Today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America.
I don’t remember the day particularly. It was not a big occasion at all. The NES only saw limited test market release at first. The video game crash of ’83 had retailers wary of the risk of rapidly depreciating unsold inventory glutting their shelves. Some thought that video games were a passing fad, and that their day had passed.
So I don’t really remember when I first heard about Nintendo. I would likely have been in 6th or 7th grade, and it would have been sometime in 1986, not 1985. I wasn’t aware of the system when it came out, but I must have seen the commercials at some point. But I’m pretty sure my first time ever learning about the existence of the NES was when I went over to a friend’s house to hang out, and he had one hooked up to his TV set.
We played Super Mario Bros, and I remember having a mixture of feelings about it. Clearly this was a system far advanced over the Atari 2600. The graphics had much higher resolution and more colors, the game had a musical soundtrack. On the other hand I wasn’t too sure about the gamepad controller at f3. The D-pad and it’s square brick shape were uncomfortable. I adapted rather quickly, but my initial impression was that the controller was not comfortable to grip. I also felt like the overall brand aesthetic was somehow clunky and stiff feeling. I’m not sure how to describe it, but at the time it felt very square, very right angled, very grid, and rigid, and this made it feel awkward somehow. Maybe it was the way every game seemed to be laid out on a grid of 16×16 tiles.
This initial feeling didn’t last, and it didn’t take long for me to feel natural and smooth when playing games on the system. Once my hands got accustomed to grasping the little rectangular gamepad, it all came together for me.
We didn’t get the NES in my house until Christmas, I think ’87. But maybe it was’ 86. We had gotten an Atari 7800 first, thinking it was the system to get based on our familiarity with the 2600. By the time we had the NES, Nintendo was already well into sweeping the nation. I can’t honestly remember whether we got it in ’86 or ’87.
I remember the early games we got to play. Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt. Excitebike. Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! Kung Fu. Trojan. The Legend of Zelda. Metroid. Kid Icarus. Ikari Warriors. Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Rad Racer. Contra. Gradius. By the time we got our NES, it seemed like it had already been out, probably at least for a year. We wouldn’t have wanted it earlier than that, not until it had established itself as a proven winner with a great catalog of games. It just happened that by the time we were aware of it, that’s exactly what it offered.