
The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013) - tosh
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday/
======
CM30
In the US it saved the industry. Outside of the US computer games and mini
computers were selling fine, and gaming was going through its own golden age
(especially in the UK). Hell, even Japan offered more competition for the
Famicom than the US did for the NES.

America is not the only place in the world, and the video game crash was not a
worldwide phenomena.

~~~
bartread
I've always felt like this as well. The "great video game crash of 1984" was
very much an American phenomenon. It affected many of the consoles of the era
_in America_ , which were getting long in the tooth and were quite
underpowered, especially (but not only) the Atari 2600. I get rather fed up of
hearing people refer to it as a universal, industry destroying event.

The crash occurred because the market was flooded with cheaply made, poor
quality, simplistic games, which were about all many of these consoles were
capable of running. People became bored of them.

There's basically no comparison between these consoles and the NES. The NES
was vastly superior and hence allowed the creation of much more involving
games.

By contrast the early to mid 80s in the UK and Europe looked quite different:
here it was the 8-bit computers that ruled the roost. These had more memory,
and often better graphics and sound capabilities. Again, this allowed for the
creation of more involving games. As a result many of the machines - and
perhaps the C64 the most - had great libraries of games. And of course they
were programmable and affordable, which made them vastly more interesting to
homebrew hackers on a budget. (Apple and IBM machines were considerably more
expensive.)

~~~
greggman
I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and
all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game.
Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there
are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and
Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month.

Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was
higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality

~~~
ionised
Every Unity game I've played seems to suffer performance problems of some
description, or completely shits the bed when you try to add mods.

I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.

~~~
crysin
It's not Unity, it's the developers. Unity can perform very well if enough
care and effort is taken to understand it. The problem is a lot of Unity
developers don't take the time to learn it's mechanics or just don't
understand programming all that well. If you were to attach Unity's profiler
to a majority of the Unity games out there, which I'm sure with some you could
because they're probably built with the autoconnect profiler set to true,
you'd probably see a monstrous amount of garbage collecting occurring. Not
understanding update cycles or the performance implications of newing each
update is what I've seen be the true source of performance loss in Unity, in
general. Unity also has a GetComponent<T> because they need to access a class
attached to a Unity GameObject, but instead of caching that reference to the
gameObject they just do the GetComponent each frame or each method call, which
has a performance impact because Unity needs to filter through all the active
GameObjects to find either the first one or all of the ones that have said
component. Stuff like that is why Unity games run so poorly, the engine is
almost to accessible.

------
TangoTrotFox
I find notions of 'saving' things, particularly industries, to be
disingenuous. If the NES flopped, or never existed, it's not like the console
gaming industry would not exist. There is clearly a market for it and so we
would simply have different names to recall as the 'saviors' of the industry.
This is also why companies failing is not a bad thing, nor something that
should aim to be avoided.

For instance with our massive automotive bailout. If these companies went out
of business it might have been a rocky few years, but clearly there is a
demand for vehicles and this would have created a vacuum enabling new
companies, perhaps with more innovative ideas, to take their place. Instead we
propped up a failing industry for no apparent gain. It could have even been
detrimental in the longrun. Not all automobile companies were failing --
Hyundai-Kia were booming for instance. And had we let the dinosaurs go extinct
it's entirely possible that today most cars being sold would have been much
more fuel efficient. Instead, as soon as gas prices dropped we ran right back
to giant gas guzzlers. Ford, for instance, even recently announced they've
decided to stop making all passenger cars... except the Mustang. So what
happens the next time gas prices spike? Deciding to save the company has
predictably incentivized myopic behavior.

~~~
scarface74
Ford was the only US automaker that didn’t need to be bailed out.

Besides, people who buy Mustangs aren’t that sensitive to gas prices.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
No, they didn't receive the TARP funds. Instead they received a $5.9 billion
dollar loan from the taxpayer for the stated purpose of developing more fuel
efficient vehicles - and, without which, they likely would have gone bankrupt.
It was granted with a subinflation 0.25% interest rate and has still not been
paid back.

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pjmlp
NES was mostly an US phenomenon I guess.

In Europe we were focused on ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, depending on the
country, and then moved into a mix of PC, Atari and Amiga.

In Portugal the only games console that some kinds cared about were the Sega
one's.

~~~
emodendroket
The Master System only really caught on in Europe and Latin America; in the US
and Japan the NES was far more successful. They also had Japanese PC games,
but they were on different, Japan-only machines that were capable of
displaying Japanese characters and had a much larger portion of indie games
and pornographic games.

~~~
elboru
In Mexico I never heard of Master System, my first console was a NES and it
was not until the SEGA Dreamcast and PlayStation came out that I knew of other
consoles. Nintendo had a monopoly over here.

~~~
emodendroket
It may just be Brazil.

------
sien
The NES is very significant.

But without it the Amiga kept gaming going happily. It was a great system. I
remember the first time I saw an NES and the comparison to the Amiga wasn't
great.

The Amiga had a lot of great games in the 1980s too. Kick Off, Speedball,
Xenon, Marble Madness, Bubble Bobble, Populous, F18, F16 Falcon, the Lucasarts
Adventure games.

~~~
orionblastar
The Amiga CD32 was going to dominate the industry but had an IP suit against
it.

When the Amiga 500 dropped below $300 in the USA it entered video console
territory.

~~~
detritus
That's not at all how I remember it - the CD32 was a last ditch effort, and
one which whilst trying to maintain some sense of heritage (mainly in the
awful styling - even at the time I wondered what they were doing) entirely
misplaced the value of the Amiga in teenagers minds: creativity and piracy,
neither of which were to be found.

For me the CD32 was a final confirmation that the haydays of my beloved Amiga
were past.

At that point, I'd already seen Comanche running on a lowly office PC and knew
that things were fast changing.

------
bluedino
Atari basically created, and then almost single-handedly destroyed the entire
American console industry.

Despite their early success it was so poorly ran. Management was horrible.
They were releasing piles of shit as games, like Pacman and ET. Programmers
left the company in droves because of poor pay and treatment. Atari poorly
handled the third party developer situation.

Their hardware was terrible. The 5200 and 7800 were flops. They couldn't get
any traction in the home computer business.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Bugs aside, ET actually isn't a bad 2600 game at all. A lot of the crap it
gets is purely meme driven.

~~~
joezydeco
And the bugs have been fixed:

[http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/)

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ekianjo
It would be great if we could stop glorifying Nintendo as if they were the
only valid actor from some kind of dark ages of video games. It was just so
NOT the case, having lived thru that time.

~~~
Jeema101
I feel like in the US it was. I still remember the first time I saw Super
Mario Bros. at my friend's house. It's hard to overstate how mind blowing that
game was to me as a kid after being exposed to mostly single-screen arcade and
console games prior to that.

~~~
crtasm
Same clear memory for me too. We had a BBC Micro and some great games but
Mario still stood out.

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chriselles
Interesting.

I distinctly remember a BIG gap in home video game systems between the death
of Atari 2600 in the early 80’a and market acceptance of the NES in the mid-
late 80’s.

Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

~~~
mieseratte
> Ice hockey was a game we played religiously.

Reminds me I have / had a small graveyard of Ice Hockey cartridges. I got my
start programming in the mid 00's doing homebrew NES dev, and Ice Hockey was a
readily available, cheap cartridge with the NROM PCB layout

I still feel a little guilt for taking all those poor cartridges out of the
world, and keep an old Ice Hockey PCB sans CHR and PRG ROMs on my desk as a
totem / reminder.

------
kilbuz
For those interested in the cultural and technical history of bringing the
Famicom to the West, I can highly recommend "I am Error" by Nathan Altice.
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-
error](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-error)

------
DerekL
This discussion about how dominant the NES was in which countries reminds me
of a question I've had for a while. Is there hard data on the popularity of
each game platform (computer or console, home or handheld, etc.), globally or
for each country?

I think the best way to measure it is by software sales. You could also
include hardware and accessories, but that would inflate the share of some
platforms because of uses beside gaming (productivity and the Internet on
computers, or Blu-ray playing on the PlayStation 3).

------
ra88it
Does anybody have recommendations for books or documentaries that evoke the
general vibe of this era?

~~~
Famicoman
The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001) is amazing, if that's the angle you
are looking for. Over 600 pages of great stories and information about the
industry. I've read it twice and still think there sre things in there I
haven't fully digested. I have a few other video game books pushed in the
early to mid 2000s, but this is the only one I'd actually recommend. There are
a lot of newer books, but they seem to approach video games from a more
sensationalized space. One exception I would make are the works of Brian
Bagnall, who writes about Commodore/Amiga. I haven't read his books but I hear
they are amazing.

For documentaries, not exactly the same, but I enjoy the Bedrooms to Billions
series (feature films, 2 are out) and to a slightly lesser extant Viva Amiga
(2017) and the 8-Bit Generation series (feature films, 2 are out). These can
be a bit more computer-focused though. I do not recommend Video Games: The
Movie (2014), it feels like a VH1 special with little actual information.

~~~
tripplethrendo
I agree with you that Video Games: The Movie was trash.

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jbverschoor
Wow that thing looks an aweful lot like an MSX. Both the console, the
cartridge and the joystick

