One of the most iconic products of my youth is also my favorite video game console of all time: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). As a child of the 1980s, I’d like to think that my soft spot for the NES is more than just nostalgia run amok. It’s a good thing the data is there to back me up.
The Nintendo Decade of Dominance
Nintendo filled a niche in a ready-to-explode market. The popular Atari gaming systems of the late 70s / early 80s weren’t getting the job done. The consoles were bulky, the joysticks were not joyous to use, and most of the games were very basic – a lack of storylines or challenging gameplay, ‘blocky’ graphics and more weren’t going to be enough to carry gaming through the decade. And yet, the desire for a dedicated gaming console was so strong – it was clear that serious gamers weren’t going to be satisfied with the burgeoning personal computer market. A lot of us loved our Apple II+s, our Commodore 64s, or our IBM PC, but as gaming platforms they just weren’t enough. Not yet, anyway.
Enter Nintendo. Founded as a playing card company in the late 19th century, Nintendo eventually moved into electronic gaming. Within five years of the debut of the eight-bit NES in 1985, Nintendo claimed control over an “…almost 80-percent share of the $3.4 billion home video game market” (fundinguniverse.com).
A Boy and His Gaming Console
An NES sold for $100 back in 1988, when I bought mine. $107 in my state, if you included the tax. $100 seems like a fortune to a seven year-old. I helped around the house, saved my meager allowance (when did a dollar a week constitute an allowance???), and reminded my parents about my goal about every five minutes or so. The NES was the first “major” purchase of my life, and I will never forget what it taught me about making things last or the value of money.
The “Action Set” (which may have been a bit more and my parents may have helped subsidize!) consisted of the NES, two controllers, the Zapper, and the ubiquitous Super Mario Brothers / Duck Hunt cartridge. You remember the original Duck Hunt, right? I still hate that laughing dog. We played NES games until our eyes bled. Mario 2 and 3 releases were like feeding frenzies at local stores. We played entire seasons of Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl at sleepovers. Classic games with complicated puzzles to solve and/or intricate storylines such as The Legend of Zelda or Metroid frustrated and fascinated us for weeks on end. It was a glorious time to be a kid.
Today we can re-live our youthful gaming experiences on the Nintendo Wii or on popular game emulators on our PCs / the internet, but it’s just not the same. That’s why, 25 years later, I still have my original NES. It had to be jerry-rigged a bit (my favorite was when my NASA project manager father cut an empty spool of thread in half and strategically placed it in the console to help hold the game to the 72-pin connector in back to make it work), and it still takes about ten minutes for me to get a game to actually work (we all had our systems – blowing on the cartridge, wiping it off, putting one game on top of another in the console to hold it down, etc.), but when I’m making the blocks fit in Tetris, beating up the bad guys in River City Ransom or hitting a grand salami in Bases Loaded II, it’s all worth it.
Ah, to be young again.
Sources:
“Nintendo Company, Ltd.,” fundinguniverse.com