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. 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.
A few years later, he console could be upgraded with an add-on peripheral disk system that used disks similar to normal,
everyday floppy disks used in computers at the time, but which had proprietary grooves so only official disks could be used. Some games were still released on
cartridge, but some were only on disk. The disks made saving
files easy and possible, but when the games were translated and ported to the American system some
interesting work-arounds had to be made. Most games went with a password system (like Metroid, for example).
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 Gyromite and Duck Hunt. 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 with 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 on the right side (today they would be white and yellow, and side note - 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
main culprit for this was the NES-10 Lockout timing chip that helped
prevent piracy, but even the smallest bit of dust or contact corrosion
caused it to fail. 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. The NES Advantage was an arcade
style joystick controller with big buttons, but the only real “advantage” 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, Nintendo presumably 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, called the NES Four Score and the NES Satellite. The major difference was that the Satellite was wireless and used batteries. 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.
Finally, by 1996, the Nintendo 64 was released in North America only 3 months behind the Japanese date, and the only difference between the consoles was the position of two pieces of plastic that straddled the cartridge slot. This form of physical region locking was easily defeated by pliers back in the day, and now can be overcome with a $7 tray ordered from eBay that replaces the stock version in a 5-minute mod job. From this point onward, there have been basically no regional differences and the only thing preventing cross-region gaming is a software lock.
