NES games referred to as Nintendo Tapes?

[coleco82]

When I was growing up some of my aunts and uncles would refer to Nintendo games as Nintendo Tapes. I am guessing because the original NES loaded games like a VCR so it makes sense.

My parents called my Atari 2600 Jr. a Nintendo lol, then later when I got my SNES, and PS1, they still called it Nintendo haha

Did anyone else ever hear of people calling NES games Nintendo Tapes?

[Tanooki]

I heard it but not in family, and I'd give someone a glare even as a kid. Us kids knew better, they were game paks or cartridges. I know Nintendo with the fear of the 1983 days made it look like a VCR so I could get why some foolish people who knew nothing other than it was 'a nintendo' though they were plastic tapes but it just bugged me.

[godslabrat]

It was extremely common. "Tapes" was popular slang for video cartridges until cartridges gave way to CDs. The word really annoyed me, but there was nothing to be gained by having the argument over and over.

[Inky]

I've heard Atari games called tapes.

Really irritated the hell out of me. I constantly corrected people telling them "It's a cartridge. There's no tape inside."

Deep down, I know that those people appreciated being corrected.

[Newsdee]

Famicom cartridges (and Master System, and Megadrive) all have the form factor of casette tapes in a case. It's super convenient to repurpose storage boxes

[BydoEmpire]

My grandmother called them Nintendo tapes as well. Actually, at first she thought i was "Intendo."

 

Never really bothered me, to be honest, I knew they didn't know much about them.

[Gamemoose]

I heard that too but, like others, not in the family. My family had some sort of computer or game system. Like it said on the box, those little slabs of plastic were cartridges.

 

I am running into a similar situation where my step kids call any console a "gamestation" and figure that's the name of it. So I do get asked, up to the age of 11, if they can "play the gamestation". My response is "which one?"

[Silverfleet]

My aunt used to call them "Intendo Tapes" all the time. Always made me laugh.

[R.Cade]

I don't remember anyone saying "tapes" or "cartridges". They were always "games".

[godslabrat]

What we forget now is that, for the longest time, culture moved along without most people needing to be interested or even aware of technology. In our parents and grandparents time, you could ignore 99% of technological advances and your life didn't change THAT MUCH. Oh, sure, maybe you're interested in that new "television" thing or having an automatic transmission in your car, but you could adopt into those innovations at your own pace, and society as a whole took decades to make them pervasive.

 

The whole "needing to be informed" thing didn't really come about until the 90s, when computers and access to the internet suddenly became cheap and socially acceptable. The PC boom of the late 90s made technology a requirement that it never had been before. It's weird for people like us to think of now, because that was almost 30 years ago, and many of us don't remember the world before that.

 

So yeah, this kind of cluelessness was actually deliberate.

[Tanooki]

Perhaps my mom having a fairchild channel f2 system around for years kept the dreaded 'tapes' argument from popping up.

[Greg2600]

This comes up a lot. My parents or grandparents would call Atari games tapes. Nintendo though became so ubiquitous that eventually they just called all video games Nintendos!

[Noah98]

My mom always called them Atari tapes and it used to drive me crazy, unless she was buying me one. She probably still calls them tapes lol!

[CatPix]

Interesting.

We had this in France, to it's a bit less stretched, as people would refer to games as "Cassettes".

It still retain the tape idea, as the main tech items sold as "cassette" were the Philips Audio Cassettes and the VHS video cassettes. (tho calling carts cassette isn't wrong; a "cassette" can also be a small box, and in Old French was also the name for pans and sauce pans, which you can find in the modern "casserolle").

 

I guess that the name sticked because early games systems would refer the games being "cassettes" and that the word is indeed used up to the Super Famicom :

Of course that wouldn't confuse most people here as they would have never heard of, but people in charge of importing games and systems might have had a hard time deciding if they should advertise the games as cartridges or cassettes.

Which make me wonder why we ended using cartridges. 8 tracks were never popular in France (for exemple, it seems that no blanck 8 track carts were sold and home tape players were not sold either, only car players). I can guess it could be tied to translating from US/international documentation, and because console sellers wanted to make a clear distinction to the public between the tapes used on 8 bits computers and the solid-state cartridges used on consoles.

Edited July 19, 2017 by CatPix

[+frankodragon]

Even Homestar Runner calls em "tapes" When are people going to learn? I've seen (and I probably have some around) games from old video rental stores in which it has a sticker, "Be Kind- Rewind"

 

[godslabrat]

Interesting.

We had this in France, to it's a bit less stretched, as people would refer to games as "Cassettes".

It still retain the tape idea, as the main tech items sold as "cassette" were the Philips Audio Cassettes and the VHS video cassettes. (tho calling carts cassette isn't wrong; a "cassette" can also be a small box, and in Old French was also the name for pans and sauce pans, which you can find in the modern "casserolle").

 

 

As a weird aside, I do remember an episode of Get Smart, where a (then new) audiocassette was referred to as a "cartridge".

[0078265317]

I don't remember anyone saying "tapes" or "cartridges". They were always "games".

 

Me too.

[+GoldenWheels]

Didn't run into this one much but did have a friend who called levels "boards".

[DJ Clae]

I remember "tapes". Man, nostalgia is a powerful thing! It makes me a warm fuzzy feeling to remember that now.

[Osgeld]

yea the term tapes always drove me knutz, I asked one of my uncles one day "do you know what a tape is?" yea, "well do you see a tape in there" no ... the point was still lost on him

 

actually thinking back on it, he had at one point asked for a soda and I bought him a apple or something then asked if I could play some of his atari tapes

 

I've seen (and I probably have some around) games from old video rental stores in which it has a sticker, "Be Kind- Rewind"

 

To be fair many of those stickers had metal in them to keep people from walking out with them in their pocket without tripping the door alarm

Edited July 19, 2017 by Osgeld

[zzip]

When I was growing up some of my aunts and uncles would refer to Nintendo games as Nintendo Tapes. I am guessing because the original NES loaded games like a VCR so it makes sense.

My parents called my Atari 2600 Jr. a Nintendo lol, then later when I got my SNES, and PS1, they still called it Nintendo haha

Did anyone else ever hear of people calling NES games Nintendo Tapes?

It was common in the Atari era too. 2600 carts sort of resembled 8-track tapes.

[Jinroh]

I am guilty of this. Though being from a small town with nearly only Slavic people who immigrated to the U.S. I can forgive our ignorance. The public library did let you borrow Nintendo Tapes though. Awesome classics like Sesame Street ABC/123 and Top Gun.

 

I referred to them as:

• Atari Tapes
• Nintendo Tapes
• Sega Tapes/Games

After that I got an N64 and called them 'games', eschewing the use of 'tape'.

[Torr]

Atari games were ALWAYS referred to as "tapes" by people I knew back in the day. And since those things in Dad's old truck were called 8-Track Tapes... it only made sense that the Atari ones were Atari Tapes!!

Games or Tapes... never carts...

By the late 80's and NES was starting to get common, SOME people would call it a tape, but most people just called them "games". I've never heard anyone refer to one as a "GamePak" (How do you not pronounce the "C"? Or rather, what does the "C" add in Pack?)

It wasn't until my uncle gave me his SMS and was explaining these fancy "8-Bit Mega Cartridges" and how important it was to keep them in the box. Games were "Cartridges" to me from that point on.

 

Funny side story, my niece (born '97) who grew up watching Disney VHS tapes all the time, referred to ANY VHS tape as a "Disney Home Video"; until she was about 8, and then everything was DVDs and she called them that.

But if you ever watched a Disney VHS from the 90's+ you know that during the opening previews you heard the term "Disney Home Video" about 63 times in 7 minutes.

 

Always made me giggle, like she was a spokesperson for the company or something.

"I can't wait for Cars to come out on Disney Home Video!"

"Oh Look! A Star Wars Disney Home Video!"

 

 

Side Question: When you went to rent a movie did you call it a "tape" or a "video"?

Myself.... right from the beginning.... no matter the format, it was always a "Movie". Even to buy a blank VHS tape, as a kid I called it a blank movie!

Edited July 19, 2017 by Torr

[TPA5]

Never heard carts referred to as tapes, but my mom used to refer to any kind of gaming system as a Gameboy. Never really bothered me though.

 

Besides, now I'm getting to the age where I have no idea what's hip and I didn't know what the hell 'dabbing' was until it was already considered "passe". So I have more of an appreciation for mis-characterizations these days.

Edited July 19, 2017 by TPA5

[mr_me]

Back in the 1970s some video game manufacturers modeled their cartridges to look like audio cassette tapes and actually called them cassettes. Others looked more like audio 8-track cartridge tapes and were called cartridges. How would someone know there isn't a tape inside. I think this topic has come up before.