Mario Bros was a nice one for the system! |
Even more! Because of Nintendo's guidelines, arcade games on NES brought extra content or new mechanics, like Double Dragon and the EXP. mechanic, that would become a classic on the series, or reworked versions of know arcade games that offered a different experience compared to the ones on the cabinets, so that was another interesting change.
A small collection of NES tunes.
If you take a quick look from the first released games to the last ones, you can see that during those years, games grew so much, and not just visually. Games got more complex, more meaty, more... Home console, in a sense. While they existed already on computers at that time, NES would also get graphic adventures, action adventure games and RPGs that would mix with platformers, shoot'em ups and those close to arcade-like experiences.
This is not only because how developers evolved their craft through these very formative years, but also thanks to the system's cartridges being able to use different Mappers that would lead creators to make bigger, more complex and complete games too.
We take many things granted today, that back then you couldn't. Compare what Atari 2600 could do. Now look at the NES. As I mentioned, it often outperformed computers of the time too, by getting much better ports of games (although to be fair, computers were mainly to work at that point). Heck, a smoother scrolling was such a big change alone that was a game changer.
It also solidified Japan as the head of video game design and development, something that would last up until the mid 2000's, more or less at the same time when the line between PC and consoles started to blur too much.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, it's that, there is a reason that now, more than 30 years later, this system is still quite popular, and it has been one of the most influential consoles in history, not just because ot what did on a historical level, but because the large amount of games that released on it that expanded what the medium could do, and the several series that were born here. It still does inspire developers to make games (mostly indies, but eh, indies are games as much as any other). 8-Bit music is also enjoyed and created today.
But anyway...
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| Famicom cartridges came in all colors... and qualities of plastic, some being very nasty. Yet so cool to look at, I love that Toki artwork down there. |
...In my 100% unbiased opinion, I say yes.
Please make no attempt to use your brain and accept this as sacred truth.
Nah, jokes aside, while some games definitely feel their age, and are somewhat clunky, there are still many, many games that hold up nicely, with an exorbitant amount of games that didn't get the attention they deserved. Many games also never left Japan, and we didn't even know they existed. A bunch of them got translated, while others don't require much effort to know what to do.
The 8-Bit aesthetics fortunately have aged rather well, with their simple designs and recognizable colors, not to mention that they're still being used by some games, and are a call to nostalgia for many. Just like sound effects and music because, as I mentioned before, video game music outside arcades really started to take off during this generation, leaving memorable melodies that still make people smile, but also lots of soundtracks in less well known games that also kick ass, and just like visuals, many new games today still use 8-Bit inspired sound.
Even bad games often had good music in them!
Also, many classics started here too. Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Super Mario, Mega Man, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda or Castlevania, are some examples of these, while other series born in the arcade got reinvented and improved on the system, like Ninja Gaiden, Contra or Double Dragon to the point where their NES entries ended up reshaping their respective franchises.
One of the great assets (in my humble opinion) of these 8-Bit games is that, most of them, don't really take away much time from you, or at the very least they don't feel like the commitment that some current games are. With more and more games being created with the mentality of keeping players attached to them for longer and longer periods of time, the constant grinding, the false sense of progression that some games portray, and Games as a Service being more and more extended, it's a really nice contrast.
With genres like Platformers, Run & Gun or Shoot'em ups being quite short for the most part, you can beat a game in a couple of evenings, as long as your skills are there. This is great as they are so much more inviting to replay and master by being shorter, and you really don't get tired of them because there's really not time for that to start happening (unless you're getting reeeaaally stuck in a level, or something like that).
But I may be giving the wrong impression of the library, as the NES also holds longer experiences with Adventures and RPGs (and some other genres from time to time), which personally I find they combine pretty well with those shorter experiences.
There's lots of variety in the library of the system, and it's quite interesting to see how developers started to mix genres at such early stage. You can find Action platform with Experience Points and levels where you learn attacks as you go, shoot'em ups in which you upgrade different stats as you advance, combinations of horizontal action platforming gameplay with top down action and more. Even a Survival horror RPG!
Oh, and licensed games! While the usual line of thought about "if it's based on something, chances are it's going to be bad" is for the most part correct, on this console there are quite a few licensed games that actually are great! Heck, it's to be expected because often enough the licenses where given to good developers after all! There are some awful ones, as it is to be expected, though...
I don't know, it's such a curious moment in the history of the medium that I can't help to find things to gush over it.
And that's not all! It had a boatload of accessories, most of which, where absolutely bonkers and really not needed. You probably know several, like the Nes Zapper, which as useful for a handful of games, LJN's Rolling Rocker, one of the worst excuses to waste plastic ever, or that glorious headset that also had a cross-hair dongle in front of your face...
But, you know, some accessories don't get enough attention, like this, designed for parents:
That's a lock so you can't insert your cartridges and play some NES after you came from school before do your homework. Or chores. Or you may not even play at all because your parents forgot what code they put and will ruin your weekend. Or you're blackmailed by your older brothers so you do whatever they want, or the NES dies of dust in the pins. Family Fun Times all around!
The bullet points are fantastic, too:
But the most important one of all wasn't even released outside of Japan.
If you remember one of the images above, you could see a Famicom with some weird equipment attached to it. That was the Famicom Disk System.
While sold as an accessory, it was bigger than the Famicom itself, and it was attached to it through the cartridge slot. It could be plugged or use 6 large batteries (and seems they lasted quite a bit). It offered some hardware changes that improved the capabilities of the system, mostly related to audio and storage capacity (because of the disks themselves), and save progress and data.
This peripheral was born out of the demand for an alternative to cartridges, as part of the consumers with less acquisitive power asked for a way to buy cheaper games, and that solution, at the time, were these floppy disks. But not any floppy disk, they were designed by the company.
You could buy one for around 15 to 20 bucks, instead of the average 30 that a cartridge would cost (although bigger games would be more expensive), and it had the added advantage that you could rewrite those disks to contain other games, through something called Disk Writers, machines inside retail stores that would take your disk, and for a certain amount, you could erase the data on it and put a new game. Or even two, if they were small enough, one on each side of the disk; and for a bit more, you could even get a manual.
Even the writing process had a small animation of Mario and Luigi messing around with one of the kiosks (just like when you turn on the FDS, and you see Mario and Luigi messing around with the start-up screen).
All that process would lead to things like contests, too, using special blue floppy disks. And not only that, but this peripheral actually changed the way Nintendo looked at games, with Yoshio Sakamoto (mostly known for being the producer of the Metroid saga), commenting on how the disks permitted to create larger games with more interesting mechanics and bigger worlds, and less arcade-like single screen games. Games like Metroid and Zelda appeared on the FDS originally, so he was quite right. And Nintendo's idea was to use the Disk System as the main way to produce these bigger games, and for a time, they did.
But sadly, it wasn't without its issues. Being disks, you had loading times. You also need to get up and change the disk's side often. And they were much more fragile than cartridges.
... And there was the thing that really killed the popularity and advantage of the disks: cartridges caught on. While originally, the sizes were pretty small, the prices for their production dropped and the amount of data they could hold increased to the level of the FDS' disks. And battery back ups started to be a thing, too. Lastly, pirating these disks proved to be much easier than expected, which made a lot of publishes, and even the very Nintendo, end up not wanting to use the FDS, and going back to cartridges, even porting previously FDS games to cartridges.
While a sad ending for the peripheral, the improvements the FDS had on software development are still there, and I think this peripheral should be cherished even if it's just for that reason alone. That said, people in Japan still look with good eyes at this thing, and today is still object of curiosity, which is good.
All around the FDS history is really interesting thing to read about, if you ask me!
Anyway, while the FDS didn't work out for long, it got some interesting games released exclusively on that format, both first and third party games, like the musical shoot'em up, Otocky. And some early NES games got re-released on FDS with improvements, like VS. Excitebike, which is much better than the original one.
This accessory even had a mascot, Disk-Kun, A yellow creature that looked like the FDS disks themselves, that would appear on commercials and other merchandise. There were many things NES / Famicom related that we would never see until the internet became a thing.
One of those, that kinda makes me smile, for example, was the tradition fans of gaming there had for shortening the names of games and systems in an affective way, and that's why the Family Computer ended being the Famicom, but more than that, series like Super Mario become SuMari, or Dragon Quest ended up being referred as DragoQue (pronounced DoragoQue), and such.
That's something I caught on watching Game Center CX!
And... I think I said far, far more than I needed for an introduction. I'll end up saying that the NES was incredibly formative for game development and, generally speaking, a key factor to revitalize the medium, and to this day I still find enjoyment out of this 8-bit system. And like me, seems like many others still do, seeing how much interest on the NES Classic there was (and still is).
The 8-Bit aesthetics fortunately have aged rather well, with their simple designs and recognizable colors, not to mention that they're still being used by some games, and are a call to nostalgia for many. Just like sound effects and music because, as I mentioned before, video game music outside arcades really started to take off during this generation, leaving memorable melodies that still make people smile, but also lots of soundtracks in less well known games that also kick ass, and just like visuals, many new games today still use 8-Bit inspired sound.
Even bad games often had good music in them!
Also, many classics started here too. Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Super Mario, Mega Man, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda or Castlevania, are some examples of these, while other series born in the arcade got reinvented and improved on the system, like Ninja Gaiden, Contra or Double Dragon to the point where their NES entries ended up reshaping their respective franchises.
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| Just a tiny bunch of games on the ocean that is the NES library, even if not every single one there is that great... |
One of the great assets (in my humble opinion) of these 8-Bit games is that, most of them, don't really take away much time from you, or at the very least they don't feel like the commitment that some current games are. With more and more games being created with the mentality of keeping players attached to them for longer and longer periods of time, the constant grinding, the false sense of progression that some games portray, and Games as a Service being more and more extended, it's a really nice contrast.
With genres like Platformers, Run & Gun or Shoot'em ups being quite short for the most part, you can beat a game in a couple of evenings, as long as your skills are there. This is great as they are so much more inviting to replay and master by being shorter, and you really don't get tired of them because there's really not time for that to start happening (unless you're getting reeeaaally stuck in a level, or something like that).
But I may be giving the wrong impression of the library, as the NES also holds longer experiences with Adventures and RPGs (and some other genres from time to time), which personally I find they combine pretty well with those shorter experiences.
There's lots of variety in the library of the system, and it's quite interesting to see how developers started to mix genres at such early stage. You can find Action platform with Experience Points and levels where you learn attacks as you go, shoot'em ups in which you upgrade different stats as you advance, combinations of horizontal action platforming gameplay with top down action and more. Even a Survival horror RPG!
Oh, and licensed games! While the usual line of thought about "if it's based on something, chances are it's going to be bad" is for the most part correct, on this console there are quite a few licensed games that actually are great! Heck, it's to be expected because often enough the licenses where given to good developers after all! There are some awful ones, as it is to be expected, though...
I don't know, it's such a curious moment in the history of the medium that I can't help to find things to gush over it.
And that's not all! It had a boatload of accessories, most of which, where absolutely bonkers and really not needed. You probably know several, like the Nes Zapper, which as useful for a handful of games, LJN's Rolling Rocker, one of the worst excuses to waste plastic ever, or that glorious headset that also had a cross-hair dongle in front of your face...
But, you know, some accessories don't get enough attention, like this, designed for parents:
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| Now you're playing... NOT! Go do your homework, you twerp! |
That's a lock so you can't insert your cartridges and play some NES after you came from school before do your homework. Or chores. Or you may not even play at all because your parents forgot what code they put and will ruin your weekend. Or you're blackmailed by your older brothers so you do whatever they want, or the NES dies of dust in the pins. Family Fun Times all around!
The bullet points are fantastic, too:
- Control how much time your family plays Nintendo!
- Great Motivator for Homework, Chores, Grounding...
- Installs in seconds, no tools necessary!
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| As silly as it is... I can't but feel it's awesome. Also, does it count as ironic use of your own slogan? |
But the most important one of all wasn't even released outside of Japan.
If you remember one of the images above, you could see a Famicom with some weird equipment attached to it. That was the Famicom Disk System.
While sold as an accessory, it was bigger than the Famicom itself, and it was attached to it through the cartridge slot. It could be plugged or use 6 large batteries (and seems they lasted quite a bit). It offered some hardware changes that improved the capabilities of the system, mostly related to audio and storage capacity (because of the disks themselves), and save progress and data.
This peripheral was born out of the demand for an alternative to cartridges, as part of the consumers with less acquisitive power asked for a way to buy cheaper games, and that solution, at the time, were these floppy disks. But not any floppy disk, they were designed by the company.
You could buy one for around 15 to 20 bucks, instead of the average 30 that a cartridge would cost (although bigger games would be more expensive), and it had the added advantage that you could rewrite those disks to contain other games, through something called Disk Writers, machines inside retail stores that would take your disk, and for a certain amount, you could erase the data on it and put a new game. Or even two, if they were small enough, one on each side of the disk; and for a bit more, you could even get a manual.
Even the writing process had a small animation of Mario and Luigi messing around with one of the kiosks (just like when you turn on the FDS, and you see Mario and Luigi messing around with the start-up screen).
All that process would lead to things like contests, too, using special blue floppy disks. And not only that, but this peripheral actually changed the way Nintendo looked at games, with Yoshio Sakamoto (mostly known for being the producer of the Metroid saga), commenting on how the disks permitted to create larger games with more interesting mechanics and bigger worlds, and less arcade-like single screen games. Games like Metroid and Zelda appeared on the FDS originally, so he was quite right. And Nintendo's idea was to use the Disk System as the main way to produce these bigger games, and for a time, they did.
But sadly, it wasn't without its issues. Being disks, you had loading times. You also need to get up and change the disk's side often. And they were much more fragile than cartridges.
... And there was the thing that really killed the popularity and advantage of the disks: cartridges caught on. While originally, the sizes were pretty small, the prices for their production dropped and the amount of data they could hold increased to the level of the FDS' disks. And battery back ups started to be a thing, too. Lastly, pirating these disks proved to be much easier than expected, which made a lot of publishes, and even the very Nintendo, end up not wanting to use the FDS, and going back to cartridges, even porting previously FDS games to cartridges.
While a sad ending for the peripheral, the improvements the FDS had on software development are still there, and I think this peripheral should be cherished even if it's just for that reason alone. That said, people in Japan still look with good eyes at this thing, and today is still object of curiosity, which is good.
All around the FDS history is really interesting thing to read about, if you ask me!
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| Funny enough, the "Nintendo" marks on the floppy weren't just decorative, they acted as a anti-piracy measure too, that worked... For a time. |
Anyway, while the FDS didn't work out for long, it got some interesting games released exclusively on that format, both first and third party games, like the musical shoot'em up, Otocky. And some early NES games got re-released on FDS with improvements, like VS. Excitebike, which is much better than the original one.
This accessory even had a mascot, Disk-Kun, A yellow creature that looked like the FDS disks themselves, that would appear on commercials and other merchandise. There were many things NES / Famicom related that we would never see until the internet became a thing.
One of those, that kinda makes me smile, for example, was the tradition fans of gaming there had for shortening the names of games and systems in an affective way, and that's why the Family Computer ended being the Famicom, but more than that, series like Super Mario become SuMari, or Dragon Quest ended up being referred as DragoQue (pronounced DoragoQue), and such.
That's something I caught on watching Game Center CX!
And... I think I said far, far more than I needed for an introduction. I'll end up saying that the NES was incredibly formative for game development and, generally speaking, a key factor to revitalize the medium, and to this day I still find enjoyment out of this 8-bit system. And like me, seems like many others still do, seeing how much interest on the NES Classic there was (and still is).
I promise introductions for other systems will be much shorter, but I just let pass this opportunity to not only talk about all this, but also go back an read things again, which I find as entertaining as I did years ago.
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