Page 31 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #43 FREE Edition

NES’s remarkable timing. The two years that American console lovers spent in a desert for new releases coincided with two years of rapid innovation and expansion for the console’s Japanese counterpart, the Family Computer (or Famicom). Debuting in July 1983, right around the time that Atari cartridge sales dropped off a cliff in the U.S., the Famicom had become a genuine phenomenon in Japan. The Famicom may not have come out of the gates with as many games as the Sega SG-1000 or Tomy Pyuuta, but it boasted nicer graphics
than those other systems while demonstrating an unprecedented fluidity of movement, even compared to the powerful home computers of the era.
With a small library and a hardware defect that prompted a
full console recall, the Famicom actually had a pretty shaky start. Its long-term success was by no means a given. About a year after its debut, though, third-party publishers like Hudson and Namco began shipping games for the system, supplementing Nintendo’s modest internal release schedule while pushing the boundaries of the console’s performance. Nintendo’s early Famicom titles tended to offer refined-yet-conservative gameplay, whereas carts like Xevious (a Namco arcade favorite) and Antarctic Adventure (an enhanced computer game port from Konami) took advantage of the system’s innate features like smooth scrolling and multi-colored sprites.
By the time the NES reached America, the Famicom had already lived through its early growing
pains and reached a level of maturity on par with the American 2600 at its peak. Nintendo shipped the Famicom with only three games at launch, all ports of older arcade games. When the NES arrived, it arrived alongside 18 carts; by the time it completed its nationwide rollout the following autumn, its library had doubled, bulked up by Nintendo’s own arcade ports and an array of third-party releases.
Those external titles included Capcom’s Ghosts ’N Goblins, a milestone release for Famicom: The first Japanese release to include
a special memory management chip that allowed the console
to access more memory and processing capabilities than the basic hardware actually supported. These advanced boards would become standard issue for Famicom and NES games and played a huge part in the console’s longevity;
on its own, Nintendo’s console amounted to the pinnacle of tech for “golden age” systems, a beast of a machine in 1983 but too limited by memory and graphical constraints to compete with subsequent machines. Boosted with memory management features, the most advanced NES games sometimes gave TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Genesis tech a run for their money. Ghosts ’N Goblins didn’t bring those expansion capabilities to Famicom until the system was nearly three years old, but it arrived on NES soon after it hit retail across the U.S.
In other words, the impression
that the NES made a massive generational update over what
had come before was, in many senses, an illusion. There’s no better example of this than Super Mario Bros., a game that its creators have described as their definitive statement on the capabilities of
the Famicom hardware. Super Mario Bros. literally uses every
last scrap of power and memory available to the base-level hardware with no expansions, and for Famicom owners, it represented
the culmination of more than two years of software evolution. It was
an epic achievement worthy of celebration and ruled the charts for good reason. For NES owners, on the other hand, Super Mario Bros. represented the baseline: Not the extent of what the console could potentially achieve, but rather
the default level of substance and quality NES fans had a right to expect from the system.
Those expectations were met and exceeded. Sure, the NES had its share of dud software, but nowhere near the amount that had shown
up on Famicom. Japan’s early- access experience meant that they effectively beta-tested the console for Americans. Nintendo of America employed a licensing approval system to vet third-party releases, which allowed them to weed out the worst of the games that showed up on Famicom. On top of that, by the time the NES hit critical mass in the U.S., the third-party developers and publishers who had hopped aboard the Famicom bandwagon had gotten the hang of designing and programming for the machine and concentrated on bringing
their best software to America. We largely missed out on their rough, early, experimental works and skipped straight ahead to the good stuff. While there’s certainly charm to those messy exploratory efforts, they probably weren’t a great fit for an American market still suffering shell shock from the chaotic latter days of the Atari 2600. If Sunsoft had brought their frustrating troll attempt of an action-platformer Atlantis No Nazo to the States, it would have evoked bad memories of the unbounded frustration of sloppy third-party titles for 2600. Skipping that in favor of a game as beautiful, ambitious, and varied as Blaster Master did Nintendo and the NES
a world of good by presenting the system as the home for cutting edge game design.
So here’s to the Famicom, the crucial rough sketch for the masterpiece known as the NES.
NOVEMBER 2024 • WWW.OLDSCHOOLGAMER.COM
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