20 Years of NES

Twenty years ago, the NES changed the face of U.S. gaming. All this week, 1up.com has a series of features celebrating the anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System. From the site: "When the NES launched, America hated videogames. Well, sort of. The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software and, at first, retailers were reluctant to sell another system. But the NES was a hit, controlling a healthy 90 percent of the U.S. home videogame industry at the peak of its popularity."

Comments

where's the article?

[conJunk]

Is it just me, or was the target of the link devoid of anything except ads?

I thought I'd found the path to the rest of the story when I got to this sentance:

And take a minute this week to unpack your dusty NES from its storage closet and go for a run-and-jump trip down memory lane.

there was link on "memory" (which has since disappeared) that went to dell.com's RAM catalog. Ugh.

Re:Trip down memory lane

[jandrese]

Uh, the "Seal of Quality" was just a measure to stop pirates, it was by no means an actual indication of a game's quality. There was plenty of crap out there with the Nintendo Seal of Quality on it.

Huh?

[Vellmont]

The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software

What? I had an Atari 2600 and I don't remember being "upset at bad software" at all. Was everyone else upset and I just somehow missed it?

"Adult Gamers"

[kevin_conaway]

I think the influx of high quality sports games attracted a whole new class of people to gaming, the "Adult Gamers." These are the folks that have money to spend but only play games casually with their friends.

Whichever system had the best NBA 2K or Madden game won the pack. The others followed suit.

Re:Boo.

[FidelCatsro]

Main difference is that Nintendo did it 15 years ago and now don't do it .
Microsoft still are doing it .

Re:NES #1? Ignorance.

[AKAImBatman]

PacMan was prior to the Video Game Crash. After the Video Game Crash, all the people who'd spent MegaBucks on Atari, Intellivison, and Coleco systems were left out in the cold with highly expensive hardware and no software to buy. A LOT of consumers became rather despondant over this, thus the line "Americans hated video games." It was so bad that Nintendo called the console an "Entertainment System" and marketed a Robot with it to keep people from thinking of it as Another Video Game Console(TM).

Originally, Nintendo was also going to market a disk drive (which was available for the Fanicom in Japan) so that people could use it as a home PC. As it turned out, the market accepted the Nintendo well enough that they eventually ditched the whole "home computer" idea.