Posted Fri Apr 6, 2018 9:12 PM
Posted Fri Apr 6, 2018 9:33 PM
Posted Fri Apr 6, 2018 9:50 PM
Nintendo gets a lot of undeserved credit for "saving" video games (which is not to say that Nintendo deserves no credit). Usually, it's from people who take the popular view that the entire pre-crash era was merely the time of the early failed experiments and evolutionary dead-ends of the video game industry, a time worth revisiting only for the purpose of considering the necessary mistakes which lead to the NES, the pinnacle of classic gaming. Nintendo made an important contribution, true enough, but it came at a price.
I've often wondered what video games would be like today if Nintendo had not dominated the market so completely after the crash (I'm specifically referring here to the American market). There was still plenty of demand for the kinds of video games that were being produced circa 1983; it was the glut of product that caused the crash. I can only speculate, but I think the market would eventually have corrected itself, and a new crop of companies—including the strongest of the pre-crash industry leaders—would have learned the lessons of the crash and recovered. But instead, companies like Nintendo and Sega swept in to fill the void, bringing with them a cultural shift from American consoles to Japanese. I'm sure that contributed in part to the game design aesthetic that the article discusses.
AtariAge user "mos6507" has also written about this:
I hated the NES because of what it represented. It represented a cultural shift from American consoles to Japanese. I was really too old to be enthralled by Super Mario Brothers. So the whole side scroller fascination was kind of lost on me. All I knew was the consoles I associated with the home gaming universe were being swept aside and the NES and SMS were taking their place. The NES much more than the SMS felt Japanese, and I mean Japanese in a 1970s Datsun sort of way. And I just didn't go for it. I didn't like the color palette or the cutesiness or the joypads that emphasized the left thumb over the right hand. And I resented the fact that the Generation Y was falling for this stuff hook line and sinker. Nintendo Power magazine, The Glove, the emphasis on "megabits" and all the stuff that really signified the switch between classic gaming and the modern era of disposable, sequelitis gaming.
So the NES to me was like rap/hip-hop in the music world, the dividing line on the generation gap.
IMHO, the NES succeeded because of the videogame crash opening up the market to any and all competitors and the generational transition between Gen X and Gen Y. Gen X moved on to home computers and didn't look back. Gen Y cut their teeth on the NES because that's all that was out there. The actual NES hardware was nothing special by mid 80s standards. The only reason it looked like a big upgrade vs. earlier systems was the lower cost of ROM at the time, enabling bigger banked ROM games.
Generation-X and Generation-Y pretty much split right on the videogame crash, with X being the Atari generation and Y being the Nintendo generation. X upgraded to 8-bit home computers and Y latched onto the NES and the Japanese aesthetic. That's how I see it. It's a generational or fashion-trend split. Much is made of the "improvement" with NES gaming but it wasn't so much better as just different.
I saw this transition, too, and the "generation gap" formulation was definitely applicable to my family. I was seven years old in late 1983, old enough to have been enjoying games in the pre-crash era for a few years, but my younger siblings ranged in age from four to newborn. By the time they were old enough to become gamers themselves, the NES had taken over everything, whereas I had made the transition to the Atari 800 (while also holding on to the 2600). I had fun with the NES, too, but I usually found the games that I was enjoying on the Atari side to be more diverse and interesting and nuanced than the typical NES fare. But, because that's what my siblings (and the majority of the market with them) had become accustomed to, "my" games just didn't interest them. I thought that "my" kinds of games still had a lot of potential, and I would have preferred to see more of them, but the market wasn't there for them anymore.
Posted Fri Apr 6, 2018 10:38 PM
Nintendo gets way too much credit. They were in the right place in the right time. There was still plenty of demand for video games; it was just a question of what format and platform people were going to buy them on. In 1983/84, they were buying them on computers. Without Nintendo, the console industry would have been "saved" by somebody else - probably Sega, because they were the only other relatively healthy company with an arcade lineage making consoles at that time. But it could have also just as easily been Atari. It would have been somebody. It just happened to be Nintendo because they timed it right and had some good launch games.
I dislike some of the Nintendo fans who act like there was no console industry before Nintendo, or like what there was was irrelevant. The Famicom and NES were just another in a long line of consoles that had existed before. It was a continuous lineage that started in the 1970's. The crash was real, but it was also temporary (and it seems less and less relevant as time goes on), and it would have been temporary regardless of whether Nintendo showed up or not.
Nintendo should get credit for taking advantage of the vacuum that existed because of the crash. They did a great job of that. But they didn't "save gaming". They didn't create anything that didn't already exist, or bring anything back from the dead. They saw an opportunity that existed because other companies had dropped out, and they took it. Any other company could have done the same and in fact did, but Nintendo had their system ready first and that made the difference.
What Nintendo did is not all that dissimilar from what Sony did in the 32 bit era with the original PlayStation, or what Atari did with the original 2600. These systems were just the first to hit all the right buttons and satisfy pent-up demand that was already there. That's not to say they weren't good products that were marketed well, but none of them "saved" anything. They were just good products in the ongoing lineage of consoles that sold well. That's it.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 4:02 AM
Nintendo should get credit for taking advantage of the vacuum that existed because of the crash. They did a great job of that. But they didn't "save gaming". They didn't create anything that didn't already exist, or bring anything back from the dead. They saw an opportunity that existed because other companies had dropped out, and they took it. Any other company could have done the same and in fact did, but Nintendo had their system ready first and that made the difference.
What Nintendo did is not all that dissimilar from what Sony did in the 32 bit era with the original PlayStation, or what Atari did with the original 2600. These systems were just the first to hit all the right buttons and satisfy pent-up demand that was already there. That's not to say they weren't good products that were marketed well, but none of them "saved" anything. They were just good products in the ongoing lineage of consoles that sold well. That's it.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 5:42 AM
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 5:58 AM
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 7:17 AM
Edited by mr_me, Sat Apr 7, 2018 7:34 AM.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 7:33 AM
And not updated until 1990, fortunately Sega forced their hand.
And NEC/Hudson. Can't forget about the PC Engine.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 8:00 AM
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 8:02 AM
Wasn't Atari already planning to use some sort of lockout device on the 7800, to keep other companies from using the system's more advanced features?
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 8:03 AM
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 8:15 AM
Sega did make an adaption of Pitfall for arcades.
Most of Nintendo's games were evolutionary, not revolutionary; they were expansions of earlier platforming & adventure games. Super Mario Bros was an expansion of concepts explored in Pitfall. Zelda was an expansion of concepts explored in earlier Japaneses RPGs and action games.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 8:33 AM
Point being Nintendo didn't need to make their games for gaming to progress beyond simple one-screen action games.
The world would look different w/o Nintendo for sure, but even without them someone would've provided games w/similar levels of polish. Competition would force companies to make better games; they already knew you couldn't release just anything thanks to the crash. We'd have adventure platformers, hopefully w/o someone abusing monopoly power.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 9:25 AM
A world with fewer side scrolling platformers wouldn't be a bad thing.
That's certainly a thought I had in the height of NES/Genesis/SNES days. I guess it's a case of, "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Side-scrolling platformers ran well on that hardware.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 9:44 AM
I hated the NES because of what it represented. It represented a cultural shift from American consoles to Japanese. I was really too old to be enthralled by Super Mario Brothers. So the whole side scroller fascination was kind of lost on me. All I knew was the consoles I associated with the home gaming universe were being swept aside and the NES and SMS were taking their place. The NES much more than the SMS felt Japanese, and I mean Japanese in a 1970s Datsun sort of way. And I just didn't go for it. I didn't like the color palette or the cutesiness or the joypads that emphasized the left thumb over the right hand. And I resented the fact that the Generation Y was falling for this stuff hook line and sinker. Nintendo Power magazine, The Glove, the emphasis on "megabits" and all the stuff that really signified the switch between classic gaming and the modern era of disposable, sequelitis gaming.
So the NES to me was like rap/hip-hop in the music world, the dividing line on the generation gap.
IMHO, the NES succeeded because of the videogame crash opening up the market to any and all competitors and the generational transition between Gen X and Gen Y. Gen X moved on to home computers and didn't look back. Gen Y cut their teeth on the NES because that's all that was out
there. The actual NES hardware was nothing special by mid 80s standards. The only reason it looked like a big upgrade vs. earlier systems was the lower cost of ROM at the time, enabling bigger banked ROM games."
Good old anti-Nintendo and anti-Japanese Atari fanboy bias.
You're never too old to appreciate Super Mario Bros. Anyway, it's not as if the NES only has cutesy platformers.There's a wide variety of arcade games, shooters, racers, sports games, puzzles, action games, adventure games, strategy games, etc. Almost every genre is well represented. The Famicom/NES has much better graphics than any consoles that came before it, limited color palette non withstanding.
The NES hardware looks like a big upgrade over earlier systems because it is. For example, the NES has better sprites and smoother scrolling than any previous consoles, as well as better sound, none of which has to do with "bigger banked ROM games." It was most powerful console until the Sega Master System and Turbografx.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 9:48 AM
That's certainly what drew me to it -- better sprites, smoother scrolling, lots of arcade ports, better resolution (the Konami font in particular was pleasingly familiar), fun games ...
People say, "but computers!"
Where I lived, the very limited 8-bits were on the way out, and their successors were very expensive. NES was cheap and fun, and you could even rent games to play.
Plus that Zapper light gun! Whee!
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 10:05 AM
Edited by mr_me, Sat Apr 7, 2018 10:34 AM.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 12:00 PM
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 12:05 PM
Nintendo didnt save anything, at least here in the Netherlands. I was a kid back in the day and i didnt hear of the NES years later after it hit the market. Why, we where all talking about homecomputers over here. They where the smarter buy, you could use it for other things then gaming. Although most never got used for something other then gaming. So the whole Nintendo saved gaming is heavily over exaggerated looking from a European stand point.
Exactly.
Nintendo specifically revived the console video game industry in North America. This doesn't apply to Europe.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 5:51 PM
Look to the C64 to see what would have happened with games had the NES not been so successful.
Posted Sat Apr 7, 2018 6:29 PM
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