The curious tale of a Nintendo UK Hotliner during the console war era | Hacker News Reader

The curious tale of a Nintendo UK Hotliner during the console war era

nintendolife.com

133 pointsadrian_mrd54 comments

> “Nintendo Hotline, Keith speaking, can I help you?”

> “Hi! Well, er, maybe… this is a bit embarrassing really, there’s a dragon and it’s breathing fire and I can’t get past it and I don’t know what to do.”

> “Okay, no problem. Firstly, what game are you playing? You are playing a game, right?”

> “Yes – sorry, Super Mario Bros.”

first step of successful troubleshooting: assume nothing

Honestly, if I somehow managed to endup in the company of a dragon breathing fire, I don't know who'd be better to call.

Personally, I'd intercede to St. George, but I concede that the video game hotline guy is a strong runner up.

Good luck finding St. George's phone number.

Thank you.

I find them lucky to answer by phone. By writing, customers tend to answer completely aside of the question, it seems they don’t even see the question sometimes.

I like the idea of getting a letter that says "it doesn't work" and then that person having to wait a week to get something to the effect of "what do you mean by that?" as a response

When I was about 9 years old I found a cheat code in a game. I forgot the game, but it was the famous up+up+down+down… etc, but backwards. I called Nintendo Power and talked to one of the reps there. They didn’t know about this one! They got my information and sent me a box with a copy of the game, a free years subscription to the magazine, and a tshirt. I was a VERY happy kid.

I also used to “fix” games for the local video store. Qtips and rubbing alcohol.

“Little kids would phone up and ask if they could speak with Mario,” remembers Dan. “There was this wonderful innocence about it, like believing in Santa. We never had the heart to say he wasn’t real, so we’d say that he was busy making a new game and couldn’t come to the phone.”

That's adorable.

I wonder these guys knew any Mario canon. He was a plumber, and never depicted as a videogame dev. Kids would get confused, like if you told them Santa was out collecting kids' teeth or something.

I'm not sure why kids would be confused by the star of multiple video games being busy making another video game.

What kind of logic leads one to that conclusion?

No related contemporary materials ever showed him creating videogames, but instead showed him either being a plumber or saving Peach from Bowser.

The Ninja Turtles were famous cartoon characters. No one assumes they animated the cartoons because of that...

You're overthinking it. Think of it more like a movie star making a movie.

That's not really an apt comparison. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh my god, man. I hope you don't have kids.

You should be more worried about parents who resort to insulting people over discussions like this.

Do any of the video games actually show Mario doing any plumbing, though?

Like, I've never seen Mario in a game with a toilet snake trying to dislodge a 15lb turd from the sewer line.

“This training consisted of completing the entire NES catalogue, about 100 games, in one month.”

I’ve been playing video games my entire life, but I’m not sure I could survive this “training”.

Assuming it was paid training, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week

160 hours gives about 90 minutes per game. For the NES that's probably more than acceptable, many games were very short (Super Mario Bros can be finished by speedrunners in just 5 minutes for an extreme example)

The sub 5 minute speed run of Super Mario Bros skips most of the game via warp pipes.

A more proper comparison would be the warpless category, which takes a bit less than 20 minutes.

Btw, for Mario 3 the 100% record is about one hour.

Imagine how disappointing it'd be to accidentally speedrun a game on your first play.

How many hours do you think it takes for a player to get to the point they can finish the game in 5 minutes?

Something which is fun to do in your free time becomes a chore if you have to do it reliably, on a deadline.

They likely did it as a group, so together to some extent. When someone got stuck I suppose the others would give hints and tips. Still a difficult task, but slightly easier than going at it alone.

I think there is some youtuber that, recently?, played through every official NES game...

Edit: http://themexicanrunner.com/

There was only one time I sincerely considered calling a tips line.

It was this stupid barrel in ‘Carnival Night Zone’ in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - if you ever played the game; you know what I’m talking about - and I later wondered if it was literally placed in the game as bait to make you call the SEGA help line.

Either way; this article was a fascinating look into that small world.

Supposedly, it became so common for people to get stuck here, the hold music for the SEGA hotline added a message telling people how to get past it, before they even spoke to someone.

I am not fucking surprised. Where else - ever - in the Genesis classic Sonic games did you ever have to use up or down to move an item?

Also, IIRC; it wasn’t in the manual.

OMG yes! I thought it was just me being too young :)

I called the tip line exactly once. I was surprised because it was actually my parents' idea, and I knew it cost money. Of course, it makes sense in retrospect. It was the copy protection part of StarTropics, which come to find out was apparently their most common question.

In those days, copy protection of console games was rare, and all copy protection generally relied on physical artifacts that came with the games (sometimes manuals, sometimes dedicated objects). I'd bought the game used, and did not receive the artifact in question. In this case, the copy protection step happens pretty late in a difficult game. The copy protection thing was a "letter" from the main character's uncle with a code written in invisible ink -- that is, it wasn't obvious that it was a copy protection artifact. Naturally, many kids would lose it and be locked out of the end of the game.

No wonder they got a lot of this question: the call basically unlocks the last 33% (wild probably-wrong estimate from memory) of a game you already own.

Nintendo had this exact problem when they initially released StarTropics on Nintendo Switch Online - they forgot that the player wouldn't have access to the manual: https://nintendoeverything.com/startropics-for-nintendo-swit....

Nintendo had previously released this game for the Wii Virtual Console, but they included an image of the dipped letter in the digital manual included with the game.

So until very recently, Ubisoft call centre in the UK provided exactly this service - it had people familiar with latest Ubisoft releases, games consoles and walkthroughs nearby, answering calls from people lost or confused about what to do. It's a shame it got shut down last year, now support is email-only.

I remember – aged 10 or 11 – calling the Nintendo UK hotline, because I was stuck on Zelda: Link's Awakening. Zelda is a pretty big game, but the person I spoke to knew exactly where I was and helped me find the instrument I was trying to find. Even at that age I thought this was pretty incredible.

Link's Awakening is strictly linear, as far as video game go; depending on what objects and/or instruments you have, finding what the next step in the quest is simple

I called the American hotline for help beating Mechaturtle in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They told me there was no such thing as Mechaturtle. But there WAS!!

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Mechaturtle

Those were the days when there was no source of "truth," and even the so-called experts couldn't help. I wonder what kind of person in today's world would have been staffing that hotline. A social media intern?

A person wouldn't staff the hotline today. It'd be a computer on the other end, probably directing you to purchase some DLC.

I had to call them to get past the first level of Super Mario Bros 2... I just could not work out that I needed to jump on the eggs and pick them up, then trow them back.

I felt like a moron talking to some random person on our faux vintage phone while my parents watched on frowning at me.

The first couple of photos are black and white. In 1990, everyone used color photographs except newspapers. Are they purposefully black and white to make it feel older?

Lots of photographers chose to shoot B&W even when colour was available. Some used it purely for aesthetics. Others chose it because it was less expensive to purchase and easier to self develop. Or maybe it's just what they had in their camera that day.

Cheaper printer for publications as well. one color instead of four color needed+.

I always have this thought when seeing black and white photographs from the 70s onwards. Every photo from my family starting in 1977+ is color.

Someone in film told me black and white does offer better detail in analog as color saturation can sometimes blur lines. They also told me that as a student they filmed in black and white since in color every object in the scene can mean more because of its. Like if you had a normal 80s bedroom but just one pillow on the bed was red then that could imply something even if you didn't mean to (maybe romance, not sure).

I still shoot b&w today and it’s amazing how more “emotional” a photo can become once you adjust the exposure curve.

Look at the work done by the classic photographer Fan Ho

https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/fan-hos-incredible-black-an...

Just wanted to say that I sincerely enjoyed those works!

I would not have stumbled upon those unless you had shared; and I’m considering making one my iPhone wallpaper, they are so striking. :)

Beautiful isn’t it? Glad you enjoyed it!

but the b&w from the 1st 2 pictures are actually of higher quality compared to the others in colour.

Im not sure this is the case here, but from my limited understanding of camera, b&w camera will produce higher resolution picture just because of how the monochrome sensor work vs colour sensor

They are not digital photos, but from films. Color films require 4 layers for colors. B&W has only one metalic silver layer and because there are no colors, it can be more granulated. I think, that silver crystals were even smaller than what was from color layer crystals, so B&W films had not 4x times more silver "pixels" but even more, compared to what color films had, hence the reason why those color pictures look so blury, compared to so good B&W pictures.

Not to mention, that B&W films and pictures with very good results could develop every amateur and during the development process add various effects - sepia is one of them, but you could get blue tint by mixing some other chemicals.

> The first couple of photos are black and white.

If you look carefully, you'll notice that in the black and white photos the operators are wearing headsets, there are posters on the walls and in one of them there is a SNES on the table.

According to the article, this would place them at the same timeframe as the other photos.

If you were taking a photography class in the nineties, you would have probably been using B&W film: it's easier to learn to develop yourself, which meant it was easy to start playing around in the darkroom with the various ways you could alter a reel of film by playing with how you developed and printed it. Color film's a lot more complex. If not for a hurricane and a few cross-country moves I'd probably still have some prints of B&W photos I took in a college class, using the 35mm camera I inherited from my father.

If you were someone who was serious about photography to the extent of "I have a nice camera and know how to use it" - maybe it's your hobby, maybe you're somewhere on the path from "likes to take photos" to "makes a living as A Photographer" - then you would have been aware of working in B&W as a valid artistic choice that changes the overall mood of the imagery. A sharp, crisp B&W photo felt pretty modern versus a faded old one.

Even in the mid-2000s, photography classes were still teaching through B+W - as you mention, developing is easier (and therefore faster). The film and photo paper were also cheaper.

Those photos are taken from https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/15457444.photos-remember-wh...

Reminds me of that image of counterfeit Game Boy cartridges being destroyed. Despite being taken in 1994, the quality of the photo makes it look like a WWII war crime.

https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/145631381574689178...

B&W was much better in low light than colour. You could get high ISO film without too much noise and take 'normal lighting' photos that would come out with a manageable amount of grain. If you did the same with colour you'd get a much worse result or need a lot more flash.

Or to put it another way - for photography indoors, B&W gives a much more reliable result.

I think, that people downvoted this because 1990 was not really a time when everyone took color pictures, but more like in late 90s, when photo cameras became cheap and widely available and there was also available reasonably cheap service to develop films and photos in short time on automated machines. So, unless you were able to purchase very expensive equipment, you could not have good color photos to care for what B&W could get you, unless you were paying for professional services.

In 1998(or maybe even 1999) I was working on the first and latest Japanese machines that had digital color screen(where you could adjust colors and crop photos), that was bought from Japanese company as one of the earliest in Europe and that was all the rage, when Kodak was killed off because of them, because of FUJI. In most of the 1990s everyone were making photographies on machines with negative screen(sometimes not even zoomed film frame) - they could not see photos the way they would be before they were printed out. The final peak of color photographies on film coincided when digital cameras started to become "bearable". So, looking on my album, it is 2003(Canon Power Shot A70, which came out in 2003), when I had first digital photos(and their quality IMO were getting close to what you could get from film camera), so actually that company that bought that expensive automatic color photo printer had ~5 years to operate it...

Though, it was a crapy job - I was making on average 3000 photos per day(if it was a late shift, it was going into very late night, so max 12h) in summer and had a junior salary... with that quality of pictures(cropped and color adjustments) I was giving out with that machine, what other operators did not care that much.

So, more or less good color photographies, that were comparable to B&W were only couple of years before first digital cameras appeared(so more like - late 1990s), so it could not be possible, that in 1990 everyone was using color photos. 1990ies were becoming very global very quickly, but at that time, if in Japan everyone had color photos, it did not apply for everyone else outside of Japan for 1-2 years, because market had to catch up(and if you were able to buy equipment and a film, it did not mean, that you were able to develop your film and make photos, if your local photo shop was not able do those). US maybe had shorter time, but by late 1990s it still had a gap what you could get in Japan and what was available in US and here in Europe these things appeared as last.

Unless there is a mix-up about Polaroids, that "everyone used" according to MTV - have not owned them, because they were not cheap and most probably their paper was not on cheap side as well.

People rarely has photo nowadays, because they have phone. So, the whole era of things has gone - that includes calculators, alarms, radios and music players. Mobile phones killed them all.

The first one I was working might have been Noritsu, the next one was Fuji photo processing machine. They both had to use at least 3 different chemical containers and photo paper rolls - each for different sizes(and materials - gloss, matt, silk) of photos, so basically if you were making one size of pictures(and same material), you had to do that type of photos first and then swap to other type of paper. Though, some of the swaps had to be done earlier, because of promise for customers to have their pictures in ~1h done.

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