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Nintendo Entertainment System Turns 25

Posted by Soulskill on from the mine-still-works dept.

harrymcc writes "On October 18th 1985, Nintendo launched its NES console in the US, reviving a near-dead video game industry and establishing Nintendo as a leader in home consoles. We've celebrated with a roundup of some of the stranger spinoffs that the NES has inspired over the last quarter century, from odd controllers to a lock parents could use to disable the console to do-it-yourself projects like an NES built into a Super Mario cartridge."

23 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Crazy... by grub · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I remember going to parties, getting pissed and stoned out of my tree, and playing NES with my buddies.

    Now we play some of the same old games on the Big Ass Emulation Disc for XBOX with the family. Minus the booze and drugs, of course. That's pretty impressive staying power for those games.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:Crazy... by PatHMV · · Score: 4, Informative

      God, I'm old. This was 5 months after I graduated high school.

    2. Re:Crazy... by Aquina · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yeah, but I disliked NES and rather chose SNES games like Terranigma, Zelda (3), Secret Of Mana, Secret Of Evermore, Illusion of Time and... oh yeah Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. ;-) Give Terranigma a try (http://www.romnation.net/srv/roms/43226/snes/Terranigma-G.html)!

    3. Re:Crazy... by Krau+Ming · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I never knew how old NES was... I was ~4 years old when my Dad came home with an NES and mario/duck hunt one day, and given my birthyear of '81, he must have bought it within the first year of release. I'm pretty sure that qualifies him as an old school tech geek...

    4. Re:Crazy... by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

      NES is actually older than the Summary suggests.

      The NES is simply the US version of the Famicom, which was released to Japan in 1983. Same hardware and specs; different plastic package. So it's really 27 years old now..... almost as old as a Commodore 64 or Atari 5200/Supersystem or Colecovision (1982).

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    5. Re:Crazy... by h4rr4r · · Score: 2, Funny

      When I played the NES the SNES did not exist yet.

  2. wireless by snookerhog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    according to the Nintendo store in NYC, the NES was originally designed to have wireless (IR?) controllers. They have the prototype on display.

  3. Sure makes you feel old by mirix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember getting my NES for christmas when I was a child.

    Most of my favourite games are still from that era. New games seem to be missing some sort of soul... mind you, there were a lot of truly horrible games for NES too!

    --
    Sent from my PDP-11
    1. Re:Sure makes you feel old by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is, games for the NES and that era were -made- to be abstract, when we got to the N64/PS1 era, developers started releasing "realistic" games which end up looking like crap when the next generation of games come out.

      Graphics were secondary to making an entertaining game, the game was developed with the concept first then the graphics followed and the graphics were what made sense. For example, the look of Mario wasn't developed to look like a specific person, but rather to compensate for the lack of advanced hardware. Today, developers take graphics first, take a storyline first, then let the game fill in the cracks.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:Sure makes you feel old by Captain+Spam · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This claim seems strange to me. What games back then do you think had soul? And what new games have you played that you felt lacked soul? It's a sort of nebulous concept, so I could benefit from some examples. Maybe some explanation of what gave those examples soul.

      I can explain it in two words: "Nostalgia filter".

      To add more words, there's really the same proportion of good games to bad games nowadays. That didn't change. But when you look at the past through the rose-tinted glasses of your own nostalgia, back to your memories of the carefree days of your youth with NES games right alongside them, it looks a lot better than your more recent memories of the cynical, stressed-out days of your adulthood with more modern games right alongside them.

      So, give it about ten or so years until we get the people who grew up on video game generation n (where n is some generation after the NES). We'll hear them wax soulful and philosophical about THOSE games, too, while deriding the current generation of the time. And then the cycle of life continues! Ah...

      --
      Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
  4. Re:up up down down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, I think it's law or something-- Konami law, if you will, that any time one recites the Konami code, it will inevitably be *wrong*

  5. The mark of good games... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The mark of good games is when you can still pick up and play them 5, 10, 15 or even 25 years from now and they are just as good as the first time you picked them up.

    I can't say that many Xbox or PS1 games can say that. On the other hand, almost the entire NES library seems to be filled with examples that are just as fun today as they were back in the day without having to put on rose-tinted glasses of saying that this game was fun for its time.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:The mark of good games... by CronoCloud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's nostalgia talking, there was plenty of crap on the NES, and plenty of great games on the PSone.

    2. Re:The mark of good games... by syphyre · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I sense exaggeration. There are what, perhaps 20-25 games that could still be considered just as good today (if that many)? There were what, just under 800 games published in the US for the NES? Small sample selection. Same thing goes for the Xbox, PS2, SNES, etc. Huge libraries, few games that will last and last and last.

    3. Re:The mark of good games... by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem with the PSone, as well as most other 3D consoles, is that their graphics age extremely badly. NES still look quite ok, SNES games can even look pretty good, PSone games on the other side just look really ugly. Same goes for the controls, there is only so much you can do wrong in 2D with a Dpad, but in 3D things have improved a lot over the years and many PSone titles are borderline unplayable by todays standard, even the good ones.

    4. Re:The mark of good games... by QJimbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There are plenty of PS1 games that are still very fun to play now. Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Tomb Raider are just some examples.

    5. Re:The mark of good games... by Fallingcow · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There are around 1000 NES games playable in English, counting fan-translation ROM patches. Maybe 1100.

      I just finished sorting through mine to weed out the ones that suck or that I'm otherwise not interested in (by which I mean I favorited the good ones and set my emulator manager to only show favorites--the things are so small that there's no sense in deleting any).

      Even being pretty aggressive in removing games--cutting the ones that were and are good on the system, but which exist in a better form on another platform (mostly arcade ports like TMNT:Arcade, for example) and damn near all the sports games, many of which were fine then but aren't something I'm going to play now (all of the football games got cut--Sega systems all the way for that--but a few other gems like Ice Hockey are so damn good that I couldn't cut 'em) I still only got it down to a bit over 130. Cut out some that few others like but that I left on because they're personal favorites from my days playing on an actual NES (like High Speed and To the Earth) and you're looking at a bare minimum of 100 English-language games that are best on (or exclusive to) the NES and are still fun to play.

      10% after 25 years in the US isn't so bad, IMO. Probably twice that many would have been considered top-notch back in 1993 or so when there weren't a lot of options on newer systems to displace NES games, and things like MAME didn't exist. I was surprised there were that many that were still good, personally; I'd never dug through the whole library like that before, and had assumed nostalgia was making the system better in my mind than it had been. It's no SNES, Playstation, or PS2 in the games-library department, but there are tons of good titles there.

  6. Re:Wait, what? by mrnobo1024 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Only if you look at the release of each in a different country.

    July 1983: NES (actually, "Famicom") released in Japan
    September 1985: Super Mario Bros. released in Japan
    October 1985: NES released in US
    March 1986: Super Mario Bros. released in US

  7. Re:Obituary != Birthday Card by Sowelu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Me and my roommates still huddle around it to play Mario. When the gray screen and flashing light got too prevalent, I went down to my local retro game store (more NES games than you used to be able to buy in the old days!) and picked up a brand new 72-pin connector, and replaced my old one. It works like it's new again, and I got some new games, too. Wizards and Warriors is hard. All my old battery games still work, and when I bought Wizardry used, it came with the last owner's dead party members in the dungeon still. I found them and hauled them back to the surface, and now they're in my party; it's almost like I was playing Shadows of Yserbius. My PS2 died. The only console I now own is my NES. Hell, it's the only thing I use my TV for since it doesn't get that new digital whatever (and I wouldn't watch it anyway). I beat both quests of Zelda on my NES while waiting on some long downloads and compiles over the course of a long weekend.

  8. Re:Obituary != Birthday Card by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...Except for the fact the NES isn't dead or abandoned.

    Nintendo sells NES Roms for $5 a piece on the Wii, the NES still has a thriving homebrew scene, new versions of the NES/Famicom hardware shows up nearly daily from replicas of other systems made to con unwary buyers (PolyStation anyone?)to portable consoles.

    Just about every one of Nintendo's NES titles have gone on to spawn successful franchises the majority of which continue to this day (Mario Bros, Zelda, Punch-Out, Metroid, etc.)

    I don't think there has been an older system with as healthy of a community and such surrounding it. Just because Nintendo isn't churning out any more NES consoles doesn't mean the NES is dead.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  9. Re:Mine still works... by Applekid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hey, it's already pretty good. The lockout inside the console is easily neutered (cut pin 4 on the DIP IC with "CIC" on the silkscreen), the cartridge connector -- while flawed -- is straightforward to repair and you can buy replacements for about $5, and the console can be opened up with regular old Phillips screwdriver.

    If it were made today, it would use security screws under rubber feet and labels, have a sticker about voiding the warranty, and disabling any kind of protection device would either brick it, make it impossible to play with more than one player at a time, or get you in trouble under DMCA.

    --
    More Twoson than Cupertino
  10. Re:Mario vs. Duck Hunt by JDeane · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nahhh the post your replying too was incorrect, the only thing Duck Hunt checked for was the brightness of the square thats all it did.

    The screen did not go black then black with a white square, all it did was go black with a white square in the position of the sprite you where shooting at, if your gun was pointed at one of the white squares when you pulled the trigger you scored a "hit" if it was in the black area it was a "miss"

    "The light detection flag gets set when sensing light emission from the display, ie. when the cathode ray beam outputs a bright color (preferably white) at the location where the gun is pointed to.
    Most video controllers are latching the current cathode ray beam coordinates at the time when the light detection flag gets set - that's not supported by the NES/Famicom video controller - it could be eventually implemented by software, ie. by counting the number of clock cycles between vblank and light detection.
    Otherwise, the following trick can be used: Output a black picture, with a white field at the desired target location, wait for 1-2 frames, then check the light detection flag to see if the zapper was pointed to the target area or not. The downside is that the normal picture cannot be displayed during that time, so one should check the zapper position only when necessary, ie. typically only at the moment when the trigger gets pulled."

    Pulled from a site that has way more information about the NES then most mortals need to know.

    http://nocash.emubase.de/everynes.htm

  11. Re:Wait, what? by mattack2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, "Mario" the character was in an arcade game first. (Retroactively named Mario in Donkey Kong, where he was called Jump Man [exact case possibly incorrect].)

    However, *Super* Mario Bros. was not an arcade game first(*). "Mario Bros." was.. Where they were in the sewers, jumping into turtles and such from below, then walking over them so they'd go off the screen.

    (*) I think it was later. IIRC, there were NES-in-arcade-cabinet systems.