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

NES

[readin]

I went from Atari 2600 straight to GameCube. Both are (were) great! I'm looking forward to my first experience with Zelda!

Boo.

[Seth Finklestein]

"By the end of the 1980s the courts found Nintendo guilty of anti-trust activities because it had abused its relationship with third party developers and created a monopoly in the gaming industry by not allowing developers to make games for any other platforms." -- Wikipedia

All the fanboys seem to ignore that Nintendo broke the law repeatedly. When Microsoft does it, you guys pee your fake-lawyer trousers. When Nintendo does it, you pee your fanboy pants.

Frankly, Nintendo did more to destroy proper homebrew gaming than a thousand Ataris helped to establish it. I look forward to their doom thanks to the GamePark open handheld gaming platform.

NES #1? Ignorance.

[ziggy the zagnut]

It's foolish, revisionist history to say that Americans hated videogames. Does anyone remember Pac Man fever? The album? It was a phenomenon. There was a veritable ton of Pac Man schwag (cheesy merchandise like bubble gum dispensers, keychains, Rubik's cube knockoffs, etc.) showing strong evidence of video games' pre-Nintendo dominance in American culture.

I'm very weary of articles, especially on boingboing.net, that pitch Mario Bros. as the original videogame. You all should be making fan art of Yar's Revenge, Pitfall and River Raid.

NES inspired music

[Neva]

There are quite a few people nowadays, who have grown up with NES systems in their time, keeping the music alive in various forms. For instance:

Minibosses
Redefined - Nintendo A Cappella
All Your Bass A Cappella

..and as a side mention:
http://www.pressplayontape.com/

No Games?

[miyako]

I was expecting to see a list of reasons why the NES was great...like yet another top 10 list or something, so I'll post one, here are my top 10 NES games I think everyone should play if given a chance (in no particular order).

1. Dragon Warrior - the game that started the JRPG.
2. Blaster Master - the first game I remember playing that had something like an Isometric view
3. Super Mario Bro's 3 - perhaps the finest mario game ever.
4. Bionic Commando - Robotic Zombie Hitler and a huge bionic claw, what more could you ask for?
5. The Ledgend of Zelda - A classic by any definition
6. Kirby - one of the prettiest games for the NES and a fine platformer- too bad they changed the formula so much for later games
7. Castlevania - the first survival horror game, the controls are a little clunky but it's still a classic platformer
8. Megaman - I've never actually beaten any of the Megaman games, but a classic if you like HARD games
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II The Arcade Game - This is one of those games that's probably not great, but I remember it fondly
10. Final Fantasy - The first in the series, a solid game but definitely different than today's FF games.

My Mother

[DrugCheese]

still begs me to find her a NES system so she can play her Dr.Mario and other games she was more addicted to then I being addicted to Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. Although I've set her up with nesticle and a generaic d-pad, it's not a Nintendo controller so she doesn't like it.

NES was a family tradition with us, after dinner we'd all sit around and play duck hunt or Mario Brothers.

Tales from the 8-bit era

[realityfighter]

Actually, the story is a little funnier than that. Tengen tried to reverse engineer the lockout chip, but they couldn't in time to make their deadline. So they called the USPTO and asked them to send a copy of the chip spec, claiming that they needed the information for an ongoing legal case. The Patent Office gladly passed over the specs, and Tengen started making copies. By the time Nintendo had sued the pants off Tengen, they'd figured out how to disable the lockout by sending a small power surge to knockout the chip inside the system.

Another funny story from the NES era is the tale of Wisdom Tree Games, the derivative company created by Color Dreams to sell unauthorized NES cartridges out in the open without fear of retribution from Nintendo. How? The company and the games were biblically themed, and the carts were sold in Christian bookstores. Nintendo didn't dare sue a company making bible games, for fear of massive PR backlash. So Wisdom Tree thrived in its technically-illegal niche. In fact, it's still around today and still printing carts for the gameboy color.

The 10NES chip certainly made for some interesting stories.