Well, if there was ever a topic to inspire me to write, this would definitely be the one. 40 years ago today the NES officially hit store shelves across the USA. As the NES is one of my favorite pieces of hardware, I absolutely couldn't and shouldn't pass up the chance to be a little nostalgic.
My first encounter with the NES was actually with a NES in disguise, quite possibly almost a year before it came out. I grew up in the Phoenix metro area, and my family's local grocery store of choice (Safeway) had an interesting bottleneck and feature that they took advantage of for marketing. The feature was that the Phoenix metro had, in the 80s and 90s, a very diverse population that would make it great for test marketing new products. We would often see new products show up in stores well before the rest of the country, and in some cases the products we saw would never even make it to full production.
As for the bottleneck, there were two sets of front doors on the northeast and northwest corners of the Safeway. Both funneled to the north center before turning in. This allowed for a hallway where they could put crane machines, candy and other toy machines, soda vending machines, and arcade cabinets that you'd be forced to see on your way in or out of the store.
Well, one day-- probably very early 1985-- I ran into a PlayChoice-10 cabinet there. This machine was certainly impressive and new; it had ten different games to choose from, with two entire CRT displays in there. Game selection was done with dedicated buttons on the control panel, and you could actually see game instructions for each game on the upper monitor that was also used for game selection. Sheer luxury in an arcade cabinet form!
Of course the drawback was that for a single quarter you'd get five minutes of game time, with a permanent timer taking up the bottom right corner of that upper display. When your time was up, it'd pause the game and give you a chance to put in another credit to keep playing if you so chose. If not, it'd end the game and go back to cycling through the games' attract modes.
I had no idea at the time that this piece of hardware was the harbinger of what would eventually be my favorite console. In those early days, I played Super Mario Bros. the most. Months later, they'd replace one of the games with Gradius, which would then become one of my favorite series of all time.
Later, the local K-Mart would get a massive lit glass display case and would have the NES in there. Quite honestly, that display was pretty intimidating for a kid coming off the Atari 2600. Sure, I'd used computers before, but this upcoming NES was something entirely different. It had a robot, which you could see in the display case. It looked much more high-tech than any of the previous consoles released. No fake wood grain to be seen, it was all grey, black, and red.
Most intimidating of all, the gamepad: up until this point, the most common controller was a joystick you'd have to use with your right hand, with a single action button you'd use with your left thumb. No, here you'd have to get used to moving with your left thumb and take actions with your right thumb with the controller being a horizontally held rectangle. This was a major shift in how you interacted with the device.
I still hadn't realized yet that the PlayChoice-10 was the demonstration unit for the NES. Once the NES actually hit the store shelves, that's when everything clicked. The games on the PlayChoice-10 were many of the launch titles for the NES, and they played identically because they were functionally identical outside of color differences due to the different PPU chip used between the two.
I'd get my NES for Christmas 1987, about a year after they came out. My next door neighbor would also get one that same Christmas. While I got the Action Set with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, they'd get the Power Set with the added Power Pad and World Class Track Meet. I also received Spy Hunter and Iron Tank with mine. Spy Hunter had been an arcade favorite of mine for years at that point, and Iron Tank was the much-improved home version of SNK's arcade game TNK III which I'd also enjoyed quite a bit.
My neighbor's sons, who I hung around a lot as a kid, would borrow a number of games that I'd end up adding to my favorites list. Contra and Castlevania were both first played at my neighbor's home with their large color TV. The summer of 1987, they'd borrow a copy of Metroid, which would become another key game-- that story has a bit more going on, though.
Even before I got my NES, I was enthusiastic enough about it to ask my parents to buy the "Official Nintendo Player's Guide" book. This expensive $15 guidebook was a major help in the early days. It provided maps and tips for large parts of the early library, also also gave sneak peeks at upcoming releases. Several of the games in that sneak peek section would catch my eye, most notably one called "Mega Man". The premise was interesting enough that I'd later rent the game. Unfortunately, the first game is not nearly as well balanced as the later games; I wouldn't even come close to finishing the first game until after I'd played and beat its much better sequel. The skills I'd gained from completing Mega Man 2 would allow me to go back and defeat the original at last.
I've digressed a bit here, so let's go back to Metroid. The Player's Guide had a complete map to Metroid; my friends would ask me to use the guide to help them out while they were playing. You can't do several months of guide work like that without starting to memorize the layout. I'd work my ass off that summer to buy my own copy of Metroid, and would be the first in my neighborhood to beat the game.. literally the day I bought it. My mother was quite certain I'd stop playing the game at that point. On the contrary, I felt the need to get better at it, and I was already halfway or more to completely memorizing the map layout. Within a few months, I'd no longer need the map as I could walk someone through the game from memory alone; even blindfolded if desired. That came entirely from needing to be the map wrangler for my friends.
One more tiny digression: The NES was also where I learned how evil Nintendo could actually be. There were three different ways you could play Super Mario Bros. in the USA-- the version most people would know is the NES version. There was also the PlayChoice-10 version, which was identical. There was, however, also the "VS. System" version of the game. This version of the game had remixed many of the levels from the original NES game, but also contained some levels ported from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 game (known as the Lost Levels when it later was released in the USA; the original game was considered way too difficult for the US market so we got an entirely different Super Mario Bros. 2 and would get Lost Levels in the early 90s on the SNES)-- in short, the difficulty is significantly higher in general!
I'd argue the NES was the most influential console to ever be released. The previous generation of hardware was mostly arcade ports or arcade-styled games, and the hardware was too limited to really get into deep game design. The NES/Famicom was where we were able to get games with significant complexity; Metroid, Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest-- all of these games were made possible by the massive technology level leap between the previous generation and this new one. It may be a primitive machine by today's standards, but it was the first console to have real depth in its library.
While you can point to the Swordquest titles on the Atari 2600 as a predecessor to that kind of depth, the graphics capabilities left players wondering what they were actually doing. You couldn't really put dialogue in the game explaining how to play or what you were trying to do-- all of that had to be left to the manual (and heaven forbid you ever lose that manual!)
Sure, computers could do things in the same general vein; you already had Ultima on the C64/Apple/etc. The difference here is that this system didn't need a keyboard, didn't have floppy/cassette loading times, and the NES was easily accessible and cheap compared to a computer.
This was a massive change for the non-computer-literate masses; one thing I distinctly remember very well from my childhood is that even the girls in my classes growing up all played the NES as well. This was less the case in the next generation, but for that one generation literally everyone in my classes talked about and played NES games.
Forty years later, we're still playing those games. A tip of my hat to the designers of the hardware, the programmers, artists, and musicians behind those games, and most of all..
..to the friends and classmates all those years back who played alongside me and discussed these games in and out of classrooms.
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