Nintendo Pioneer Talks NES Phenomenon

Posted by simoniker on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @08:04PM from the mario's-box-of-tricks dept.

Thanks to Video-fenky for his article translating a recent Famitsu interview with Hiroshi Imanishi, former executive director of Nintendo, about the original launch of the Famicom/NES console, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. The Famicom wasn't immediately well-received, according to Imanishi: "We were the new kid on the block, and a lot of places said to us 'We've already seen Donkey Kong in the arcades and on the Game & Watch! You're putting it out again?'" He also describes how the trademark NES controller almost never came to be: "...during development the majority of Nintendo wanted to include a regular joystick with the system. However, during that time, we made the first multi-screen Game & Watch, and we introduced the control pad so you wouldn't have to keep on glancing at your hands while you're playing the game"

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Re:Donkey Kong by AndyBusch · 2003-07-23 00:06 · Score: 4, Informative

Almost. The NES version only lost one level (the pie factory). The 2600, Intellivision, etc versions also lost the elevator level. In the earliest NES games, they hadn't figured out how to use memory mappers to access larger amounts of data, so the earliest games were incredibly small. All those early carts (even through Zelda and Metroid) dump to about 40 k.

The NES was an incredible feat, though. Since it only used a bit of internal hardware, it then relied on large amounts of processor in the cart. That's why it's so hard to emulate the console. By contrast, only a handful of SNES games (Super FX games, and Mega Man X 2 and X 3) have any processing hardware in the cart.