How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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, 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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,

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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

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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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. 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.

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