Page 30 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #43 FREE Edition

The Nintendo Entertainment System saved video games.
You know the story: The Atari 2600 burned bright. Suddenly, it crashed to earth because of all those E.T. and Pac-Man carts that they had
to bury in the desert. It took out the rest of the video games industry
as collateral damage, and the only reason we even have video games today is because Nintendo and its incredible robot-powered console, the NES, appeared from nowhere and reminded the world how good video games could be!
That’s the general shape of video game history as it’s often told by Americans, anyway. We’ve gotten a little better about getting the details right over the past decade or so,
but ask any European enthusiast about how the U.S. views game history and they’ll sign and launch into a spirited discussion of the
ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64... and rightly so! Atari’s flameout in the mid ’80s made a wreck of the U.S. console industry, but it really only hurt the U.S. console industry. Everywhere else - including on American computer platforms! - video games were doing just fine.
Still, we can all agree that the NES gave the American console market a much-needed hard reset. You can literally count on both hands the number of U.S. console games released in the year leading up to the NES’s debut in October 1985; that business was well and truly
fried by the time Nintendo came calling. Kids still wanted to play video games, and developers still wanted to make them, but toy and electronics retailers across the
U.S. were having none of it after
the massive soaking they took on unsold Atari and Intellivision stock. American kids who wanted to play TV games had to settle for leftover stock on aging systems. Those games were cheap and plentiful, sure, but they felt increasingly
stale compared to the massive strides being taken with arcade and computer hardware.
If you’re old enough to remember the NES’s early days, you know
how impressive it seemed in comparison to what had come before. I still remember the first time I saw the system in action, early in 1986: Walking through the local Federated electronics super- center, gazing in awe at the various Amiga and Atari ST graphics demos lighting up the computer section. Suddenly, I spotted a new Atari machine featuring a cool martial arts game that looked as colorful, detailed, and above all fluid as an arcade machine. No, wait, not an Atari system - it was Nintendo, from those red-tent arcade machines. Its version of Kung-Fu may not have looked as visually sumptuous as the computer video demos a few aisles over, but it looked fun... and, more importantly, the system’s price tag came in at about one-tenth that of an Amiga. That was still incredibly expensive for an elementary school kid... but with enough allowance
and birthday cash, it seemed like a realistic dream.
And everyone I knew at school agreed. The NES’s lineup, price, and capabilities made it an instant hit among the tween-to-teen set
in 1986. Before we knew it, video games were back, baby.
Really, though, the NES’s greatest advantage was its timing. It arrived in the U.S. after a few years of console games practically
not existing. Kids in the States developed a genuine hunger for new console games in that time, and the NES delivered - not just new games, incredible new games. Coming
on the heels of the Atari 5200, Intellivision, and ColecoVision,
the NES felt like the biggest generational leap game fanatics had ever seen. Older systems boasted hundreds of excellent games between them, but none of them could compare to Super Mario Bros. in terms of scope, technology, and its perfect synergy between player, controller, and game.
Therein lies the other side of the
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OLD SCHOOL GAMER MAGAZINE • ISSUE #43