The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013)

arstechnica.com

152 pointstosh74 comments

In the US it saved the industry. Outside of the US computer games and mini computers were selling fine, and gaming was going through its own golden age (especially in the UK). Hell, even Japan offered more competition for the Famicom than the US did for the NES.

America is not the only place in the world, and the video game crash was not a worldwide phenomena.

I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era in America, which were getting long in the tooth and were quite underpowered, especially (but not only) the Atari 2600. I get rather fed up of hearing people refer to it as a universal, industry destroying event.

The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were capable of running. People became bored of them.

There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving games.

By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different: here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory, and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more expensive.)

The Japanese called it "Atari shock" and I suspect this is a much better name for the phenomenon.

It wasn't a problem with people getting sick of video games. It was a problem with Americans getting sick of the Atari 2600, other similar video game consoles and the distribution model of cartridges sold in toy stores

The sales of home computers in the US massively increased during the "video game crash", especially sales of the Commodore 64. I suspect those C64s spent the majority of their time playing video games, off floppy disks.

Nintendo must have done their market research, because they clearly identified the source of the problem and cleverly marketed the NES as "Not a video game console" and "Completely different from the Atari 2600".

Off tapes, not floppy disks, probably. Those drives were expensive.

It's my understanding that the majority of C64 users in the States used disks, while the majority of European C64 users used tapes.

It was different per country. In the UK, tape was quite dominant, but at least here in Austria, the 1541 was far more common. AFAIK it was the same in Germany.

Indeed. I think in the US basically everyone had a disk drive whereas in the UK almost nobody had one. In The Netherlands and Germany they were quite common, as well.

Not sure if the nordics were a mixed bag or not, as i don't recall anyone using tape for their C64 (but a few had UK computers, the Amstrad CPC in particular).

My impression is that the clear majority of the Nordic C64 users had a datasette and tapes.

My cousins were part of a cracking crew on C64. Almost all of the (hundreds of) games I had were ISEPIC'd and 5-10 to a floppy disk.

It took me years to realize that was pronounced "ice pick" and not "i-sep-ick". I didn't know any better.

I wonder what would have happened if the C64 shipped with controllers and a game.

I think Nintendo's quality control gets too much credit. The European market was flooded with C64 and Spectrum games of wildly varying quality, but a) they were cheap and b) there were credible, independent games magazines. The European computer games market in the mid-80s wasn't too dissimilar from the PC games market of the mid-90s.

A full-price Spectrum or Commodore title cost £8-£10 ($30-$40 in today's money), but a budget title cost as little as £2 ($7.50). The low cost of cassette media drove down the price of games, so young gamers could build a collection with their pocket money.

Crash, Your Sinclair and Zzap!64 weren't afraid to slate a bad game, so you could have a reasonable degree of trust in their reviews. Your Sinclair had a regular feature called Crap Games Corner, dedicated to taking the mickey out of genuinely awful games. By the late 80s, all the major magazines had cover tapes with demos or free games.

Nintendo's strict quality control was a particular response to the severe asymmetry of information in the US console games market, but it wasn't the only option.

I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game. Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month.

Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality

Now, as then, the key is good journalism.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com

Link unrelated?

There's a deluge of crap games on Steam, but there are also journalists sifting through all that crap to find the hidden gems. RockPaperShotgun are (IMO) the best of the bunch.

Not really, RPS is (I feel) one of the best journals out there when it comes to gaming. Too bad they only review PC games though :(

Every Unity game I've played seems to suffer performance problems of some description, or completely shits the bed when you try to add mods.

I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.

It's not Unity, it's the developers. Unity can perform very well if enough care and effort is taken to understand it. The problem is a lot of Unity developers don't take the time to learn it's mechanics or just don't understand programming all that well. If you were to attach Unity's profiler to a majority of the Unity games out there, which I'm sure with some you could because they're probably built with the autoconnect profiler set to true, you'd probably see a monstrous amount of garbage collecting occurring. Not understanding update cycles or the performance implications of newing each update is what I've seen be the true source of performance loss in Unity, in general. Unity also has a GetComponent<T> because they need to access a class attached to a Unity GameObject, but instead of caching that reference to the gameObject they just do the GetComponent each frame or each method call, which has a performance impact because Unity needs to filter through all the active GameObjects to find either the first one or all of the ones that have said component. Stuff like that is why Unity games run so poorly, the engine is almost to accessible.

Unity is fascinating. I remember upgrading from a old gaming PC to a brand new one. I sat down and fired up Kerbal, and it was almost as bad. I don't play Unity games any more.

I really hate that Unity games are mashed with traditional games as well and that I can't filter that shit out on any popular stores such as steam. Drives me wild.

I predicted the same around 10 or so years ago with the massive deluge of free mobile games flooding the market, making it hard to find genuine quality. Turns out I was wrong.

In Spain the video game industry for microcomputers were doing really well with a very healthy internal market.

Alternative perspective: the popularity of the NES in North America stopped the C64 from being the defacto gaming computer/console.

If they put more emphasis on releasing cartage based titles, bundled a game pad, and made the keyboard an accessory and got the timing right, it would have been a much better device to have in every living room in the 1980s and early 90s.

IIRC, the US desktop computer game market was also unaffected. It should be called "The great US console game crash of 1984."

Exactly, the only video game Crash here in the UK was Newsfield’s magazine.

Alright, but the audience of this site is mostly American and the US is the largest market for games.

I find notions of 'saving' things, particularly industries, to be disingenuous. If the NES flopped, or never existed, it's not like the console gaming industry would not exist. There is clearly a market for it and so we would simply have different names to recall as the 'saviors' of the industry. This is also why companies failing is not a bad thing, nor something that should aim to be avoided.

For instance with our massive automotive bailout. If these companies went out of business it might have been a rocky few years, but clearly there is a demand for vehicles and this would have created a vacuum enabling new companies, perhaps with more innovative ideas, to take their place. Instead we propped up a failing industry for no apparent gain. It could have even been detrimental in the longrun. Not all automobile companies were failing -- Hyundai-Kia were booming for instance. And had we let the dinosaurs go extinct it's entirely possible that today most cars being sold would have been much more fuel efficient. Instead, as soon as gas prices dropped we ran right back to giant gas guzzlers. Ford, for instance, even recently announced they've decided to stop making all passenger cars... except the Mustang. So what happens the next time gas prices spike? Deciding to save the company has predictably incentivized myopic behavior.

Ford was the only US automaker that didn’t need to be bailed out.

Besides, people who buy Mustangs aren’t that sensitive to gas prices.

No, they didn't receive the TARP funds. Instead they received a $5.9 billion dollar loan from the taxpayer for the stated purpose of developing more fuel efficient vehicles - and, without which, they likely would have gone bankrupt. It was granted with a subinflation 0.25% interest rate and has still not been paid back.

NES was mostly an US phenomenon I guess.

In Europe we were focused on ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, depending on the country, and then moved into a mix of PC, Atari and Amiga.

In Portugal the only games console that some kinds cared about were the Sega one's.

Growing up in the 80s in Korea, NES wasn't big at all. Early to mid 80s console was mainly dominated by bootleg versions of Sega Master. Then in 1987, the NEC PC-Engine (turbographx16) came along and blew everything out of the water with its slick form factor. Then many jumped on the MegaDrive (Genesis). Good old days. :)

The Master System only really caught on in Europe and Latin America; in the US and Japan the NES was far more successful. They also had Japanese PC games, but they were on different, Japan-only machines that were capable of displaying Japanese characters and had a much larger portion of indie games and pornographic games.

In Mexico I never heard of Master System, my first console was a NES and it was not until the SEGA Dreamcast and PlayStation came out that I knew of other consoles. Nintendo had a monopoly over here.

It may just be Brazil.

Europe was a mixed bag, at least i have the impression that Nintendo was the big seller in the Nordics.

I knew several people, myself included, that had a NES, but only one that had a Master System. And i don't know of anyone that had a Gensis/Mega Drive, but again several with a SNES.

Hmmm. I can't really speak from experience, but I read a couple books on the subject and they are in agreement that Sega led Europe. But of course Europe is a more diverse market than the US so I'd expect more variation from one place to another.

Yeah i guess we have to break it down by nation to get a clearer image.

On that note, it may well be that the Nordic Nintendo distributor was more "energetic" than some of its colleagues on the continent.

https://www.nintendo.se/information/7-bergsala-ab

I guess it depended on your social circle.. :)

There were also lots of NES clones with 100+ games built-in, and they were big with my friends. They happily ran my US NES games. A bit slower than my US NES, but they didn't have the hassle of having to get a NTSC TV like I did...

I had my NES years before they were available here, but I knew they were sold in France at the time, at least.

The Megadrive/Genesis was also a big hit, no question about it.

NES was big in Europe too, but it was a bit of a rich kid thing. The games were expensive, 2 to 3 times as much as a computer game, plus I knew at least 20 kids with a home computer and maybe a handful of games were bought for them - in total, like Christmas presents and such. The rest, hundreds of titles, were copied.

Nah, the NES was big in the UK too. Most kids I knew had one when I was young.

I had mine 'chipped' and could use this two-piece cartride that had like 3000 games on it. Most were awful clones or whatever but some were weird and wonderful.

In '90s there were also Pegasus and others which were just terrible clones of NES.

I remember having a silver star which was looking back was a terrible console in general.

Seriously? Maybe this is a generation thing but I remember the opposite, the NES was big in the UK, they were everywhere.

Yep, on the 80's and 90's Iberian Peninsula I hardly saw NES on sale.

I migrated from a Timex 2068 (Spectrum clone) to PC 386 SX around 1991, but already used a couple of Amiga 500 at some demoscene meetings by then.

The NES is very significant.

But without it the Amiga kept gaming going happily. It was a great system. I remember the first time I saw an NES and the comparison to the Amiga wasn't great.

The Amiga had a lot of great games in the 1980s too. Kick Off, Speedball, Xenon, Marble Madness, Bubble Bobble, Populous, F18, F16 Falcon, the Lucasarts Adventure games.

The Amiga wasn't nearly as influential in NA as it was in EU.

Sure.

But it would have kept the industry going in the US as well.

Electronic Arts targeted the Amiga quite a bit.

As did Spectrum Holobyte.

The Amiga was a fantastic machine it was far too expensive to be anywhere near as mainstream as the NES. If it would have kept the industry going it would have been in a far more niche fashion.

$1300 Amiga 1000 (without monitor, $1800 with it) vs $200 NES. The $700 Amiga 500 helped but the NES had also dropped in price by then. Sales figures for the Amiga do not seem entirely reliable but supposedly ~8 million vs ~60 million, and obviously not all of the Amigas were used for games.

Yeah, the 500 was what kept the Amiga going in the home market afaik (i didn't even know the x000 range existed until years after i had gone PC, all i knew was the 500/600/1200).

All in all the NES was more akin to the C64, while the Amiga was more akin to the SNES.

Yes, and much earlier than the SuperNES too, which came out quite late in comparison. As for the NES you could also take the C64 as a comparator that had a very decent library of original games too.

Yes but the nes was faster to setup, more child proof and had better joypad. Even without the fantastic games, it made a huge difference.

Amiga 500, which launched the same year as NES was also 4 times the price of NES.

How did it keep it going?

The Amiga CD32 was going to dominate the industry but had an IP suit against it.

When the Amiga 500 dropped below $300 in the USA it entered video console territory.

That's not at all how I remember it - the CD32 was a last ditch effort, and one which whilst trying to maintain some sense of heritage (mainly in the awful styling - even at the time I wondered what they were doing) entirely misplaced the value of the Amiga in teenagers minds: creativity and piracy, neither of which were to be found.

For me the CD32 was a final confirmation that the haydays of my beloved Amiga were past.

At that point, I'd already seen Comanche running on a lowly office PC and knew that things were fast changing.

CD32 was launched a bit late, but also marketed too little. Commodore was dying by then, too many business jets, too few financially sound decisions.

Atari basically created, and then almost single-handedly destroyed the entire American console industry.

Despite their early success it was so poorly ran. Management was horrible. They were releasing piles of shit as games, like Pacman and ET. Programmers left the company in droves because of poor pay and treatment. Atari poorly handled the third party developer situation.

Their hardware was terrible. The 5200 and 7800 were flops. They couldn't get any traction in the home computer business.

Bugs aside, ET actually isn't a bad 2600 game at all. A lot of the crap it gets is purely meme driven.

And the bugs have been fixed:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

It would be great if we could stop glorifying Nintendo as if they were the only valid actor from some kind of dark ages of video games. It was just so NOT the case, having lived thru that time.

I feel like in the US it was. I still remember the first time I saw Super Mario Bros. at my friend's house. It's hard to overstate how mind blowing that game was to me as a kid after being exposed to mostly single-screen arcade and console games prior to that.

Same clear memory for me too. We had a BBC Micro and some great games but Mario still stood out.

In the US console market? There was the Sega Master System, which I loved, but it didn’t make much of a dent here. What else was there? Atari XE and 7800?

Computer games never stopped - in fact they kept picking up steam during the crash. I know you said “video games” and not consoles but consoles had a huge impact on gaming.

you probably have this impression because of the time it took for nes to enter western market. I lived through that period as well and had a japaneese friend that had a famicom ( and pretty much everything that was released in japan, as soon as it was released). I was very much into computers and consoles , but i remember going to his appartment with a feeling of seeing something from the future.

Interesting.

I distinctly remember a BIG gap in home video game systems between the death of Atari 2600 in the early 80’a and market acceptance of the NES in the mid-late 80’s.

Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

> Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

Reminds me I have / had a small graveyard of Ice Hockey cartridges. I got my start programming in the mid 00's doing homebrew NES dev, and Ice Hockey was a readily available, cheap cartridge with the NROM PCB layout

I still feel a little guilt for taking all those poor cartridges out of the world, and keep an old Ice Hockey PCB sans CHR and PRG ROMs on my desk as a totem / reminder.

For most kids I knew the C64 was the dominant 'video games system' of that era. Consoles seemed dumb and limited. First time anyone I knew got a console was when the Nintendo64 came out.

In retrospect it seems these things were very regional and driven by network effects - a lot of my friends bought computers based on having friends they could copy or borrow from.

For those interested in the cultural and technical history of bringing the Famicom to the West, I can highly recommend "I am Error" by Nathan Altice. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-error

This discussion about how dominant the NES was in which countries reminds me of a question I've had for a while. Is there hard data on the popularity of each game platform (computer or console, home or handheld, etc.), globally or for each country?

I think the best way to measure it is by software sales. You could also include hardware and accessories, but that would inflate the share of some platforms because of uses beside gaming (productivity and the Internet on computers, or Blu-ray playing on the PlayStation 3).

Does anybody have recommendations for books or documentaries that evoke the general vibe of this era?

The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001) is amazing, if that's the angle you are looking for. Over 600 pages of great stories and information about the industry. I've read it twice and still think there sre things in there I haven't fully digested. I have a few other video game books pushed in the early to mid 2000s, but this is the only one I'd actually recommend. There are a lot of newer books, but they seem to approach video games from a more sensationalized space. One exception I would make are the works of Brian Bagnall, who writes about Commodore/Amiga. I haven't read his books but I hear they are amazing.

For documentaries, not exactly the same, but I enjoy the Bedrooms to Billions series (feature films, 2 are out) and to a slightly lesser extant Viva Amiga (2017) and the 8-Bit Generation series (feature films, 2 are out). These can be a bit more computer-focused though. I do not recommend Video Games: The Movie (2014), it feels like a VH1 special with little actual information.

I agree with you that Video Games: The Movie was trash.

From Bedrooms to Billions (2014), on the British video games industry 1979-

Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound (2016), more about composition and working within constraints but the hardware gets a look in.

Wow that thing looks an aweful lot like an MSX. Both the console, the cartridge and the joystick

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