The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

The early roots of the NES were the Japanese Famicom system (short for Family Computer). Internally the systems were similar, but there were a lot of differences. The Famicom was white, maroon, and gold colored. The cartridges were all different colors, and they plugged in vertically (like the SNES and N64) instead of the front loading American NES. Another difference is that the controllers were hard-wired to the system and the cords were very short. In Japan, it’s expected that people are sitting very close to the TV because of the small living quarters. So the first player controller was pretty much like the NES, but the second player did not have Start or Select buttons and instead had a microphone. It was used in much the same way the DS microphone was used. The side of the system had holders for the controllers.

The system also came with an add-on peripheral disk system that used disks similar to normal, everyday floppy disks used in computers at the time. Some games were purely on cartridge, and some were only on disk. The disks made saving files easy, but when they translated them to the American system some interesting work-arounds had to be made. Most games went with a password system. The problem with passwords is that little kids don’t write down everything legibly and when you lose a letter, all your progress goes with it. The Legend of Zelda was the first game to have save files on the NES, and that required having a battery soldered to the cartridge, but it worked.

Localizing games (the term used for converting Japanese games to an American audience) was a tricky bit. Nintendo of America (NoA) censored every instance of smoking, sex, drinking, swearing, and even most religious references. A lot of times, there were also minor changes to the games themselves when they were localized. One of the best examples is that on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the battle music and boss music was changed (for the better, IMO) and a couple of the bosses were switched around. Another one is that in Japan, Super Mario Bros. 2 was just more of Super Mario 1 with newer, harder levels. They included slippery surfaces, wind, and poison mushrooms. It was also only a 1-player game where you could be Mario and have normal abilities, or be Luigi who could jump higher/farther, but had much less stopping traction. The game was deemed too hard for Americans, so they converted another game called Doki-Doki Panikku set in Arabia into Super Mario Bros. 2 by changing a few sprites around. Years later, they released Super Mario USA in Japan and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels in the USA so each country would have both versions of the game. 

There were also a lot of Japanese games that never made it at all to the States because they were deemed having too much Japanese culture, too hard, or just not popular enough. Final Fantasy 2 and 3 were never localized, as an example, until years later by popular demand from American/European audiences.

Because of the spectacular failure of the video game crash of 1983, many parents and critics had decided that games had been a fad, and many retailers wouldn’t sell systems or games. The genius of Nintendo was how they dressed up the system and sold it to the retailers and consumers. What they were really showing and promoting were R.O.B. the Robotic Operating Buddy and the Zapper with Duck Hunt and Gyromite. Retailers thought it would sell because of the toy robot aspect of it, but once consumers got ahold of the games, they usually stopped playing the robot and just focused on the games. These games were actually playable; the graphics and sound were much better than previous home consoles and the controller actually responded like it was supposed to.

The system itself was a dual grey colored box with a black stripe that had 2 buttons and various jacks for plugging in power cords, A/V cords, and controllers. It had red and yellow jacks for the RCA cable hookups (today they would be white and yellow) on the right side (those were rare on TVs in that day), and an RF-to-coaxial jack on the back of it for most television sets. There was also obviously a cord for the power cable. Unfortunately, at this time the transformer was part of the plug so it took up quite a bit of room when plugged in. It wouldn’t be until the N64 until Nintendo figured out to put the transformer away from the plug so it doesn’t clog up the outlets.

The games were inserted into the front by opening a small door, being put into the system, then the games had to be clicked down. There was a very, very common problem where dust would get into the system or the games and it would make the games not work. The two most common solutions were to take the game out and blow into it, and then maybe hit the system itself (percussive maintenance). Kits were sold to clean the games and the system to help prevent this, but it happened a lot and it was a normal part of owning a Nintendo. It was like how in the 90’s, we just accepted that computers running Windows got the Blue Screen of Death every 15 minutes.

The game cartridges were gray (with a few notable exceptions), and came in a black plastic sleeve. Like the boxes and manuals, most of the sleeves were lost/thrown away by most people. Many retail stores sold cases that held 20-30 games so they would be easier to keep track of. The box and label art of the original run of games were all done in the same style, making them easy to identify, but once the system caught on the style was quickly usurped by better box art.

For those who didn’t have a TV new enough to have a coaxial jack (colloquially known as “cable ready” back then), there was a converter that turned the coax into 2 forked connectors that attached to screws.

The controller had a Directional pad (D-Pad) that was capable of 8 directions shaped like a cross instead of a joystick. It worked much, much better than past joysticks (especially the Atari 2600). It also had black rubber Start and Select buttons and hard plastic red B and A buttons (they were alphabetically backwards from what English speakers would have expected).

The Zapper was 2 shades of gray to match the system with a red trigger button. After a law was passed requiring toy guns to be orange tipped, all NES systems were sold with bright orange Zappers. Both the controllers and Zapper had a proprietary jack so that no other controllers would work. This is unlike what SEGA did with their controllers – they used a typical serial port type jack that allowed even Atari controllers to be hooked up to both the Master System (their 8-bit console) and the Genesis (the 16-bit system).

There were a lot of optional controller styles available, but none of them were worth it in my eyes. The NES Advantage was an arcade style joystick controller with big buttons. The only “advantage” I saw was the turbo and slow features. Turbo was useful for games that required button-mashing, and slow was a feature that paused the game repeatedly for those with slower reflexes. The NES Max was a boomerang shaped controller that had a precursor to the 3DS’s circle-pad and regular buttons with turbo options. There were other kinds, like the U-Force that used hand motion in some manner to control the games, but it worked better on some than others. The most well known was the Power glove, and it was a precursor to today’s Wii Remote. It was a glove that had required sensors on the TV to use, and it really didn’t work that well. My friend Brooks also had the Power Pad – a precursor to today’s Dance-Dance-Revolution pad – for sports games. If nothing else, Nintendo was always looking for innovative ways to interact with the game. If you want to learn more, watch the Angry Video Game Nerd videos about these (warning on language). As I said, none of them were superior to the original controller. The best part was that you could put your thumb on the two buttons so you could use both at once, and the D-pad was near flawless.

Originally, I think Nintendo intended for the Select and Start buttons to be used mainly for menu purposes, but eventually Select became just another button on a lot of games (like Zelda II). Start was almost always the pause button. It was interesting all the ways that game devs made use of so few buttons (but which seemed plentiful compared to the Atari).

There were 2 different 4-player adapters available. My friend Jake had one and we tried to play Super Spike V’Ball with 4 people, but it was difficult to get it to work right. 

At some point the Game Genie came out, and it was basically a hex-editor that let people change the values of certain memory locations in games. The result was that you could get Mario to jump super high or perhaps run really slowly, or a whole bunch of other things. If you had one, you also had to have a guide-book that had lists of codes for games that they had discovered. Nowadays, that kind of information would be posted on a website and crowd-sourced, but back then it was restricted to a book that was occasionally updated.

When you look at the evolution of games, you can see how people discovered new and innovative ways to make games over the years. Original games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. were single screen games. Then later they figured out features like side-scrolling, scrolling both ways, having more stuff than what’s on screen, multiple backgrounds, using more color palettes than the system was designed for, digitizing voices, etc.

Something that you would always see on games and their boxes is the Nintendo Seal of Quality. They learned from the mistakes of Atari and in order to release a game you had to pay to be officially licensed, but also the games had to at least be playable. That didn’t guarantee that the game wasn’t mediocre, but it probably weeded out a lot of terrible games. Occasionally you might see an unlicensed game – instantly recognizable by its different cartridge color/shape.

On the bottom of the system was a small, removable cover that 
was labeled as an expansion port. To actually gain access to the port, it required breaking a little plastic piece off of the shell. To my knowledge, it was never used but may have been there to facilitate a Famicom Disk System type of add-on. The Disk System connected to the original Famicom hardware via the cartridge slot, but that would have been a lot harder with the NES design, so a bottom port probably made the most sense. 

Some programming limitations that my friends and I noticed in the early years were corrected later. One in particular was the value of 255. We noticed on a lot of games that often there was a limit of how many missiles, rupees, or other items. We later learned about how that was the biggest 8-bit number one could make, and that the programmers later learned how to exceed that number. We also figured out that the system considered the background, the foreground, and moving sprites as separate things, even though we didn’t know why at the time. We figured out the NES had a limit of about 8 sprites at a time because whenever there were more, they would blink and the NES would slow down.

There was also a distinct sound that each company's games had. You could blindfold me and let me listen to games I had never played, but I could still tell you that the game was made by Konami, Tecmo, Nintendo, or Capcom just by the music and sound effects.

After the SNES had debuted, Nintendo released an updated NES. It was a smaller console designed to look similar to the SNES and was top loading. Other than missing the RCA input jacks, it behaved just like a regular NES, so there was no graphical or sound improvement. The dust problem was greatly lessened though, which was a big bonus. The controller that came with it was similar to the dogbone shaped SNES controller, but they messed up and put the buttons on the wrong angle.

They made games for it for a little while after the SNES was out, but once the SNES caught on development kinda stopped. 


Additional Resources:

The Angry Video Game Nerd plays with ROB (warning: Language)

The Angry Video Game Nerd play with multiple NES accessories (warning: Language)

The Angry Video Game Nerd plays with the Power Glove (warning: Language)

Gaming Historian: The Video Game Crash of 1983

Gaming Historian: Game Genie

Gaming Historian: NES v2


Gaming Historian: The Story of Super Mario Bros. 2