How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

For the holidays in 1986 (and ’87) (and ’88) the most stupendous, most wanted, most amazing thing any kid could possibly get – outside of a pony, *maybe* – was the NES. That year, video games came back from the dead and changed forever.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and Weird ten years old right now, and
this is stuff you should know. Can I go ahead
and admit something? Oh? Yes, I'm nervous though, but yes,

(00:25):
go ahead. Well, I was a little bit old for
Nintendo the ANYS system. Uh. And that's not to say
that kids my age weren't playing it, but like it
really booned in popularity right when I was sort of
like fifteen sixteen and starting to sort of drive and
get out in the world. Uh. And I also did

(00:47):
not own one, so like I never played Mario Kart
and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Uh. Eventually
in college, I remember it had to have been a
Super Nintendo and like my roommate had one, so that's
where I first started playing Super Mario World. And I

(01:09):
played stuff like Tetris and Mario and the game Boy
that my brother had. But I was I've never owned
a Nintendo. Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came
out and I was ten eleven years old, not driving yet,
and it was and I owned one too, so it
was definitely in my Wheelhouse. Yeah. I mean later in college,

(01:30):
my um my good friend Clay got a the first
PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter
and Mortal Kombat. And then I got on the PlayStation train.
But it's just funny reading through this. I was like,
I played some of these games here and there, but
I was not Nintendo kid. Yeah, I have to say
I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super Nintendo

(01:52):
or Sike of Genesis, but I have friends who had those.
Um went off into the End sixty four world with
the Golden Eye played back right. My friend John had
one of those, and I played a lot of that.
That was so great. And then I got the first
PlayStation two, the first PlayStation I mean, not to be confusing. Um.
And at that point I realized that I was thinking

(02:13):
about how to play games while I was not playing games,
like when I was just walking around living life. And
I made a decision, a very faithful decision that I've
never regretted, that I was going to give up video
games because I was too addicted to them. This is
this was college and I it was I never looked back. Wow,
so you were into him, huh? I was big time

(02:33):
into him. Yeah, it was. It was like, this is
if it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it,
then yes, I was a little too into him, if
you ask me. I was never a gamer or anything
like that. I just really enjoyed playing games. Maybe a
little too much in your favor, uh, in your defense, Rather,
I would say that I think everyone who's ever played
like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world as

(02:56):
like Tetris boards occasionally if you're into it. Yeah, uh,
and you know my deal is that, you know I
said before, as I was heavy Atari kid, big time
arcade kid, and then played this kind of stuff with
friends here and there, and then now every year I'll
usually or every couple of years, I'll get two or
three PlayStation games, play him obsessively for a couple of months,

(03:17):
and then it sits for nine months to a year. Yeah,
I'm with ye. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy
way to play video games. You know. Yeah, I've still
enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun. Uh. But yeah,
my my buddy Doug Dillard growing up, had one rich
friend and he had a television, and so I had
kind of some fun today watching the old because I

(03:37):
remember thinking the in television football was really great, and
when I looked at it today, I mean it's very
very basic, but it was pretty good still, like your
calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back. It
was a big rush of nostalgia. Yeah. Um, it's somehow
two bit graphics, I think. Yeah, and this, to be clear,
what we're gonna talk about today is the the original

(04:00):
any S. This could have been a two parter if
we would have gone down the road of the sixty four. Like,
we're not even talking about the music today at all,
so there was plenty more material here. But this is
just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season, Yeah,
because I mean it's the holidays, so one of the
greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisced
nostalgically about holiday's past. And I definitely associate the Anyes

(04:25):
or other I didn't realize this until I started researching it.
Some people call it the nest. Did you know that? Yeah,
Some actual like legit gamers call it nest. Other people
call it any S, and apparently there's some big disagreement.
I've always called it an e S. But I always
associate the n E S was a pretty significant portion
of my life, but like it always is tied to

(04:47):
Christmas as well. All right, well you're gonna wax nostalgic
a bit more, even though I did play a little
bit of Easier and there. Okay, so um. One of
the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment System has an amazingly
rate story to it, like it's it's just so fun
to tell because Nintendo came along at a time when

(05:08):
the video game market in North America had so totally
bottomed out that people looked at video games like imagine
think about how big Autari was. People looked at it.
It crashed so hard that it was a fad that
was never coming back, like it had already lived its life.
And Nintendo walked into this burning um city that was

(05:32):
the video game industry and said let's give this another shot,
and they actually managed to succeed. Yeah, I mean Atari
was dead as disco. We talked a little bit about
it before, especially in the ET episode, and I did
a full Attari guest two parter with Strickland. Yeah back

(05:52):
in the day on tech Stuff. I bet that was
a fun one. It was a lot of fun. But yeah,
ET came along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it
helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't
just this one game. It was uh, sort of a
flash in the pan for a few years, and parents
were also weighing in and saying, you know, um, I

(06:14):
don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television, Like,
I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't
think it was a part of this satanic panic necessarily.
It was pre Satanic panic that was more along the
lines of your riding your brain, right. So, um, I
was that the thing that triggered it? Or was it
the terrible terrible games that really triggered the what's called

(06:37):
the North American video game crash? Of it was the games,
wasn't it? Well? I mean I think it was a
two part thing. Like kids got a little less interested
because the game started to suck quite frankly. Uh, And
then I think you also had parents beating the drum
of hey, and and Atari wasn't really coming out with
you know, the new systems weren't that great. The THEFT

(06:59):
undred came along, I mean, rather followed up, and it
was just okay. So they needed something needed to happen,
and that thing that needed to happen was a Nintendo. Yeah.
And also at the same time, one of the other
things that had ushered helped usher out video games was, um,
the personal computers starting to come into the world. And

(07:20):
with the personal computer you could like do your taxes,
your kid could like practice math, and they played games
on floppy disc too, So exactly, yes, I played Wolf.
It's like, oh, I'm so glad you said that, because
I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disc and I'm like, like,
I was definitely playing it before that it was Wolf instead.

(07:43):
Thank you, man, you just made a really great neural
pathway circuit, like connect completely in my brain. But I
saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who
wrote an article on this and Wired back in two
He said that video games were dead, dead dead, personal
computers were the future, and anything that just played games

(08:04):
and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. That was
kind of like the premise. So just to get across,
I don't want to like beat this drump too hard,
but to get across how huge the crash was. The
video game crash of North America. UM in nineteen eighty two,
Atari raked in two billion dollars Atari alone in nineteen

(08:24):
eighty three they lost five hundred and thirty six million dollars.
That's a swift fall, yes, but that's how quickly that
it happened, and so people that basically, if it crashes
that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's
kind of where we were at in n Yeah, but
as you pointed out, this was we need to keep

(08:45):
pointing out, this was the North American crash. Yeah, good point.
It did not happen in Japan. UM in nineteen eighty three,
they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about,
because we have arcades are we here that are flourishing. Uh.
We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. It's still
a lot of fun to play. Those games are still
fun to play. And in nineteen eighty this was a

(09:07):
few years before the United States crash, they said, hey,
you know what, there's this gaming thing going on, home
gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get
together a team over here to just sort of poke around.
Because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys, and
we have for a long time, and we're big in
the arcade world, but we don't have a really a
console system going, and that led to a beat. I think. Actually,

(09:31):
there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in
nineteen eight one, and it was it was sort of
the biggest thing in Japan at the time, but well,
I think it was kind of the only thing in
Japan at the time too, well, which makes it the biggest.
I guess you could also say it was the smallest.
But it was not a Nintendo product, right, No, it
absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was it was Nintendo came

(09:53):
along as a rival to to this um Cassette Vision
epoch Cassette Vision. UM. So the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi
Yamauchi um He apparently was this driving force. He had
some really great people working for him in Japan and
in North America, but he seems to have been this
person who would be like, um, do this enormous undertaking

(10:17):
and do it in an hour kind of thing. He
kind of seems to have had a sense that there
was a really narrow window that was open right now,
that could close at any time, and that they needed
to get this stuff done, but they also needed to
do it really well and really right, basically out of
the gate. And they actually managed to because in nineteen three,
after just a couple of years of research and development,

(10:40):
they released what's called the Family Colm or the Family Computer,
which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment
System that they released a couple of years later in
North America. Yeah. I mean, it's not very often that
a head of a company or a boss comes along
and says, I want to do something better and cheaper
than what is currently out there, and it actually happened. Uh.

(11:03):
And listeners at home, if you can look this stuff
up as you go safely, please do because just seeing
these all these various units we're going to talk about
is really a lot of fun. Yeah. They teeter on
the edge of being creepy there, like at that age
they're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy, but they're getting there
given another decade or so, you know what I mean. Yeah,
I think they're cool looking at I mean, this is

(11:25):
the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on
a shelf. As a collector. These days, I think there's
a lot of people who have that actually, oh I'm sure,
um so look at the epoch cassette vision because that's
kind of fun. But the Famicon was this red and
white box. Uh. It top loaded, It had two wired controllers,
and it had very importantly on the control pad. It
had a had the deepad, It had the directional pad

(11:48):
on on the left with the up and down, left
and right arrows, and then an A and B button,
which no one knew at the time, but that would
kind of revolutionize the gaming world. As you know, they
got a little fancy year over the years, but it's
still sort of that's still the bones of what a
controller is. Absolutely like it was I can never remember
the full quote, but somebody said it was like they

(12:10):
invented the airplane, uh and got it right fully out
of the gate, like trade tables and everything. Essentially, it
was like that's what they did with that that controller design. Uh.
And now you think about it, you look at it,
like the Nintendo brick and especially the fam Com controllers,
they looked so old fashioned. But if you can put

(12:32):
yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan and if
you looked around at the other stuff available, it was
it was just from the future. And that was one
of the things that Nintendo did really really well during
this period. They figured out what everyone thought, what the
future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and

(12:53):
they gave it to everybody. It was a really like
exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought
to the present and it was all thanks to Nintendo basically.
So it retailed for about a hundred and fifty bucks
back then, which is what close to five hundred today? Yeah,
four hundreds something like that, all right, So I mean
kind of on par with you know, the range of

(13:16):
even modern gaming. Mean, what's the new PlayStation like five?
Maybe I don't know, I'm not sure. I think it's
somewhere in there five or six hundred bucks. Do you
remember that PlayStation ad that was like for PlayStation seven,
It was just people running around the real world. It
was all like VR and augmented reality. I don't remember that.
It was pretty cool because it came out in like
the nineties and you're like, whoa, and we're pretty close

(13:37):
to that now already, you know for sure? Uh. They
they bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior games
and the Popeye games, which uh, we're basically about the
same quality as you would get at the arcade. And
it was huge. It was a huge deal. I mean,
especially if you grew up playing Atari. Uh I loved Atari,
but Atari was Atari, and it had a lot of limits.

(13:59):
And this was you know, you went to the arcade
so you could play games better than it's aori. Now
you could do it at home, right, Yeah, so that
was an enormous progression. But it wasn't just like the
graphics the quality of the look of it. It was
also the game play too, Like it was way more
fun than most of the games you were going to
play on an atar. It was just funner to play
some of these um fam com games. Um and it

(14:22):
it took off like a rocket. Uh. It knocked the
epoch um cassette vision right off of the top place
into the history books basically essentially. Yeah, they sold half
a million units in two months after its release. I
think by the end of nine they'd sold two and
a half million units, so in about a year or so.
And they were like, Okay, I think we're definitely onto something.

(14:46):
And they had enough Hubris enough I guess at least
self assurance that they set their sights on North America again,
which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video
games were concerned. It's a great spot for a break.
I think so too, all right. I think where we

(15:24):
left off the United States was a version of Core
mc McCarthy's The Road Yeah and the Walking Dead. And
Nintendo came along and said, we are going to save
you and bring you into the future. And it was
a tough sell at first in the US because, like
you said, the video game uh craze for lack of

(15:45):
a better word, had kind of come and gone. This parents,
we're still not you know. They were like, I'm glad
that went away, basically, and now we have these PCs
in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail
or whatever. And they seem happy enough with that. And uh,
Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew it
was going to be a tougher cell that they knew,
so they knew they had to come up with something awesome.

(16:07):
And their first crack at that was something called the
the a v S, the Advanced Video System, and they said, well,
give it a keyboard so it looks like a computer.
It'll have a little cassette disk drive. It'll be able
to do some stuff. It'll but you know, they bundled
it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick,
had a keyboard like a musical keyboard, and it had

(16:27):
this wireless which is well explain on how all this
works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it
had a little ray gun, a little zapper. Yeah, and
you really said a mouthful with the word wireless. Man,
this was and this advanced video system came out with
wireless controllers like it was. That's really impressive, and it

(16:48):
was really slick looking to like, really futuristic looking. But
also yes, they put enough computer um peripherals in it
that it did it didn't look like a video game system, right,
So they took it to c e S. The January
UM version I think even back then was in Vegas UM.
But it's sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right. Yeah,

(17:11):
I've never been to that of you, no, huh. Strickland
has great stories from it them. Yeah, he goes every year,
I think I think so. But at CS in January
they're like, here you go, everybody, here's the future of
the advanced video system and no one cared at all
about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play,
to mess around. No one could have cared less about

(17:35):
that thing. Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back,
because the games were good and they knew that. I
guess they were just a little gun shy, but it
seems like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there
wasn't someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is
going to be a real thing. But you know, it
didn't work. They didn't get any response. No, And I

(17:56):
think that really goes to just kind of underlined just
how bad a reppy tasition video games had, because you know,
Dave points out that, um, the consoles that have been
going for like a hundred a hundred and fifty dollars
the year before, these retailers were stuck with them and
they were selling them for like forty bucks, which is
how much the games used to go for. Now the

(18:17):
games were like four dollars. So the retailers have been
so badly burned. I think they all got caught with
these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they were
like never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against,
which is as Dave Dave. Again, Dave helped us with this.
As he points out, you were either a very foolish
company to try this or a very smart one because

(18:37):
again it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant
that there was no competition in this enormous market right now. Yeah, absolutely,
Uh So they knew they had to have almost like
a trick to get their foot in the door, and
they came up with one, and um day found this.
Uh is Gaming Historian? Is it a I know it
had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a

(18:59):
full web site? I don't know. All I know is
that the the YouTube channel where they make really high
quality YouTube videos that are really interesting. It's good stuff.
But someone at Gaming Historian came up with this very
apt metaphor about a trojan horse, and that's kind of
what they were looking for, was a way to get
these things in the home by almost tricking parents into
thinking it wasn't a gaming system and it was more

(19:22):
just sort of like a toy because kids still gotten
bought or you know, received toys and stuff. It's not
like they shut down the toy industry. It was just
home video games. So what they invented was the ROB
the r O B the Robotic Operating Buddy, which is
a very sweet name. You should totally go look at
ROB online and especially YouTube videos of ROB in action

(19:45):
and just be prepared for the speed of ROB. Right.
But the thing is ROB was a robot. He moved
and he functioned, he interacted with the games that they
came up very slowly, right, very slowly. But this was
a time where like, robots were kind of hard to

(20:06):
come by. If they were not like that, it was
not an easy thing to get your hands on. And
now all of a sudden there's this company saying like, hey,
we have this whole thing and it has a robot too,
and it was one of the greatest strokes of of
marketing genius that any company has ever come up with.
As we'll see, Yeah, I mean what they ended up
with was a robot that didn't I mean, it functioned

(20:27):
as it should, but like I said, it's super super slow.
They only ended up having a couple of games where
you could use the robot, and it was just sort
of a sneaky way to get these uh consoles in
the door. And because it was all part of the
same system and and that's how it worked. They managed
to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door.
And uh thanks to a guy named uh Lance Bar Uh.

(20:52):
He helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed
the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit
more about in a sec but he designed it as
a front loading system, which made sort of people think
of VCRs. It was also a very um they called
zero four solution, so there wasn't a lot of wear
on the on the cartridges and it, you know, just
worked really well. Plus it it looked like you said,

(21:14):
it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at
the time, and um, I don't think we said chuck.
So that January c e S was um just a
complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time
coming up with the advanced video system and it got
it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company,
Hiroshi Yamauchi, told a couple of people like, hey, redesigned

(21:38):
this in an hour, and they did. And Lance bar
was the guy who did it, and he knocked it
out of the park because that any yes, is a debut.
Later on in in North America was essentially what he
came up with in that one hour that he was
given to do it. UM, so they had they did
all this and had it done in time for the

(21:59):
July c e s like six months after that huge,
colossal failure, they went back to the drawing board and
came back in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System
fully fleshed out, including Robot and Zapper Gun, well notably Robot,
because that's what it all. Anyone cared about it first. Yeah,
for sure, like et CE S, the the NES system

(22:22):
was sort of to the side, and everyone was just
trying to get their hands on Rob and play gyro Mite,
which I'm telling you, you gotta just spend five minutes
watching Rob play this game because it shows the split
screen of the the TV screen of what's happening on
the game, which really isn't much. And then Rob just

(22:42):
very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin. Yeah,
and I wasn't the UM the game historian video that
that really kind of went into detail about how Rob
played and setting up his accessories and everything. I watched
a bunch of them. Yeah, I'm okay, I think it
was that one. If out it was another one I
saw where they really kind of showed, like the idea

(23:04):
of Rob was pretty ingenious. Like he he was player two,
but you were actually playing together, like you in gyro Might.
You were kind of running through this maze and there
were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had
to get robbed to do it for you. And again
he was so slowly. Yeah, get get an eye exam

(23:24):
and your glasses made in an hour or two, um,
And then yeah, he would have completed that and you
could advance to the next column or whatever. It was
a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it's
just the execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed
the buttons on the player to controllers. So if you
got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could
just push the buttons on the player to controller yourself

(23:45):
and play gyro Mte that way. But the point was
they don't seem in retrospect to have really thought Rob
was going to take off. Um. In fact, the games
that that they he came with in North America were
the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the
North American version of these. They just put like kind
of this like um like fix on it that made

(24:08):
it compatible with the North American system. But when you
loaded up gyro Mite, the the um the intro screen
showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning
of it. I feel like I saw other games that
had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, maybe
it's a memory um. It may have just been like

(24:28):
boot up screens or something. So they decide, uh, it
was such a you know, I grabber at cs that
they decided, all right, let's go to New York City
and let's test it out there in one city, roll
it out, see what happens. The New York retailer said, hey, buddy,
I got look at this. I got a warehouse full

(24:48):
of Atari's over here that I can't even give away,
like I don't know about a new gaming system. And
they said, all right, here's what we'll do. We will
ship them to your store from Japan for free. We will.
You can just sell what you sell and pay us
for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us.
We'll take them back. We'll send over a team in

(25:10):
your store to set up these big marketing interactive marketing displays.
And we'll we'll take on all of the risk, and
all you guys gotta do is try and sell some
of these. And they went, yeah, all right, that was
a great Joe Pesci by the way, Joe bet So. Yeah.
They did this in five hundred stores. And normally, when
you when you did the kind of a soft test

(25:32):
release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas.
There's somewhere that no one cares about, right, But they
went full bore and hit New York City. And I
think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times
that like it was based on that that Frank Sinatra song,
the idea that you if you made it in New York,
you can make it anywhere, and they did make it
in New York. Um. Oh, I can't remember. I want

(25:55):
to rock, okay, um, I want to run. I want
to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP three
is so good it still holds up if I want
to rock. Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that
MP three or MP four, I don't know what. I

(26:16):
bought it at toys R. Very cool. So um. They
they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They
sold about half the units that they had produced for
this test market in New York. Um, I think like fifty.
But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give
this a try. Let's let's roll out to the rest
of the country. Another bold move because normally after your

(26:39):
first test um, uh, like run your first test market,
you do like four or five more. And he said, now,
let's skip that, Let's just go right to the rest
of the country. And he did. And that was the
Christmas season too, So I get the feeling that they were, Um,
they weren't super disappoin in it, but they weren't super

(27:01):
pumped either. It felt like it was right in the area.
And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right
in that zone where it was just enough to keep
it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors
pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it
sold thirty units, you know. Yeah, for sure, I saw
somebody say, like the Nintendo. Had Nintendo not been successful,

(27:23):
like the games as we know them today would definitely
not exist. We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch
of dopes. Yeah, and going outside. Who needs it? So
that was holiday season. Um, night by six, they clear
they hit on something else. So like one of the

(27:43):
things that they did was take a poll of that
people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo
and I think like the vast majority of them said
that UM rob the Robot was the reason they had
bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how
that's how well that mark getting employee worked. So UM
Robin kind of served as purpose. Though everyone knew he

(28:05):
was slow, they weren't releasing more games for them, so
they came up with UM. Originally, the way you bought
Nintendo it was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers,
the zapper gun, Robbed the Robot, and all of Rob
the Robots accessories, and then two games, one of which
was Gyro Might that game you play with rob Right? Okay,

(28:28):
that's a lot of stuff, and of course it was
pretty expensive at the time, so for the national rollout
they kept the deluxe set, but they also came up
with something called the NES Control Deck, which was just
the console to UM controllers and very very importantly Super
Mario Brothers. And that was bucks and they sold those

(28:50):
things as fast as they could make them for the
holidays that year. Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance
of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came
along and uh with actually with a famicon, and it
was just it was the most advanced looking game and
playing game that any kid had ever seen. Uh. It was,

(29:13):
as day points out. It was the first game that
you could play and and have fun playing for forever,
Like you could go on and on finding the hidden worlds,
finding the easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections
that you and other levels that you never even knew existed,
banging away hidden bricks, like there were so many discoveries

(29:36):
and places to go. And Super Mario Brothers they created, Um,
it's sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey,
how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How
but put your cigarette down? How would you like to
play a video game the same one for the next
seven hours? Hot Dog? And that really hot Dog. It

(30:04):
was a whole new deal though, because even when I played,
it'sary like we played for hours at a time, but
I don't know, you played a game for five minutes
and you pop in another and that's why you had
like forty games in your in your controller box because
none of them you could play for hours and hours
and hours in a row and not eventually be like, Okay,
this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid. Yeah,

(30:26):
So the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything
I've Almost every single source that I've seen on the
Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things
uses the word light years ahead of everything else, because
it really was. Um. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto.
He designed the game very famously. He's he obviously became

(30:48):
a legend overnight because of it. They were also smart
enough to do some really savvy marketing moves which uh
kind of rolled out in a few different ways. They well,
they had a lot of advertising money that was sort
of a given. They about twenty million bucks uh to
spend off the bat, which is a ton of money
for advertising now and then. But they created a call center. Uh.

(31:08):
They trained these UH players and these gamers basically to
master these games and sit on the phone and you
could call a number if you got stuck and talk
to a human being that could like walk you through
a level that you couldn't get through. Uh. They had
Nintendo power magazine, which is a very big deal. And
they created the first you know, gaming championships where uh

(31:32):
and these are still just huge, you know where kids
and adults alike. You know, now adults from all over
the world come together to battle each other out. And
the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the
Grand Championships at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Yeah. I hadn't thought
about that, but yeah, you can make the case that
they created the sports phenomena. They lead the groundwork for

(31:53):
it to come at least, right I would think, So, yeah,
that's pretty cool. So um. There was a poll of
Nintendo years after the national rollout um that found that
of teams polled said that they recommended the n e
s to their friends, and I think three percent of
adults and of little kids. That is eye popping, and

(32:15):
that means that they were successful. They used rob to
get their feet in the door, and they knew that
if they just got their console in the hands of Americans,
they would change their minds forever about video games. And
that's exactly what happened. And they avoided the Atari mistake,
which was uh, they did their best to try and
keep bad games from being able to play it on

(32:35):
their system, and that's what happened with the game's got
so bad. I mean they're hundreds and hundreds. We talked
about this in the ET game episode, like ET gets
unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release,
But there were far worse games released on the ATR
A system, hundreds and hundreds of really really bad games

(32:57):
that just no one even remembers. And Tendo saw this
play out in America and knew that they couldn't let
that happen to them, so they designed a proprietary system
where you could only play officially licensed any S games.
He created a lock chip on their circuit board and
only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the

(33:20):
lot key or the key chip uh to unlock it.
And that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing.
They said even to third parties, they said, you can
only make two of these games a year, like, don't
come at us with two hundred games, Like make something
really really good that will approve of and we will
put the Nintendo sealo of quality on the front of

(33:41):
the cover. Yeah. And then like they were really nitpicky too,
Like as you were developing the game, you needed to
send Nintendo, like, um, explanations of the game play, the characters,
the design, all that stuff, and Nintendo would make notes
and send it back and make you change stuff. Um.
And that that's what you could do if you had
eight of the market as far as video games were,

(34:04):
because people had to come to you. And then it
was really smart for them to just kind of protect
their intellectual property like that because it was so good.
But um, they were basically so um heavy handed about
it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at
one point for their licensing practices. Yeah. I mean, anytime

(34:25):
you control that much of a market, the FTC is
gonna sniff around. Uh. And there were other companies out
there trying to bootleg games. Uh. Still there was one
called tin Gin that had a few license games, but
they wanted more money, and so they went to the
patent office and said, hey, can we take a look
at that patent for these lock and key chips? And

(34:45):
they said, sure, here it is and so they, uh,
I guess illegally because they ended up getting sued and
Nintendo one. So I mean, I don't know how all
that patent law works. I wasn't I'm surprised that you
could just go get a patent and rip it off.
Well you you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem

(35:06):
to have just ripped it off. But I think it's
one of those things that it was like gray illegal,
gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court. Okay,
you know what I mean. So they just tank and
rolled the dice and they lost essentially, I think. So
I've see I've actually heard it both ways. I just
wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way.

(35:28):
So there's this YouTuber named Ninten Drew and he has
a video called ten Weird ny S Facts, and he
talks about that that key chip thing where people were
trying to get around it, and he said other companies
UM didn't even bother to come up with a chip.
They just used a low voltage spike to scramble the
brains of the lock chip UM so that it wouldn't

(35:51):
work anymore. And now the game could be played. And
as an example he used to UM he used a
game from the developer Tree and it was a Bible Adventures.
But Bible no, I've never even heard of it. But
if you put Bible Adventures in your ny S. It
would scramble its brain so that you could play Bible Adventures.
I would think some of these might endanger the game

(36:13):
console itself. You'd think, so, yeah, it's pretty pretty reckless.
Jesus killed my Nintendo, right. Uh so rob did not
work out. Poor rob um did its job and got
its foot in the little robotic foot in the door.
But kids, uh, we're like, this is not so fun
playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where

(36:35):
it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. Um,
and so rob you know, Dave kind of funnily points
out Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet
of every kid that probably owned one, and it just
became about that any S system. But that's not to
say all those peripheries were not a success, because that

(36:55):
zapper uh and the game Duck Hunt were both big
deals that kids love to play. Yeah, and um, I
did not realize this, but the laser gun, the what
was it called the zapper? It was not It didn't
shoot anything at your TV because if you stop and
think about, your TV is not set up to accept
that kind of thing, or your TV screen certainly isn't.

(37:17):
So what happened instead is it was a light detector.
So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your
screen and just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that,
but still faster than you could register it. The screen
went black and whatever ducks are on the screen turned
into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing

(37:38):
at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper
would register that white flash of light that was a
duck that square, and it would register it as a hit.
That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious. Very ingenious. Uh,
and the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they
don't know how that stuff works exactly. There is no
kid who picked up the zapper and did and go

(38:02):
all right, I guess here a minute forty, we'll take
our second break, and we'll come back and talk a
little bit about what happened next. Okay, chuck so um.

(38:33):
There were a couple of other peripherals that came along
that were as mad as rob was, maybe even a
little mayor. One was the power pad, the other was
the power glove. And again these were things that were
really cool and helped advance any system and made a
bunch of money for everybody, but when you played with them,
they weren't very good. Yeah. The power pad is uh,

(38:55):
it was a pad. It was that it had another
use from another company. It was called a fun fitness
pad from Bandai, and Nintendo bought them out and basically
repackaged it and said, hey, now you can do like
track and field games by running on this dumb thing.
And that technology is still very popular, like if you
go to arcades, those dance games, uh, and they're still

(39:18):
like I played one not too long ago with my
daughter David Busters where you do like track and field
stuff is still around. But at home a kid isn't
gonna do like they're inside kids because they don't want
to be outside running around. They want to be on
the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well.
It ended up in the closet with Rob I almost
called him rod. Uh. And then that glove though, the

(39:42):
power glove, it was really cool and it looks cool today,
like if imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes
because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which
is a great boxing game, Uh, power Glove was kind
of the only game where you really maximized what you
could get out of the glove, right. I also saw

(40:03):
there's a scene in the um Fred Savage movie The
Wizard where this kid pulls out a power glove and
plays rad Racer. So he's using it like he's he's steering.
But it just they didn't really develop any games specifically
for the power Glove, so it was a little bit
because um they Dave likens it to we Eventually Nintendo

(40:23):
came out with the Wee system, which used essentially the
same kind of technology, but yeah, it was ahead of
its time, so it ended up in the closet with
the power pad and rob closets exactly. But as as
kind of clunky as those were, that that controller we
talked about that was revolutionary. Yeah. There's a writer, a

(40:45):
game pro named Ti k Kim who came up with
this cool analogy that they found, which is that what
Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what uh
Kim referenced as the language of console gaming, and that
really of locks it down as to what they did.
Like you know, we were talking earlier about that first
nes brick. You know, it was all kind of there,

(41:07):
like they grew and morphed, but that directional pad was revolutionary. Uh,
those buttons were revolutionary, and they landed on the idea
of a kid holding something in their two hands and
mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Uh thumbs and
pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs. Yeah, because

(41:28):
with the Atari joystick you would use your thumb for
the red button, but you used your whole hand to
to move the joystick. This was just totally different, um.
And it was really simple, It was really sleek. Everything
was laid out just right, and it was it was
just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like
you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of

(41:50):
the console controllers to come even today. Still it's based
on those Yeah, they had, Um, it didn't start there.
They had initially on this handheld game called the Game
and Watch, which if you look this it looks like
it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy. Uh.
And it's called a Game and Watch because it had
a clock on it, so it told told the time

(42:11):
and it was a game, So they call it the
Game and Watch. But that's where the D pad came
from and uh, Donkey Kong is a game that really
took great advantage of of the D pad, and um
it was it just seemed like the natural. And now
they make the little mini joysticks which are which are great,

(42:32):
but uh, some I think the uh I think the
Xbox they have joysticks or do they still use that dpad?
I I don't know remember addicted? So I gave it up.
So you never played in Xbox? No, no, no, I've
seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller. Yeah,
I played a lot of my same friend John Pendell,

(42:54):
who you know John backstage in New York. John he
had the in sixty four. He was my Golden Eye partner.
But he also got an Xbox and we were both
addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.
Oh yeah, that was a good game. And that was
a game that carried with you in real life because
if you played enough Tony Hawk, you would just someone

(43:16):
who had never skateboarded. You would be walking around in
the world and going like I could totally grind that
gutter on top of that that roof, right, It's pretty funny.
So the another thing that those controllers did was give
us the cheek code. I guess you could conceivably do
on like an entire joystick. But they really came along
thanks to the ny Yes, because there was a developer

(43:38):
who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into
a Nintendo game, and it was really hard, so he
created this cheak code to make it easier to kind
of game test for him so he wouldn't have to
start over every time, and is extraordinarily famous. Up up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
be a start. And that's called the Konami code because

(44:00):
the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius,
but it became much more famous with the game Contra.
I never, I guess you played a lot of Contra,
probably high for sure. Now what was Contra? I don't
even know. It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter
game where um I saw it described well as like
a cross between Rambo and Aliens. Um. So, if I

(44:23):
remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world
and you and your buddy are kind of like buff
and where like headbands, and you have like spiky blonde hair.
Um but and you just shoot all sorts of stuff
and it's really neat because you get different kinds of
weapons at shooting different ways. And now you're like, this
is clunky and old. But at the time it was,
there was just again nothing like it on the market,

(44:45):
Like a lot of the games that we understand today
originated on the n S. Yeah, for sure, I think
I've seen contract that sounds familiar. But if you did
the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, be
a start with contra. If you did it at the
intro screen, um, right before the game started, you would
get thirty extra lives which you could use to great effect.

(45:06):
Oh that's great. Uh, they ended up it's a staggering number,
still considering that they were kept a sort of a
heavy hand on the amount of games being produced, but
they ended up with close to seven hundred games for
the original NES and I think in is when they

(45:27):
launched the sixteen bit, No no, no, Super Nintendo was
one and that was the one that I guess my
roommate had where ended up playing a lot of Super Mario,
and then Super Mario two and three of course came along. Uh.
We already mentioned punch Out. That was I remember playing
punch Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was
the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But

(45:48):
there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up
and I think I remember this, but the arcade punch
Out had a boxer. The Russian boxers name was Vodka
drunken Ski, so great, and he got changed to Soda
Popinski very famously. Anyone who played punch Out is very
familiar Soda Popinski. And one of the one of the

(46:10):
big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger
who wore a turban with a gem on it. His
gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch.
When I realized that you could protect it. Yeah, it
just changed my life. That's funny. It changed your life
in it did. Hey, you might not never become like
a podcaster. You never know. It's possible that whole glass

(46:32):
stores or the sliding doors glass stories. Yeah, the glass ceiling, Yeah,
different thing. So um, what else, Chuck, There's some other
ones too that we have to shout out. Well, I'll
shout out Tetris because that's a game I played alone
in the game Boy. Uh talk about addictive. Tetris was
super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my

(46:53):
car packing skills today when we go on road trips
and stuff, Emily always still jokes like, Chuck is gonna
Tetris this thing. Uh, it was great. Tetris is a
very simple game. Uh. If you've never played it, it's
uh oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing,
but it's um. It's a game where you stacked to
different shaped blocks, and when you got solid lines, a

(47:15):
line would disappear, and the whole goal of this game
is to to keep those lines low. And as it
built higher and higher and higher, there was less room
for those blocks to drop, and it would go seemingly
go faster and faster. It was like it could very
stress panic. Yeah, especially as they just kept building up
and they're dropping in It's like it drops right onto
another block. You're up there high. It's just like you know,

(47:38):
it's just it is very stressful, it is, but it
was fun well, and it's also I think one of
the more satisfying games ever invented, uh in that when
you would things would get a little hairy, and if
you got like two in a row of the exact
ones that you needed and made I think it was
a tetris when you got like was it like five
or was it four? I don't remember four because the

(48:00):
tallest block was four high? Was it four high? But
it would make all four disappear at once, And if
you got a couple of those and you went from
like seventy high to down to in an instant, there's
no feeling like that. No, Toutris was pretty great. I
loved it too. It was awesome. I want to shout
out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which

(48:21):
I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster
and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to
beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid.
But it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't like
some path you I had to stick to, like you
were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff

(48:42):
before you could advance to the next level. That was
pretty new actually, So Metroid was groundbreaking two. And then
there are other ones that were just fun to play,
like ice hockey. Did you play that one? M I
was always into sports games, so I was I played
hockey and golf, about tennis, tennis, I played all that.
It was fun. Did you play the MLB Baseball game.

(49:03):
I'm not sure if I played that one. That one
was very addictive. R C Pro Am Ducktails was actually
a lot of fun. And then there was an army
one called jack Hole. And then if you like skateboarding
at the time, which I did, there was Skate or Die,
which was pretty good. But my money was on Town
and Country Designs Skate and Surf I think it was called,

(49:23):
and you could skateboard and then you would go surf
and it was a lot of fun to play too. Yeah.
I was so h into the sports games and I
still play the PlayStation Uh uh, what is it? P
G A two K for their golf game is still
a lot of fun, but I played. I was addicted
to the Atari Beach volleyball game, wherein it was two

(49:45):
players aside and both players were connected to one another.
They could not move independently, so when you're moving your
joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah,
that's hilarious. That sounds. It reminds me of another game
that Dave doug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which
was just about as bad as it got for a
tari where a dog chases the wagon from the Chuck

(50:07):
Wagon commercials branded poop out? Yeah, who who would have thought?
And then it would poop out like food and the
dog would eat the food. That was like the point
of the game. Uh. You should speak a little bit
about Zelda though, the legend of Zelda. That's a game
again that by the time that came out, it felt
like a kid's thing. Uh, and again we couldn't afford
an ne s. So what was Zelda all about? So?

(50:31):
I never liked Zelda. It did something to my mind
or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why.
It's almost like, have you ever um, what's your grocery store?
Kroker republics? I can't remember both, but generally publics. Okay.
So there's a lot of people out there who are
only publics and only Kroger. And I think my theory

(50:52):
is that they're laid out in a certain way that
they appeal the one type of person, and then the
other one appeals to a different type of person. So
if you are a public's person and you go into
a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place, and
reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda
maybe feels. So I never got into it, but I
know some people, like I've essentially dedicated their lives to

(51:13):
that game, like beyond playing, it's like probably dress up
as link the main character, have like all sorts of
toys and stuff like that. Like, Legend of Zelda was
really big too. Yeah, and it was certainly not the
first open world game, but uh, and I think there's
not a solid agreement on what that was. Um, there
are some arguments for the Great Atari Game Adventure that

(51:36):
was the first open world game I played. Your Avatar
was a square, but it was so much fun because
you could go anywhere for the first time. It was
really different new But I think Zelda is kind of
regarded as or the Legend of Zelda as one of
the first open world like really good open world games.

(51:56):
I guess it advanced one and it was by the
same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.
What else you got, Chuck, I mean, not a whole
lot of else. I guess we should we should definitely
talk about blowing in those cartridges, because I even made
that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working,
and uh, Dave, who's sitting in for Jerry, said, unplugged

(52:18):
the cable and just plug it back in. I said,
should I blow in it? All right? And you don't
want to actually, so did you know about that? Right?
I blew in a lot of cartridges at Aory cartridges too,
So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, um,
you would take it out of the VCR like um
entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew

(52:41):
on it, and you put it back in and it
would work. The thing is, it wasn't doing anything when
you blew on it. You weren't helping it. It just
hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when
you took it out and put it back in, the
chances were that you were making the correct connection then
and then the game would work. But you, being a
dumb ten year old, thought, well, I blew on it,
so that fixed it. But there the Nintendo long said

(53:04):
do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them,
and no one listened until there was this guy who
came along and actually ran a study, the first, the
world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge
does and it didn't work. This is his name was
Frankie Bit Truelo, And you know it was a very
rudimentary study, but I mean, how else you gonna do it.

(53:26):
You're gonna have a control game you don't blow into,
and you're gonna have game you blow into. And after
how long did he do this? Thirty days? Every day.
The guys spent a month blowing on this game. Took
this the blown cartridge out at the end and showed
that it was. It was corroded and kind of gross,

(53:47):
and uh, it's it's funny, like you don't know what kid.
You always wonder who invented this because every kid did it,
because every kid saw another kid do it who just
got it from some other kid, but was just sort
of known. Like you would take it out and it
was always the same thing. You would do it really
quick and just go and like run the cartridge back

(54:07):
and forth in front of your mouth and then stick
it back in. Yeah, I mean that sounds just triggered
a tidal wave of nostalgiam and chuck. Remember that, So
don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges. People who still playing
Nintendo Original and yes, you should follow this up again
one day to to do one on the music of Nintendo. No, well,

(54:28):
just sort of everything we didn't cover because the in
sixty four was such a big deal. And uh, I
don't know, this could be a two parter separated by
time and space. Okay, I like that idea, Chuck, let's
definitely do that. Um. And in the meantime, since Chuck
and I just hashed out a second part to this episode,
of course, that means we've just unlocked listener mail. Maybe

(54:52):
next Christmas it can be, are you know, because this
is kind of every year we try to do a toy,
a famous toy. Yeah. No, I have the same thought.
I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh all right,
consider them spilled. Yeah, they're spilled all over all right,
speaking of spilling all over, Uh, this is a correction
that on something you said that I I don't know

(55:14):
how I didn't catch this, but it's the we'll call
it the Great Nutter butter controversy of Hey guys. At
the end of the Vaudeville episode, Josh said, it's weird
how there were two types of nutter butters and they're
totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shape
cookie And I'm I don't remember what I said. It
must have just been like, huh, I think that's exactly

(55:38):
what you said. And you mentioned both of the same logo,
same packaging, which is not true, just two different types
of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what
you're talking about, because we had a bunch of people
right in. The peanut shape cookies are the Nutter butters, Josh,
but the other wafer retreats are nutty Buddy bars. Did
you look as this what you meant? No, I think

(55:58):
this person is from an altar that barn, same bear's dimension,
because in in our dimension that there, it's the same thing,
same package, same name, say everything, just different cookies. But
is the nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though?
Is what I want to know in that person's dimension? Yes, okay, okay,
it's easy to get a mixed up guys, if you're

(56:19):
not a true nuts specialist. Uh. And Chuck didn't pick
pick up on it, which was weird because I love both.
I don't never buy these, of course, but boy, a
little Debbie nutty bar so good. I think you would
like the other version of Nutter butters, the kind of
way free one. I think you would really like it.

(56:39):
That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy. No, that's
the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying. Oh man,
who wrote this email? This is George. I think Georgeton
is going to be more confused now than ever. So
George says, PS, gotta go. It's raining donuts again outside.
Thanks a lot, George. Were ciate the dispatch from your dimension.

(57:02):
Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too.
And if you want to be like George and reach
out and say hello, you can do that in an email.
Send it to Stuff podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart

(57:23):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.