The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released in August of 1991 in North America. I think Nintendo would have continued to improve and develop games for the NES and given the 8-bit era a longer life span had there not been competition from Sega and a few other companies. Sega had lost the 8-bit console war and released their 16-bit offering, the Genesis, in 1989, which gave them a nearly 2-year head start into the 16-bit era.

Unlike the Japanese Famicom, the SNES was identical to the Super Famicom other than a few minor cosmetic details in the outer plastic shell. Nintendo’s region locking was easily defeated by simply removing a plastic piece that mechanically prevented games from being inserted, thus allowing Japanese games on an American system and vice-versa.

The system was a very light gray in color, with a

couple of darker gray spots and purple accents (the Power and Reset buttons). Games were top-loaded into a slot that had a spring-loaded door to prevent dust from getting in when not in use. That plus a few other advancements prevented the blinking “Gray Screen of Death.” Unlike the NES, I can only count on a handful of times where a SNES game hasn’t worked correctly. Using my analogy from the NES section on Windows, it’s like comparing how stable Windows XP or 7 is to Windows 95. 

To eject the games, there was a button that acted as a lever to pop the games out of place. Earlier games had a small oval recess in the cartridge, and when the power button was pressed a plastic tab mechanically inserted itself into the recess to prevent the game from being ejected or pulled out during play. Later cartridge design changed the shape of the recess in response to (what I can only guess is) tabs breaking because someone ejected a game forcefully during play and broke something. The new design helped keep the game in, but also allowed for it to be pulled out without breaking if it happened.

The aesthetics of the system were more symmetrical than the

NES, and other than the printed words of “Power,” “Reset,” and “Eject,” the only thing that made the system asymmetrical was the power light on the left side.  The games came with a small hard-plastic cover that only protected the bottom of the game.

Like the NES, the system had two controller ports in the front, and connection ports in the back. The power cord was shaped differently than the NES, but the RF/coaxial jack was exactly the same. Instead of RCA jacks, there was a new “multi-out” jack that was used for TVs with those kinds of hookups which were more common by 1991. Like the NES, the power cord had the transformer on the plug so having the NES and SNES plugged in simultaneously was hard to do, as those two plugs would take up a whole power strip. It was possible to daisy-chain the coaxial inputs, but whichever one was plugged directly into the TV could override the other one.

The redesigned controller was one of the new features of the SNES. The NES controller had 4 buttons if you counted Start and Select, but the SNES boasted 8. The new buttons were X and Y for the thumb, and R and L on the top of the controller for the index fingers. Start and Select were still black and rubber like before, but they were angled to save space. The 4 main buttons (A, B, X, and Y) were set in a diamond pattern which made playing easier because it’s more natural for the thumb to be at an angle than totally horizontal. The result was that B and Y were the two most commonly used buttons. The “dogbone” shape of the controller itself was rounded to feel more comfortable. Instead of the multi-color button design of the Famicom controller, NoA opted to have purple and lavender buttons for some reason. But one thing they did was make X and Y concave while A and B were convex. Supposedly this was to help the player feel the difference between the buttons without having to look down, but in reality very few probably noticed the difference.

There were quite a few graphical, audio, and other technical updates. Graphically, it could show many, many more colors (nearly 33,000 compared to 56 on the NES) and a lot more simultaneous colors (up to 256 from the NES's 20), so sprites could have some shading added to the edges. Larger sprites (and more of them) could be utilized without blinking, and having multiple backgrounds and foregrounds was standard. Other effects included transparent sprites, more animation frames, Mode 7 (used on games like Pilotwings or Super Mario Kart for rotating the background), and accurate scaling (zooming in/out). All of these combined together to give the feel and illusion of a more 3-D environment. After getting used to this, I went back and played Super Mario 3 one time and it caught me off guard how flat everything looked in comparison.

Originally the system came with Super Mario World, which was a big selling point. The game expanded upon ground broke in SMB3 and added Yoshi with a cohesive world where any level could be replayed endlessly and some had multiple exits creating different paths. Later, a smaller, cheaper SNES package could be bought that only included 1 controller and no game giving the consumer the option of buying the game they wanted if Mario wasn’t their thing.

About this time the “Bit Wars” were in full swing. The major players were Nintendo and Sega (and to a lesser extent, Atari), though there were other failed consoles who tried to play (TurboGrafix16, for example). Though Sega had a 2 year head start and had been running on a “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” campaign, the SNES was superior in every way except for pure processing speed. It could display more colors, more simultaneous colors, greater resolution, more sprites, and had a vastly superior sound chip. Sega pushed its greater processing speed in a “blast processing” ad that worked like a charm. Kids didn’t know what that meant, they just knew that the Genesis had it. Looking back, the Genesis console was more aesthetically pleasing and less kiddy looking, had more sports games, didn’t censor violence as much as NoA, and the fact that their boxes were plastic cases were plusses, but in terms of gameplay, controllers, franchises, graphics or sound the SNES was superior.

Later in its life, games like Donkey Kong Country and StarFox

added graphical capabilities that wowed everyone. By comparison, the Genesis had add-ons like the 32X and SegaCD to accomplish what the SNES was already doing. Games like StarFox and Stunt Racer FX had an added on chip that was hard-wired to the game to help with the polygon graphics. Games like Donkey Kong Country used a different technique to make graphics. Rather than draw everything by hand, sprites were created by making animated 3-D models and using flattened versions to make frames. The result is a fairly realistic-looking character with incredibly smooth animation.

Like the NES, there were several controllers available for the SNES. But I think in general fewer were made and sold because most people just used the included controller. I always thought the standard controller was the best with one exception: the Ascii Pad. It was like a regular controller except that it had separate Turbo and Auto functions for each button as well as slow. The top of it was slightly sloped so reaching the L and R buttons was a little easier as well. 

 

 

 

There was also a mouse made for the SNES that came with Mario Paint. As far as I know it only worked with one other game, but it worked great for Mario Paint. The NES came with a Zapper light gun, but the SNES equivalent was called the Super Scope, and it didn’t rely on light gun technology. Instead, there was a sensor that plugged into controller port #2 that was placed on top of the TV, much like today’s Wii remote sensor. It was a bazooka style gun that required 6 batteries, and it came with 6 mini-games to play. There were

a few other games that were compatible with the gun, but none of them were very popular. Most peripherals were and are that way; in fact, the only one that was wildly successful is the guitar from Guitar Hero/Rockband for the Wii/PS3/XB360.

Many of the first wave of games were designed to show off capabilities, such as Pilotwings’ scaling, F-Zero’s Mode 7 abilities, and Mario World showed off the colors. The new addition of L and R buttons added different things to different games – screen scrolling for Mario, leaning for better turning in F-Zero, and weapon scrolling for Mega Man X. Later they would become just regular buttons, like the Fierce Punch and Kick buttons for Street Fighter II.

On the bottom of the system was a little expansion port, just like the NES had. It wasn't used outside of Japan, though. Japanese players had the option to buy something called a Sattelaview add-on, which let players download games and receive news via satellite radio broadcast. It was a primitive predecessor of today's Wi-Fi connection, and required having the SNES, the Satellaview, and a subscription to the service. A little more on it can be found on the BS-Legend of Zelda information. The expansion port would have also been how a CD add-on would have been used, but the project was canceled and eventually became the Sony Playstation. 

Many of the SNES games were 16-bit updates of older games (essentially remakes) of 8-bit games (Super Offroad, Super Star Wars, and Super Castlevania IV, for example), while others were continuations of past series (Zelda: LttP, Metroid III, Mega Man X, etc.), while others were updates of older games with newer features and rosters, such as sports games. Many of these games perfected their formulas during the 16-bit era. After years of making games for the NES with its limitations, the SNES let platformers shine since they had the superior hardware and years of experience for the programmers to build on.

A few years after being released, Nintendo made the Super Gameboy. It was an adapter to play Gameboy games on the SNES. There were several advantages to doing this, including bigger screen, easier to hold, and adding color. For more details, see the Super Gameboy section.

The SNES was the most powerful console of its generation, and (like its predecessor) the most popular, but it didn’t dominate the way the NES had. The Sega Genesis gained ground on Nintendo from its PR department’s ad campaigns and (mainly) because it was released earlier. It remained the main console until the N64 came out in 1997, even though the Virtual Boy was released in 1996 and died a quiet death less than a year after its debut. 

Additional Resources:

Adam Koralik talks about the 4th Generation of Video Game Consoles.

Adam Koralik talks about the SNES

James (the AVGN) talks about the SNES vs. the SEGA Genesis Part 1 (no language)

James (the AVGN) talks about the SNES vs. the SEGA Genesis Part 2 (no language)

Classic Gaming Quarterly's review of the launch of the SNES.

My Experience with the NES

Christmas Day of 1989 was probably the biggest Christmas I ever had. We got a Nintendo Entertainment System – the Action set, meaning it came with SMB/Duckhunt, 2 controllers, the Zapper, and the required cables. We also got Zelda II: The Adventure of Link as well. We played the crap out of that thing. It also meant that I didn’t have to live at my friends’ houses to play games, nor would we have to bribe my parents to rent a system for a weekend. There were days that it probably wasn't turned off at all during the first few months. 

We only had a B/W 13” TV that had the screws instead of a coaxial jack. The B/W aspect made it hard for some things. For example, during the final boss battle on Zelda 2 it was impossible to tell how much life you had, and the Bubbleman stage on Mega Man 2 caused a static-y sound to come from the speaker. That TV wore out after a few months and we bought a new, cable-ready color TV that lasted until early 2015. At first we had sharing issues. My mom’s solution was to have us take 10-minute turns. Obviously she had never played these games otherwise she would have realized how that wouldn’t work - 10 minutes was not nearly enough time to get somewhere in Zelda, accomplish something of value, and have enough time to save. The same was true of Super Mario Bros. I guess she just assumed the games were like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong - short and restarted often.

I didn’t have any inclination to keep the boxes/manuals in good condition, unfortunately. I did, however, see an idea to use electrical tape to tape the black sleeves together to make a DIY game case. This proved very useful in keeping games where they should be, and we didn't have the sleeves lost all around the house like a lot of people did. 

One time I went to swap games (temporarily) with my friend Chad. Originally the trade was going to be Zelda 2 for Mario 2, but Chad's mom decided that Mario 2 was too valuable to let go, so we got Defender of the Crown instead. My mom had me go trade back because if they weren't going to give us their good game, we weren't either. Another issue I had with game trading is that my mom sometimes took a black sharpie and wrote our last name in BIG letters all over it. I felt it was kinda defacing and devaluing the collectability of the game. For later games she would just put an address label on it instead. 

With the system was an ad for Nintendo Power, and I started subscribing. My first issue was the Super Mario 3 cover. At that time it was only published bi-monthly, but they started sending super in-depth strategy guides on the "off" months, and it just so happened that my third issue was the first strategy guide. After 4 guides it became a monthly magazine. I ended up taking the magazine for 3 years. By the end of my subscription run, most of the games weren’t as cryptic as the first ones requiring the maps and hints in the magazine to advance. Plus I could just borrow my friend Michael’s copy from across the street. Like the boxes/manuals, I didn’t keep these in great shape. I read them often when I was bored or on the toilet and didn’t think to keep them nice on a shelf like Michael did.

That year at school, we started a Nintendo Club. We were all given some kind of Nintendo-related code name – I was the Zelda Zapper. We had cards laminated with our names and a picture from a game manual on it. We had meetings at each others' houses on Fridays where we played games we had. Video game talk was the usual fare at the lunch table at school and playground when there wasn’t anything in particular to discuss.

After a few months, we got Super Mario Bros. 2 while on vacation in Utah (we had taken the NES with us an hooked it up to an old spare TV my grandparents had). We had wanted to get Mega Man 2 originally, but due to the box art, my mom deemed it too violent because of Mega Man’s gun (LOL). The following Christmas we got Golf from my aunt/uncle because during a family reunion at their house during the year we had 3 game systems and a computer all playing golf games for some reason. I also got Final Fantasy (the original).

Around this time the Super Mario Bros. Super Show debuted. It was a goofy kids show but it had cartoons featuring the adventures of Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool (she wasn’t Peach yet), and Toad. The show was ok, but the main reason I watched it was for the Friday cartoon: The Legend of Zelda, featuring the obnoxious version of Link and headstrong Zelda. Later, on Saturday mornings I would also watch Captain N, featuring Simon Belmont, Mega Man, and others, and later the Super Mario Bros. 3 show – basically the same thing as the first version of the show but with updated power-ups and the Koopa kids as additional bad guys.

Then the movie, The Wizard, came out. It was kind of a crappy movie, but kids didn’t seem to notice because they played games throughout it and name-dropped many more. But the main reason was to see advance footage of Super Mario Bros. 3. The movie was essentially the world’s longest commercial for a video game [EVER] but we watched anyway.

Later on we got a few more games. I bought Maniac Mansion from my cousin Bruce, Ninja Gaiden II from Toys’Я’Us (with a little wheeling and dealing with my mom) while Matt got Punchout!! (the non-Tyson version). We ended up borrowing Tetris from a friend and my dad liked it so later that Christmas I got it for him using a discount I received from Nintendo Power. He played Tetris a lot and finished Super Mario Bros. Most of my friends’ parents didn’t play so when they heard my dad finished SMB they were kinda impressed.

I swapped games with friends many times (never permanently, of course) so I could play a wider variety of games. I kept track of a small network of friends/acquaintances and which games they had so that I could try as many games as I could. One summer we played Castlevania 3 for weeks on end while drinking soda refills (Caffeine-Free Pepsi) we would get from the nearby gas station. On top of that, I had 2 means of game rental relatively close (Video rental store and a grocery store both within walking distance) and did so probably about every other weekend on average. Sometimes we could even convince my mom to rent one while she was at the grocery store when we were at school so that the game was ready and waiting for us when we got home (even Mega Man 2 - since the cover art was different in the rental store). 

I earned a reputation of being able to finish most games I sat down to play, and knowing all there is to know about them. I would have friends call me up out of the blue for advice/help. It was a combination of skill and determination that got me the rep. There were too many games to play them all, and I had a late start to the party. But I feel that I hit almost all the major games that are still remembered today. 

A couple years later we moved the NES downstairs when Matt and I moved into the basement. One night the ladder to our bunk beds got knocked off and shattered one of the controllers. I think we ended up getting another one, and we had to repair the unshattered one using a repair kit. It had parts to replace the rubber pads on the inside and replace worn out buttons. We opted to get neon colored buttons. Speaking of controllers, I never bothered to get any of the other controller styles because none of them were worth it in my eyes. Having the turbo and slow features on the Advantage (arcade style joystick) would be nice on games that required button mashing, but it meant losing the fine motor skill control of the thumb in favor of gross motor skills from a whole left arm. The only one I might have considered getting was the boomerang-shaped NES Max, but even if I had the money for it, I would have rather had a new game. 

We also had to clean the games and system a few times using isopropyl alcohol and special applicators. I also ended up opening up the system and bending the contact pins closer together to get a tighter grip on the games to prevent the blinking grey screen of death. That made it harder to get a game in and out, but we had to blow into it less often. We got a lot of dust in it because we lived in a desert, but also because a rogue basketball broke the door off of the control deck. 

The small cabinet we used as a TV stand held the game systems as well as a stereo/mixer board thing. It was missing one of its wheels, so the back corner was held up by a copy of the Back to the Future 2 novelization and an Encyclopedia Brown book. Looking back it probably seemed a little ghetto to my friends, but I didn't seem to mind. We also took the NES with us on a couple of trips to my grandma's house in Utah. It certainly helped alleviate some of the boredom of being there once we had exhausted all of the usual things we did there. 

Later games we got included: Captain Skyhawk, Time Lord, Iron sword, Kickle Cubicle,  Rescue: The Embassy Mission and Tecmo NBA Basketball. I also traded in the SNES game Contra III to the Card Shop for the original Legend of Zelda. Michael's copy of Zelda 2 had stopped working for some reason, so he borrowed ours one time. When he came to return it, I was playing basketball outside, so I just set it on our front porch, figuring it was out of danger. But the ball hit a corner and made a funny bounce and landed on the game, chipping off a piece of plastic from the cartridge.  

Eventually I got the SNES and had both systems hooked up simultaneously, but at some point we moved the NES upstairs to the kitchen TV because it was the family’s system, while the later ones were mine since I bought them outright. I still played the NES every so often, especially if it was part of a series (like Final Fantasy or Zelda) but my focus shifted to the SNES.

Eventually our NES wore out, between years of play and the percussive maintenance we had used to get it to work right. Even though I had the SNES, I didn't want to sell all our games and lose the ability to play them. So we bought a NESv2, a modified version of the NES that resembled the design of the SNES. It was only $50 at the time, and all of us chipped in to pay for it. It worked a lot better than the old one and survives to this day. 

During my time in Japan and at college, my brothers nearly doubled our collection when they bought some used games cheap from the video rental store, which was getting rid of old inventory. 

When I moved out of my parents' house, I left the NESv2 and games there. But when I got married, my mom was getting rid of things and gave me all the old video game equipment. We hooked it up to the 13" TV in the bedroom for a while. Once we moved to our condo, it was hooked up to the 25" TV in my bedroom while sitting in my top drawer. But now it has been moved to storage and replaced with a broken Wii that has the HomeBrew channel. 


In addition to the HomeBrewed Wii, we now have HomeBrewed 3DS systems that can emulate NES games, as well as the NES Classic Mini that we got and modified to have more games.

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. 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.

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

The Early Years

I suppose I have always liked video games. One of my fondest early memories is being taken to arcades with my family, like when my dad took me to PoJo’s for some pinball or we visited the BSU game room. Going to a place like ShowBiz Pizza (aka Chuck E. Cheese's) or Keystone Pizza gave me opportunities to play some of my favorites, like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. My only problem was that each play was a quarter, and practicing was expensive. Whenever I would go to a new store, I was always looking out of the corner of my eye for a game or some kind of mini arcade that happened to be around. Sometimes I would go run errands with my mom and just stand around the arcade machines watching the demos play over and over. When I was about 5 or 6 we got the Pac-Man Board Game from Milton Bradley, and my mom made my brother and me Pac-Man and Ghost birthday cakes (since we basically share a birthday). I also tried to watch the Pac-Man animated cartoon as often as I could catch it. It was pretty obvious that Pac-Man was my favorite game. 

One night while my mom had some kind of gathering/meeting going on at my house, she had procured my grandma's old Pong Console. I was in heaven - video games at home! It was hooked up to our 13" B/W TV and I played it as much as I could. I remember wanting to play it more after that night, but I never saw it again. 

At some point for his programming class, my dad got a
TI Home Computer (TI-99/4A). It was basically a keyboard with a CPU and some RAM, but no hard drive. It was hooked up to a standard color TV for a monitor. It had a cartridge slot for games/applications, but if nothing was in the slot it would boot up to a BASIC programming command prompt. My parents got some educational games for it, and later Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones called Munch Man and TI Invaders respectively, plus a few others, but my favorite game was called Defense SAM (Surface to Air Missles). This one had no cartridge, so we had to use the other way of storing information – cassette tapes. That’s right, the same kind that we used to listen to music on. It required a tape recorder that had certain kinds of input jacks, and it made a god-awful sound that was like a modem on steroids.

I was given a BASIC programming manual for kids and started to learn how some of it worked. The only problem was that since it lacked a hard drive, after typing up a program it would run once and clear the memory. I spent countless hours on that thing because that was all I had for video games. My cousin had a Commodore64 that I played while visiting them in Utah, and a few other people I knew had an Atari 2600 (Pitfall was my favorite). My cousins moved to Boise and they had one, but I rarely got to play it because in order to do so 3 different things had to happen: we had to be at their house for an extended period of time, they had to not be currently grounded from it, and they had to want to play it. 

I did have occasions to play computer games at school here and there. My 3rd grade teacher had a educational math fractions game involving a pogo stick that I liked, and my Gifted class teacher had Escape ANTcatraz and Castle Adventure. There were a few others, but those were probably the highlights. 

One night, when I was watching TV by myself, I saw something that would change my life – it was an ad for the original Nintendo Entertainment System with ROB and the Zapper. I was amazed, enthralled, and wanted one badly, but had the feeling that we would never get one because of tight finances. It wasn’t too much later that we moved from Boise to Ontario. Our neighbors had a Commodore64 and I would play with that every once in a while when at their house. My favorite game on that was the Impossible Mission, followed by Ghostbusters. I also visited any arcade I knew about, or even just any place that happened to have 1 or 2 cabinet arcade games like Circle-K and Ontario’s mall (may it RIP). I went to those kinds most frequently, but had occasional visits to places like the bowling alley, Pietro's Pizza around the corner, a small arcade by the music store, and there used to be a full arcade in the mall before it became a gym equipment store.

 Around 9 months after we relocated to Ontario, my friend Brooks’ family moved around the corner from Texas. After getting to know them, I found out that they actually had an NES, and most of the original launch titles. The systems were still less common at the time, but his family had the whole package – including ROB. I was introduced to some of the launch games like Gyromite, Excitebike, and Kung Fu. Later I played Super Mario Brothers and loved it. Whenever I was over there I used any excuse to play it. They had the system in a small nook in their basement, and it always felt like being in a cave, which enhanced the environment when I first played The Legend of Zelda there. I had seen the commercial for it previously and thought it looked fun, but I didn’t know just how much I would love it.

At Brooks' next birthday party, his cousin brought Zelda where I could play it for the first time, and I could not put it down. It was unlike anything I had played before, and appealed to just about everything that I liked with video games, mazes/puzzles, exploration, and fantasy all rolled into one game. I never forgot that experience, but it would be years before I would get to play it again. 

Over the next couple years, the NES became more common and more of my friends had one. My brothers and I found out that some of the grocery stores around there would rent the entire system, and we would try and convince our parents to rent one as a reward by waking up early to clean the house. While I was grateful to have the TI computer and the games we owned, I really, really wanted an NES. Finally, Christmas of ’89, it happened. But in the time leading up to it, I did anything I could to be around an NES. Lunchtime conversations with friends were almost always about games and the new secrets they had found or levels completed. Copies of Nintendo Power brought to school were passed around and pored over.

My friend Michael from across the street got an NES along with Zelda 2 and I think I practically lived over there for the next few months. Unfortunately, it kinda ruined some of the discovery aspects of Zelda 2 for me as I more or less knew everything about the game when I got it myself later that year. But with what little I had played of the game and knew from being around him playing it, I knew more than most of my friends. In fact, once, my friend Jake invited me over to his house specifically to get the Magic Hammer for him as he was unable to do so after repeated attempts. When I got it he ran around his house yelling, “HAMMER! HAMMER!” like a madman.

My aforementioned cousins with the Atari also owned, by this time, the SEGA Master System, SEGA’s 8-bit system. In fact, they had 3 of them. My aunt and uncle had bought 3 in the hopes that between 5 kids they wouldn’t fight over them. I played Double Dragon and a few other games with them under the same terms and conditions mentioned previously.

Once we finally procured a Nintendo console on Christmas of 1989, I rarely played anything but Nintendo consoles. However, there was one series of games I played with my dad on our computer - three of the King's Quest series. 

The purpose of this blog

This blog is public, though it's main purpose is to give me motivation to get out my thoughts and opinions on things dealing with my favorite games, movies, and comics. I'm not under any delusion that it will become popular or read by anyone other than possibly my kids as I'm explaining old video game equipment to them.

But someone may find it useful, so I might as well put it out there.

To start off, there are going to be several categories that posts will belong to. Right now, the ones I have planned are: Video Game History (mainly my own experience, but also some general details as well), Zelda music, Zelda game reviews and suggested changes, Marvel movie reviews, and some other things that aren't on the horizon right now. I'm hoping to get all of the things I've already listed done by 2016 at the latest so I can move onto other things.

Late 2019 Edit: 

It occurs to me that I might need to explain the naming of the blog. Usually the term "fanboy" is used pejoratively, and reserved for someone who is firmly in the camp of the creators of the media (or whatever) who can do no wrong in their eyes. 

For example, my friend from college was of the opinion that anything created/written by Gene Roddenberry was nothing short of pure genius and most things made by George Lucas was mediocre drivel. He was what we would call a Star Trek fanboy. 

I was once a fanboy of Nintendo (and anti-Sega), Marvel (and anti-DC mostly), and Star Wars (with a healthy dislike of Star Trek), but I would say now I'm a more discerning consumer of genre entertainment and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each flavor/brand/company. So I'm using the term somewhat ironically now but also owning that I used to be one in an effort to reclaim the word.