The Lifespan of The Nintendo Entertainment System

Via Press the Buttons, a node over at Everything2 with an excellent synopsis of the lifespan of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It details the background of the video game industry at the time that the NES came onto the stage, the launch and the peak of its success, and the factors that led to the console's eventual decline. From the writeup: "In the aftermath of the home video game crash in 1983, nobody in North America seemed to want anything more to do with video games. Having been burned by the atrociously bad Atari 2600 games flooding the market and the rise of the home computer, both retailers and parents, and to a lesser degree gamers, were reluctant to risk their hard-earned money on another console. Analysts claimed that video games were yet another fad in an infamously faddish time that came and went and now are gone."

Comments

There are so many inaccuracies in this article

[Dwedit]

There are so many inaccuracies in this article! Let's see...
* The NES has 2k bytes of ram built in, not 4k. Cartridges can contain an 8k RAM expansion to expand the total RAM to 10k, the expansion can also be battery backed to save games.
* The NES is not capable of rendering 16x16 sprites, only 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. Those of course can be combined to form larger sprites.

Then some nitpicks:
* I've heard from other articles that Nintendo never tried selling the Famicom directly in America before redesigning it, but I have nothing to back this up with.
* Kirby's Adventure, weighing in at 768 kilobytes, is far larger than Dragon Warrior 4.
* The article fails to mention the bootleg joysticks being sold today which contain illegal NES multicarts built in, these display directly on a TV and have no cartridge slot. No problem, this is probably beyond the scope of the article.

Re:There are so many inaccuracies in this article

[droberge]

I've fixed the inaccuracies you've mentioned. The 4K figure came from a previous writer who added the CPU RAM and the PPU RAM to get 4K and a bad mental hex-decimal conversion ($0800 = 2048 not 4096). As for the 16x16 thing, I'm so used to square sprites that I saw the 16 and assumed 16x16.

DW4 was the largest ROM I'd ever seen; checking again it seems I was mistaken. That's fixed.

Thanks for the corrections.

droberge (a.k.a. RPGeek)

Re:The NES never died.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

(Yes, I know... *whoosh" goes the joke over my head...)

Actually, dust wasn't the problem. It was the pins. They would get bent more and more each time you inserted a cartridge, to the point of not making contact anymore. A small screwdriver and a lot of patience can fix that ;)