Stuff You Should Know - How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

For the holidays in 1986 (and ’87) (and ’88) the most stupendous, most wanted, most amazing thing any kid could possibly get – outside of a pony, *maybe* – was the NES. That year, video games came back from the dead and changed forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we are 10 years old right now and this is Stuff You Should Know. Can I go ahead and admit something? Oh yes, I'm nervous though, but yes, go ahead. Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo, the NES system, and that's not to say that kids my age weren't playing it, but like, it really booned in popularity right when I was sort of like 15, 16 and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world. Right. And I also did not own one, so like, I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Eventually in college, I remember, it had to have been a Super Nintendo and like, 92. Yeah. My roommate had one, so that's where

I first started playing Super Mario World. And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario and the Game Boy that my brother had, but I was, I've never owned a Nintendo. Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and I was 10, 11 years old, not driving yet. Wheelhouse. And it was, and I owned one too. So it was definitely in my wheelhouse. Yeah, I mean, later in college, my good friend Clay got the first PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and then I got on the PlayStation train, but it's just funny reading through this. I was like, I played some of these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo kid. Yeah, I have to say, I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super

Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I have friends who had those. Went off into the N64 world with GoldenEye. Yeah, I played that, right? My friend John had one of those and I played a lot of that. That was so great. And then I got the first PlayStation 2, the first PlayStation, I mean, not to be confusing. And at that point, I realized that I was thinking about how to play games while I was not playing games, like when I was just walking around living life. And I made a decision, a very fateful decision that I've never regretted that I was going to give up video games because I was too addicted to them. Oh, wow. This was college and I never looked back. Wow. So you were into them, huh? I was big time into them. Yeah, it was, I

was like, this is, if it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it, then yes, I was a little too into them, if you ask me. I was never a gamer or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games, maybe a little too much. In your favor, in your defense rather, I would say that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world as like Tetris boards occasionally, if you're into it. Yeah. And you know, my deal is, you know, said before is I was heavy Atari kid, big time arcade kid, and then played this kind of stuff with friends here and there. And then now every year, I'll usually, or every couple of years, I'll get two or three PlayStation games, play them obsessively for a couple of months,

and then it sits for nine months to a year. Yeah. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to play video games, you know? Yeah, I still enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun. But yeah, my buddy Doug Dillard growing up had one rich friend and he had a Intellivision. And so I had kind of some fun today watching the old, because I remember thinking the Intellivision football was really great. And when I looked at it today, I mean, it's very, very basic, but it was pretty good still, like your calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back. It was a big rush of nostalgia. Yeah. It's somehow two bit graphics, I think. Yeah. And this to be clear, what we're going to talk about today is the original NES. This could have been a two-parter if we would have

gone down the road of the 64, like we're not even talking about the music today at all. No, no. So there was plenty more material here, but this is just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season. Yeah, because I mean, it's the holidays. So one of the greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisce nostalgically about holidays past. And I definitely associate the NES, or I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the NES. Did you know that? No. Really? Yeah. Some actual like legit gamers call it NES. Other people call it NES, and apparently there's some big disagreement. I've always called it NES. Yeah. But I always associate the NES with a pretty significant portion of my life. Yeah. Like it always is tied

to Christmas as well. All right. Well, you're going to wax nostalgic a bit more, even though I did play a little bit of these here and there. Okay. So one of the things like the Nintendo entertainment system has an amazingly great story to it. Like it's just so fun to tell, because Nintendo came along at a time when the video game market in North America had so totally bottomed out that people looked at video games. Like imagine, think about how big Atari was. People looked at it. It crashed so hard that it was a fad that was never coming back. Like it had already lived its life. Yeah. And Nintendo walked into this burning city that was the video game industry and said, let's give this another shot. And they actually managed to succeed. Yeah. I mean,

Atari was dead as disco. We talked a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode. And I did a full Atari guest two-parter with Strickland back in the day on tech stuff. I'll bet that was a fun one. It was a lot of fun. But yeah, ET came along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this one game. It was sort of a flash in the pan for a few years. And parents were also weighing in and saying, you know, I don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television. Like I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily. It was pre-satanic panic that was more along the lines of you're riding your brain.

Right. So was that the thing that triggered it or was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered what's called the North American video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it? Well, I mean, I think it was a two-part thing. Like kids got a little less interested because the games started to suck, quite frankly. And then I think you also had parents beating the drum of, hey, and Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The 2600 and the 5200 came along. I mean, rather the 5200 followed up. And it was just okay. So they needed, something needed to happen. And that thing that needed to happen was Nintendo. Yeah. And also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered, helped usher out

video games was the personal computer starting to come into the world. Absolutely. And with the personal computer, you could like do your taxes, your kid could like practice math. And they played games on floppy disks too. Castle Wolfenstein. So I saw it. Exactly. Yes. I played Wolfenstein. Oh, I'm so glad you said that. Because I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disks and I'm like, it came out in 1990? Like I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man. You just made a really great neural pathway circuit like connect completely in my brain. That feels good. But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler, who wrote an article on this and wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead. Personal

computers were the future. And anything that just played games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. Yeah. That was kind of like the premise. So just to get across, I don't want to like beat this drum too hard, but to get across how huge the crash was, the video game crash of North America. In 1982, Atari raked in $2 billion. Atari alone. In 1983, they lost $536 million. That's a swift fall. Yes. But that's how quickly that it happened. And so people basically, if it crashes that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's kind of where we were at in 1983. Yeah. But as you pointed out, this was, we need to keep pointing out, this was the North American crash. Yeah. Good point.

It did not happen in Japan. In 1983, they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about because we have arcades over here that are flourishing. We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. It's still a lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun to play. Yeah, for sure. And in 1980, this was a few years before the United States crash, they said, hey, you know what, there's this gaming thing going on, home gaming going on in America. And maybe we should get together a team over here to just sort of poke around because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys and we have for a long time and we're big in the arcade world, but we don't have a really a console system going. Right. And that led to, I think actually there was a console called the

Epoch cassette vision in 1981. And it was sort of the biggest thing in Japan at the time. Well, I think it was kind of the only thing in Japan at the time, too. Well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you could also say it was the smallest. That's true. But it was not a Nintendo product, right? No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was, it was Nintendo came along as a rival to, to this cassette vision, Epoch cassette vision. So the head of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi, he apparently was this driving force. He had some really great people working for him in Japan and in North America. But he seems to have been this person who would be like, do this

enormous undertaking and do it in an hour kind of thing. He kind of seems to have had a sense that there was a really narrow window that was open right now that could close at any time and that they needed to get this stuff done, but they also needed to do it really well and really right basically out of the gate. And they actually managed to because in 1983, after just a couple of years of research and development, they released what's called the Famicom or the Family Computer, which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System that they released a couple of years later in North America. Yeah. I mean, it's not very often that a head of a company or a boss comes along and says,

I want to do something better and cheaper than what is currently out there. And it actually happened. And listeners at home, if you can look this stuff up as you go safely, please do because just seeing all these various units we're going to talk about is really a lot of fun. Yeah. They teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're like at that age. They're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy, but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on a shelf as a collector these days. I think there's a lot of people who have that actually. Oh, I'm sure. So look at the epoch cassette vision because that's kind of fun.

But the Famicon was this red and white box. It top loaded. It had two wired controllers. And it had, very importantly, on the control pad, it had the D pad. It had the directional pad on the left with the up and down left and right arrows. And then an A and B button, which no one knew at the time. But that would kind of revolutionize the gaming world as, you know, they got a little fancier over the years, but it's still sort of that's still the bones of what a controller is. Absolutely. Like it was, I can never remember the full quote, but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane and got it right fully out of the gate, like tray tables and everything, essentially. It was like, that's what they did with that controller design. And

now you think about it, you look at it like the Nintendo brick and especially the Famcom controllers. They look so old fashioned. Yeah. But if you can put yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan in 1983, if you looked around at the other stuff available, it was just from the future. And that was one of the things that Nintendo did really, really well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought the future was, what it contained, what it looked like and they gave it to everybody. It was a really like exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought to the present and it was all thanks to Nintendo, basically. So it retailed for about $150 back then, which is what, close to $500 today?

Yeah, $400, something like that. All right. So, I mean, kind of on par with, you know, the range of even modern gaming. I mean, what's the new PlayStation like, $5 maybe? I don't know. I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there, five or six hundred bucks. Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was like for PlayStation 7? It was just people running around the real world that was all like VR and augmented reality? I don't remember that. It was pretty cool because it came out in like the 90s and you're like, we're pretty close to that now already, you know? Oh, for sure. They bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior games and the Popeye games, which were basically about the same quality as

you would get at the arcade. Yeah, that was huge. It was a huge deal. I mean, especially if you grew up playing Atari, I loved Atari, but Atari was Atari and it had a lot of limits. And this was, you know, you went to the arcade so you could play games better than Atari. Now, you could do it at home. Right. Yeah. So that was an enormous progression, but it wasn't just like the graphics, the quality of the look of it. It was also the gameplay too. Like it was way more fun than most of the games you were going to play on an Atari. It was just funner to play some of these Famcom games. And it took off like a rocket. It knocked the Epoch cassette vision right off of the top place. Into the history books, basically. Essentially, yeah. They sold

half a million units in two months after its release. I think by the end of 1984, they'd sold two and a half million units. So in about a year or so. And they were like, okay, I think we're definitely on to something. And they had enough hubris, enough, I guess, at least self-assurance that they set their sights on North America. Again, which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video games were concerned. It's a great spot for a break. I think so too. All right. I think where we left off, the United States was a version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and The Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said, we are going to save you and bring you into the future. And it was a tough sell at first in the US because, like you said,

the video game craze, for lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone. This was 1985. Parents were still not, you know, they were like, I'm glad that went away, basically. And now we have these PCs in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever. And they seem happy enough with that. And Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew it was going to be a tougher sell that they knew. So they knew they had to come up with something awesome. And their first crack at that was something called the AVS, the Advanced Video System. And they said, well, give it a keyboard. So it looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disk drive. It'll be able to do some stuff. But they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick, it had a keyboard,

like a musical keyboard. And it had this wireless, which is, we'll explain how this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it had a little ray gun, a little zapper. Yeah. And you really said a mouthful with the word wireless, man. This was 1985. And this Advanced Video System came out with wireless controllers. Like it was, that's really impressive. And it was really slick looking too, like really futuristic looking. But also, yes, they put enough computer peripherals in it that it did, it didn't look like a video game system, right? Yeah. So they took it to CES, the January version, I think even back then was in Vegas. But it's sorry, it's the consumer electronics show, right? Yeah, I've never been to that of you.

No, huh? Strickland has great stories from it, though. Yeah, he goes every year, I think. I think so. But at CES in January of 1985, they're like, here you go, everybody. Here's the future. The Advanced Video System. And no one cared at all about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play to mess around. No one could have cared less about that thing. Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back. Because the games were good and they knew that I guess they were just a little gun shy. But it seems like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there wasn't someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is going to be a real thing. But it didn't work. They didn't get any response. No, and I think that really goes to just kind of underlined

just how bad a reputation video games had. Because Dave points out that the consoles that had been going for like $100, $150 the year before, these retailers were stuck with them and they were selling them for like 40 bucks, which is how much the games used to go for. Now, the games were like $4. So the retailers have been so badly burned. I think they all got caught with these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they were like never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against, which is as Dave again, Dave helped us with this. As he points out, you were either a very foolish company to try this or a very smart one. Because again, it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant that there was no competition in this enormous market

right now. Yeah, absolutely. So they knew they had to have almost like a trick to get their foot in the door. And they came up with one and Dave found this, is Gaming Historian, I know it had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a full website? I don't know. All I know is that the YouTube channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that are really interesting. It's good stuff. But someone at Gaming Historian came up with this very app metaphor about a Trojan horse. And that's kind of what they were looking for was a way to get these things in the home by almost tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system. And it was more just sort of like a toy because kids still got and bought or received toys and stuff.

It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob, the ROB, the robotic operating buddy, which is a very sweet name. You should totally go look at Rob online and especially YouTube videos of Rob in action and just be prepared for the speed of Rob. Right. But the thing is Rob was a robot. He moved and he functioned. He interacted with the games that they came up with. Very slowly. Right. Very slowly. But this was a time where like robots were kind of hard to come by. They were not like it was not an easy thing to get your hands on. And now all of a sudden there's this company saying like, hey, we have this whole thing and it has a robot too. And it was one of the greatest strokes of marketing genius that any companies

ever come up with as we'll see. Yeah. I mean, what they ended up with was a robot that didn't, I mean, it functioned as it should. But like I said, it's super, super slow. They only ended up having a couple of games where you could use the robot. And it was just sort of a sneaky way to get these consoles in the door. And because it was all part of the same system. And that's how it worked. They managed to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door. And thanks to a guy named Lance Barr, he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a sec. But he designed it as a front loading system, which made sort of people think of VCRs. It was also a very, they call it zero force solution. So

there wasn't a lot of wear on the on the cartridges. And it, you know, just worked really well. Plus it looked like you said it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at the time. And I don't think we said Chuck. So that January CES was just a complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time coming up with the advanced video system. And it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company Hiroshi Yamaguchi told a couple of people like, hey, redesign this in an hour. And they did. And Lance Barr was the guy who did it. And he knocked it out of the park because the NES as it debuted later on in North America was essentially what he came up with in that one hour that he was given to do it. So they had, they did all this and had it

done in time for the July 1985 CES, like six months after that huge colossal failure, they went back to the drawing board and came back in six months with the Nintendo entertainment system fully flushed out, including robot and zapper gun. Well, notably robot, because that's what all anyone cared about at first. Yeah, for sure. Like at CES, the NES system was sort of to the side and everyone was just trying to get their hands on Rob and play Gyromite, which I'm telling you, you got to just spend five minutes watching Rob play this game, because it shows the split screen of the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which really isn't much. And then Rob just very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin.

Yeah. And was it the game historian video that really kind of went into detail about how Rob played and setting up his accessories and everything? I watched a bunch of them. Yeah. Okay. I think it was that one. If not, it was another one I saw where they really kind of showed like the idea of Rob was pretty ingenious. He was player two, but you were actually playing together. Yeah. Like you, in Gyromite, you were kind of running through this maze and there were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get Rob to do it for you. And again, he would go eat some lunch. So slowly, yeah. Come back. Get an eye exam and your glasses made in an hour or two. And then yeah, he would have completed that and you could advance to the next column or whatever.

It was a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it just, the execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on the player two controller. So if you got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could just push the buttons on the player two controller yourself and play Gyromite that way. But the point was they don't seem in retrospect to have really thought Rob was going to take off. In fact, the games that he came with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the North American version of these. They just put like kind of this like fix on it that made it compatible with the North American system. But when you loaded up Gyromite, the intro screen showed the Japanese name for it

at the very beginning of it. I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's a memory. It may have just been like boot up screens or something. So they decided, it was such a, you know, eye grabber at CES that they decided, all right, let's go to New York City and let's test it out there in one city, roll it out, see what happens. The New York retailer said, hey, buddy, I got, look at this, I got a warehouse full of Atari's over here that I can't even give away. Like, I don't know about a new gaming system. And they said, all right, here's what we'll do. We will ship them to your store from Japan for free. We will, you can just sell what you sell

and pay us for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us. We'll take them back. We'll send over a team in your store to set up these big marketing interactive marketing displays. And we'll take on all of the risk and all you guys got to do is try and sell some of these. And they went, yeah, all right. That was a great Joe Pesci, by the way. Oh, Joe Pesci. So yeah, they did this in 500 stores. And normally when you, when you did like kind of a soft test release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas, or somewhere that no one cares about, right? But they went full bore and hit New York City.

And I think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times that like, it was based on that, that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that if you made it in New York, you could make it anywhere. And they did make it in New York. Oh, I can't remember. I want to rock. Oh, okay. I want to rock. I want to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up. Of I Want to Rock? Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that MP3?

Or MP4. I don't know what the kids bought these days. I bought it at Toys R Us. Awesome. Very cool. Cool. So they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York. I think like 50,000. But it was enough for Yamaguchi to say, let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the rest of the country. Another bold move, because normally after your first test, like run your first test market, you do like four or five more. And he said, no, let's skip that. Let's just go right to the

rest of the country. And he did. Yeah. And that was the Christmas season too. So I get the feeling that they weren't super disappointed, but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30,000 units, you know? Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say like the Nintendo had Nintendo not been successful, like the games as we know them today would definitely not exist.

We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes. Yeah. And going outside. Who needs it? So that was 1985 holiday season. By 1986, they hit on something else. So like one of the things that they did was take a poll of that people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo. And I think like the vast majority of them said that Rob, the robot, was the reason they had bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how well that marketing ploy worked. So Rob had kind of served his purpose, though. Everyone knew it was slow.

They weren't releasing more games for them. So they came up with originally the way you bought Nintendo. It was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers, the Zapper gun, Rob the robot, and all of Rob the robot's accessories. And then two games, one of which was Gyromite, that game you play with Rob, right? Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of stuff. And of course, it was pretty expensive at the time. So for the national rollout, they kept the deluxe set, but they also came up with something called the NES control deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers. And that was 99 bucks. And they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year.

Yeah. You really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along with actually with the Famicom in 1985. And it was just, it was the most advanced looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen. It was, as Dave points out, it was the first game that you could play and have fun playing forever. Like you could go on and on finding the hidden worlds, finding the Easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections and other levels that you never even knew existed, banging away hidden bricks. Like there were so many discoveries in places to go and Super Mario Brothers, they created sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be

little Josh Clark? How would put your cigarette down? How would you like to play a video game, the same one for the next seven hours? Hot dog. That's what I would have said. Hot dog. It was a whole new deal, though, because even when I played Atari, like we played for hours at a time, but I don't know, you played a game for 30, 45 minutes and you'd pop in another and that's why you had like 40 games in your controller box. Because none of them you could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, okay, this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid. Yeah. So the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything. Almost every single source that I've seen on the internet that talks about how Super Mario

Brothers changed things uses the word light years ahead of everything else because it really was. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto. He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a legend overnight because of it. They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves, which kind of rolled out in a few different ways. Well, they had a lot of advertising money. That was sort of a given. They had about 20 million bucks to spend off the bat, which is a ton of money for advertising now and then. But they created a call center. They trained these players and these gamers basically to master these games and sit on the phone and you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could like walk you through a level that you

couldn't get through. Yeah. They had Nintendo Power Magazine, which is a very big deal. And they created the first, you know, gaming championships where and these are still just huge, you know, where kids and adults alike, you know, now adults from all over the world come together to battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, you can make the case that they created the eSports phenomena or they laid the groundwork for it to come at least, right? I would think so. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So there was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout that found that 95% of teens polled said that they

recommended the NES to their friends. And I think 83% of adults and 85% of little kids. That is eye popping. And that means that they were successful. They used Rob to get their feet in the door. And they knew that if they just got their console in the hands of Americans, they would change their minds forever about video games. And that's exactly what happened. And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did their best to try and keep bad games from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari. The games got so bad. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds, we talked about this in the ET game episode, like ET gets unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release.

But there were far worse games released on the Atari system, hundreds and hundreds of really, really bad games that just no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen to them. So they designed a proprietary system where you could only play officially licensed NES games. They created a lock chip on their circuit board and only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip to unlock it. And that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing. They said, even to third parties, they said, you can only make two of these games a year. Don't come at us with 200 games. Make something really, really good that we'll approve of.

And we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the cover. Yeah. And they were really nitpicky too. As you were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff. And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff. And that's what you could do if you had 80% of the market as far as video games were because people had to come to you. And it was really smart for them to just kind of protect their intellectual property like that because it was so good. But they were basically so heavy handed about it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.

Yeah. I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around. And there were other companies out there trying to boot lead games still. There was one called Tengen that had a few license games, but they wanted more money. And so they went to the patent office and said, hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and keychips? And they said, sure, here it is. And so they, I guess, illegally? Because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won. So I mean, I don't know how that patent law works. I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off. Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to have just ripped it off. But I think it's one of those things that was like a legal gray area

that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court. Oh, okay. Makes sense. You know what I mean? Yeah. So they just Tengen rolled the dice and they lost, essentially. Okay. Tengen? Is that it? I think so. I've actually heard it both ways. I got you. I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendru. And he has a video called Ten Weird NES Facts. And he talks about that keychip thing where people were trying to get around it. And he said other companies didn't even bother to come up with a chip. They just used a low-voltage spike to scramble the brains of the lock chip so that it wouldn't work anymore and now the game could be played. And as an example, he used a game from the developer Tree and it was for Bible

adventurers. Did you play that one? No, I've never even heard of it. But if you put Bible adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brains so that you could play Bible adventures. I would think some of these might endanger the game console itself. You'd think so. Yeah. It's pretty reckless. Yeah. Jesus killed my Nintendo. So Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did its job and got its foot in the little robotic foot in the door. But kids were like, this is not so fun playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. And so Rob, you know, Dave kind of funnily points out Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet of every kid that

probably owned one. And it just became about that NES system. But that's not to say all those peripheries were not a success because that zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids love to play. Yeah. And I did not realize this, but the laser gun, what was it called, the zapper? It was not, it didn't shoot anything at your TV because if you stop and think about it, your TV's not set up to accept that kind of thing or your TV screen certainly isn't. So what happened instead is it was a light detector. So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your screen in just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that, but still faster than you could register it. The screen went black and whatever ducks were on the screen turned into

white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck that square and it would register it as a hit. That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious. Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works. Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the zapper and didn't go pew, pew, pew. All right. I guess here at minute 40, we'll take our second break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened next. Okay, Chuck. So there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were as meant as Rob was, maybe even a little matter. One was the power pad. The other was the power glove.

And again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance the NES system and made a bunch of money for everybody. But when you played with them, they weren't very good. Yeah, the power pad was a pad. It had another use from another company. It was called a fun and fitness pad from Bandai. And Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can do like track and field games by running on this dumb thing. And that technology is still very popular. Like if you go to arcades, those dance games, and they're still like, I played one not too long ago with my daughter, Dave and Buster's, where you do like track and field stuff is still around. But at home, the kid isn't going to do

like they're inside kids because they don't want to be outside running around. Yeah, they want to be on the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with Rob. I almost called him Rod. And then that glove though, the power glove, it was really cool and it looks cool today. Like if I imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes, because it looks kind of neat, but punch out, which is a great boxing game. Power glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove. Right. I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a power glove and plays Rad Racer. So he's using it like he's, he's steering, but it just,

they didn't really develop any games specifically for the power glove. So it ended up, it was a little bit because Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually, Nintendo came out with the Wii system, which used essentially the same kind of technology, but yeah, it was ahead of its time. So it ended up in the closet with the power pad and Rob. Oh man. Closets getting full. Exactly. But as, as kind of clunky as those were, that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary. Yeah, there's a writer, a game pro named Tai K. Kim, who came up with this cool analogy that they found, which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming. And that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like,

you know, we were talking earlier about that first NES brick, you know, it was all kind of there. Like they grew and morphed, but that directional pad was revolutionary. Those buttons were revolutionary. And they landed on the idea of a kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs. Yeah, because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the red button, but you used your whole hand to move the joystick. This was just totally different. And it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything was laid out just right. And it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that like you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for

all of the console controllers to come. Even today still, it's based on those. Yeah, they had, it didn't start there. They had it initially on this handheld game called a Game and Watch, which if you look this, it looks like it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy. And it's called a Game and Watch because it had a clock on it. So it told the time and it was a game. So they call it the Game and Watch, but that's where the D-pad came from. And Donkey Kong is a game that really took great advantage of the D-pad. And it just seemed like the natural, and now they make the little mini joysticks, which are great. But some, I think the Xbox, do they have joysticks or do they still use that D-pad?

I don't know. I remember addicted, so I gave it up. So you never played an Xbox? No, no. I've seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller. Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend, John Pindell, who you know, John. He's backstage in New York, John. He had the N64. He was my GoldenEye partner, but he also got an Xbox and we were both addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year. Oh, yeah, that was a good game. And that was a game that carried with you in real life. Because if you played enough Tony Hawk,

you would just, someone who'd never skateboarded, you would be walking around in the world and going like, I could totally grind that gutter on top of that roof. Right. It's pretty funny. So the, another thing that those controllers did was give us the cheat code. I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick, but they really came along, thanks to the NES, because there was a developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into a Nintendo game, and it was really hard. So he created this cheat code to make it easier to kind of game test for him. So he wouldn't have to start over every time. And is extraordinarily

famous up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, BA start. And that's called the Konami code, because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra. I guess you played a lot of Contra probably, huh? For sure. Now, what was Contra? I don't even know. It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and aliens.

Ah, okay. So if I remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world and you and your buddy are kind of like buff and wear like headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair. Oh yeah. But and you just shoot all sorts of stuff. And it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons that shoot in different ways. And now you're like, this is clunky and old, but at the time it was, there was just again, nothing like it on the market. Like a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the NES.

Yeah, for sure. I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar. But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B.A. start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect. Oh, that's great. They ended up, it's a staggering number still considering that they were or kept a sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced. But they ended up with close to 700 games for the original NES. And I think in 95 is when they launched the 16 bit, no, no, no, Super Nintendo was 91.

And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario. And then Super Mario 2 and 3, of course, came along. We already mentioned Punch-Out. That was, I remember playing Punch-Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up. And I think I remember this, but the arcade Punch-Out had a boxer, the Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkinsky. So great. And he got changed to Soda Popinsky very famously. Anyone who played Punch-Out is very familiar with Soda Popinsky.

And one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a gem on it, his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch. And when I realized that you could predict it, yeah, it just changed my life. That's funny. It changed your life. It did. Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know. It's possible that whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. Glass doors. Yeah. Glass ceiling. Yeah. Different thing.

So what else, Chuck? There's some other ones too that we have to shout out. Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I played a lot on The Game Boy. Talk about addictive. Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my carpacking skills today when we go on road trips and stuff. Emily always still jokes like, Chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great. Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it, it's, oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing, but it's a game where you stack to different shaped blocks. And when you got solid lines, a line would disappear.

And the whole goal of this game is to keep those lines low. And as it built higher and higher and higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop, and it would seemingly go faster and faster. Oh, man. It could induce panic. Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up, and they're dropping and it's like, it drops right onto another block. You're up that high. It's just like, you know, it's just, it is very stressful, but it was fun. Well, and it's also, I think, one of the more satisfying games ever invented in that when you would, things would get a little hairy. And if you got like two in a row of the exact ones that you

needed and made, I think it was a Tetris when you got like, was it like five or was it four? I don't remember. Probably four because the tallest block was four high. Was it four high? But it would make all four disappear at once. And if you got a couple of those and you went from like 70% high to down to like 20% in an instant, there's no feeling like that. No. No Tetris is pretty great. I loved it too. It was awesome. I want to shout out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid, but it was really groundbreaking

in that there wasn't like some path you had to stick to. Like you were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to the next level. That was pretty new, actually. So Metroid was groundbreaking too. And then there were other ones that were just fun to play like Ice Hockey. Did you play that one? I was always into sports games. So I played hockey and golf. What about tennis? Tennis. I played all those. That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game? I'm not sure if I played that one. That one was very addictive. RC Pro Am. Duck Tales was actually a lot of fun. And then there was an army one called Jackal. And then if you liked skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skater Die, which was pretty good.

But my money was on Town and Country Designs Skate and Surf. I think it was called. And you could skateboard and then you would go surf. And it was a lot of fun to play too. Yeah, I was so into the sports games. And I still play the PlayStation. What is it? PGA2K for their golf game is still a lot of fun. But I played, I was addicted to the Atari Beach volleyball game, wherein it was two players aside and both players were connected to one another. They could not move independently. So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds, it reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog

chases the wagon from the Chuck Wagon commercials. It's a branded game. Poop out. Yeah. Who would have thought? And then it would poop out like food and the dog would eat the food. That was like the point of the game. You should speak a little bit about Zelda though, the Legend of Zelda. That's a game again, that by the time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing. And again, we couldn't afford an NES. So what was Zelda all about? So I never liked Zelda. Oh, interesting. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. Wow. It's almost like, have you ever, what's your grocery store, Kroger or Publix? I can't remember. Both, but generally Publix. Okay. So there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and

only Kroger. And I think my theory is that they're laid out in a certain way that they appeal to one type of person and then the other one appeals to a different type of person. So if you are a Publix person and you go into a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it, but I know some people like have essentially dedicated their lives to that game. Like beyond playing, it's like probably dress up as Link, the main character. Oh, sure. Have like all sorts of toys and stuff like that. Like Legend of Zelda was really big too. Yeah. And it was certainly not the first open world game, but and I think there's not a solid agreement on what that was. There are

some arguments for the great Atari game adventure that was the first open world game I played. Oh, really? Where your avatar was a square. Okay. But it was so much fun because you could go anywhere for the first time. It was really different and new. But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as or the Legend of Zelda as one of the first open world, like really good open world games, I guess. Right. Yeah. An advanced one. And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario, brother. So that's not surprising. Yeah. What else you got, Chuck? I mean, not a whole lot else. I guess we should, we should definitely talk about blowing in those cartridges because I even made that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working and Dave who's sitting in for Jerry

said unplug the cable and just plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it? Right. And you don't want to actually. So did you know about that, right? I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges too. So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, you would take it out of the VCR like entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it and you put it back in and it would work. The thing is it wasn't doing anything. When you blew on it, you weren't helping it. It just hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when you took it out and put it back in, the chances were that you were making the correct connection then and then the game would work. But you, being a dumb 10 year old, thought, well, I blew on it so that fixed it. But the Nintendo

long said, do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them and no one listened until there was this guy who came along and actually ran a study, the world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does. And it didn't work. This is in 2012. His name was Frankie Vitruelo and you know, it's a very rudimentary study. But I mean, how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into and you're going to have a game you blow into and after, how long did he do this? 30 days. Every day for 30 days. The guy spent a month blowing on this game, took this, the blown cartridge out at the end and showed that it was corroded and kind of gross. And it's funny. You don't know what kid.

You always wonder who invented this because every kid did it because every kid saw another kid do it who just got it from some other kid. But it was just sort of known like you would take it out and it was always the same thing. You would do it really quick and just go and like run the cartridge back and forth in front of your mouth and then stick it back in. Yeah. I mean, that sound just triggered a title wave of nostalgia in me Chuck. That was amazing. I remember that. So don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges, people who still play Nintendo, original NES. Maybe we should follow this up again one day. To do one on the music of Nintendo? Well, just sort of everything we didn't cover because the N64 was such a big deal and

Sure. I don't know. This could be a two-parter separated by time and space. Okay. I like that idea Chuck. Let's definitely do that. And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed out a second part to this episode, of course that means we've just unlocked listener mail. Maybe next Christmas, it can be our, you know, because it's kind of every year we try to do a toy, a famous toy. Yeah. No, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh, right. Consider them spilled. Yeah, they're spilled all over. All right. Speaking of spilling all over, this is a correction that on something you said that I

don't know how I didn't catch this, but it's the, we'll call it the great nutter butter controversy of 2022. Hey guys, at the end of the vaudeville episode, Josh said it's weird how there were two types of nutter butters and they're totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shaped cookie. And I don't remember what I said. I must have just been like, huh? I think that's exactly what you said. And he mentioned both have the same logo, same packaging, which is not true. Just two different types of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what you're talking about because we had a bunch of people right in. The peanut shaped cookies are the nutter butters, Josh, but the other wafery treats are nutty buddy

bars. Did you look, is this what you meant? No, I think this person is from an alternate Bernstein Bears dimension because in our dimension that there, it's the same thing, same package, same name, same everything, just different cookies. I'm standing by it. Is the nutty buddy what you were thinking of though is what I want to know. In that person's dimension, yes. Okay. It's easy to get a mixed up guys if you're not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick up on it, which was weird because I love both. I don't, I never buy these of course, but boy a little Debbie nutty bar. So good. I think you would like the other version of nutter butters, the kind of wafery one. I think

you would really like it. That's the nutty bar or the nutty buddy. No, that's the nutter butter, but I know what you're saying. Oh man. Who wrote this email? This is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever. So George says, P.S. got to go. It's raining donuts again outside. Thanks a lot George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension. Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too. And if you want to be like George and reach out and say hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.