SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

26:32I want to rock. I want to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up. Of I want to rock? Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that MP3? Or MP4. I don't know what the kids call it. I bought it at Toys R Us. Awesome. Very cool. So they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York. Yeah. I think like 50 ,000. But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the rest of the country. Another bold move, because normally after your first test run, your first test market, you do like four or five more.

27:18And he said, no, let's skip that. Let's just go right to the rest of the country. And he did. Yeah. And that was the Christmas season, too. So I get the feeling that they weren't super disappointed, but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically. Like, it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30 ,000 units, you know? Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say, like, had Nintendo not been successful, like, games as we know them today would definitely not exist.

27:59We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes. Yeah, and going outside. Who needs it? So that was 1985 holiday season. By 1986, they hit on something else. So, like, one of the things that they did was take a poll of that people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo. And I think, like, the vast majority of them said that Rob, the robot, was the reason they had bought the whole system, to get that robot. That's how well that marketing ploy worked. So Rob had kind of served his purpose, though. Everyone knew he was slow. They weren't releasing more games for them. So they came up with originally the way you bought Nintendo.

28:44It was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers, the Zapper gun. Rob the Robot and all of Rob the Robot's accessories. And then two games, one of which was Gyromite, that game you play with Rob, right? Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of stuff. And, of course, it was pretty expensive at the time. So, for the national rollout, they kept the deluxe set. But they also came up with something called the NES Control Deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and, very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers. And that was$99, and they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year.

29:26Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along with actually with a Famicom in 1985. And it was the most advanced-looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen. it was as Dave points out it was the first game that you could play and have fun playing forever like you could go on and on finding the hidden worlds finding the easter eggs dropping down pipes into other sections and other levels that you never even knew existed banging away hidden bricks like there were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario Brothers they created sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark?

30:19Put your cigarette down. How would you like to play a video game, the same one for the next seven hours? Hot dog. That's what I would have said. And that really... Hot dog. It was a whole new deal, though, because even when I played Atari, like we played for hours at a time, But I don't know, you played a game for 30, 45 minutes and you'd pop in another one. That's why you had like 40 games in your controller box. Because none of them you could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, okay, this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid. Yeah. So the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything.

31:02I've almost every single source that I've seen on the internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things uses the word light years ahead of everything else. Because it really was. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto. He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a legend overnight because of it. They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves, which kind of rolled out in a few different ways. Well, they had a lot of advertising money. That was sort of a given. They had about 20 million bucks to spend off the bat, which is a ton of money for advertising now and then.

31:38But they created a call center. They trained these players and these gamers, basically, to master these games and sit on the phone. And you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could, like, walk you through a level that you couldn't get through. They had Nintendo Power Magazine, which is a very big deal. and they created the first, you know, gaming championships where, and these are still just huge, you know, where kids and adults alike, you know, now adults from all over the world come together to battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood.

32:19Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, you can make the case that they created the esports phenomenon or they laid the groundwork for it to come at least, right? I would think so. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So there was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout that found that 95 % of teens polled said that they recommended the NES to their friends. And I think 83 % of adults and 85 % of little kids. That is eye-popping. And that means that they were successful. They used Rob to get their feet in the door. And they knew that if they just got their console in the hands of Americans, they would change their minds forever about video games.

32:57And that's exactly what happened. And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did their best to try and keep bad games from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari. The games got so bad. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this in the E.T. game episode. Like, E.T. gets unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release. But there were far worse games released on the Atari system. hundreds and hundreds of really, really bad games that just no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen to them.

33:37So they designed a proprietary system where you could only play officially licensed NES games. They created a lock chip on their circuit board, and only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip to unlock it. and that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing. They said, even to third parties, they said, you can only make two of these games a year. Like, don't come at us with 200 games. Like, make something really, really good that we'll approve of and we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the cover. Yeah, and, like, they were really nitpicky, too.

34:17Like, as you were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo, like, explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff. And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff. And that's what you could do if you had 80 % of the market as far as video games were because people had to come to you. And it was really smart for them to just kind of protect their intellectual property like that because it was so good. But they were basically so heavy-handed about it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.

34:56Yeah, I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around. And there were other companies out there trying to bootleg games still. There was one called TenGen that had a few licensed games, but they wanted more money. And so they went to the patent office and said, hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and key chips? And they said, sure, here it is. And so they, I guess, illegally? Because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won. So, I mean, I don't know how all that patent law works. I wasn't, I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off.

35:35Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to have just ripped it off. But I think it's one of those things that was like gray, illegal gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court. Oh, okay. Makes sense. You know what I mean? Yeah. So they just, Tengen rolled the dice and they lost, essentially. Okay. Tengen? Tell them about— Is that it? I think so. All right. I've actually heard it both ways. I got you. I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendrew, and he has a video called 10 Weird NES Facts. And he talks about that key chip thing where people were trying to get around it.

36:11And he said other companies didn't even bother to come up with a chip. They just used a low-voltage spike to scramble the brains of the lock chip so that it wouldn't work anymore, and now the game could be played. And as an example, he used a game from the developer Tree, and it was for Bible Adventures. Did you play that one? No, I've never even heard of it. But if you put Bible Adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brain so that you could play Bible Adventures. I would think some of these might endanger the game console itself. You'd think so, yeah. It's pretty reckless. Yeah. Jesus killed my Nintendo.

36:52Right. So Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did its job and got the little robotic foot in the door. But kids were like, this is not so fun playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. And so Rob, you know, Dave kind of funnily points out, Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet of every kid that probably owned one. And it just became about that NES system. But that's not to say all those peripheries were not a success because that zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids loved to play. Yeah, and I did not realize this, but the laser gun, what was it called?

37:39the zapper, it was not, it didn't shoot anything at your TV because if you stop and think about it, your TV is not set up to accept that kind of thing or your TV screen certainly isn't. So what happened instead is it was a light detector. So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your screen in just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that, but still faster than you could register it, the screen went black and whatever ducks were on the screen turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck, that square, and it would register it as a hit.

38:20That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious. Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works. Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the zapper and didn't go pew, pew, pew. All right. I guess here at minute 40, we'll take our second break. Oh, man. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened next.

39:03Okay, Chuck. So there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were as meh as Rob was, maybe even a little meh-er. One was the power pad. The other was the power glove. And, again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance the NES system and made a bunch of money for everybody. But when you played with them, they weren't very good. Yeah, the power pad was a pad. It had another use from another company. It was called the Fun and Fitness Pad from Bandai. and Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can do, like, track and field games by running on this dumb thing.

39:43And that technology is still very popular. Like, if you go to arcades, those dance games, and they're still, like, I played one not too long ago with my daughter, Dave and Buster's, where you do, like, track and field stuff, is still around. But at home, a kid isn't going to do, like, they're inside kids because they don't want to be outside running around. Yeah. They want to be on the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with Rob. I almost called him Rod. And then that glove, though, the power glove, it was really cool. And it looks cool today. Like, imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat.

40:23But Punch-Out!, which is a great boxing game, power glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove. Right. I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a power glove and plays Rad Racer. So he's using it like he's steering. But they didn't really develop any games specifically for the power glove. It was ahead of its time, I think. It was a little bit because Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually, Nintendo came out with the Wii system, which used essentially the same kind of technology. But, yeah, it was ahead of its time.

41:02So it ended up in the closet with the power pad and Rob. Oh, man. Closet's getting full. Exactly. But as kind of clunky as those were, that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary. Yeah, there's a writer at GamePro named Ty K. Kim who came up with this cool analogy that they found, which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming. and that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like, you know, we were talking earlier about that first NES brick. You know, it was all kind of there. Like, they grew and morphed, but that directional pad was revolutionary.

41:45Those buttons were revolutionary, and they landed on the idea of a kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs. Yeah, because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the red button, but you used your whole hand to move the joystick. This was just totally different. And it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything was laid out just right. And it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come, even today still.

42:25It's based on those. Yeah, they had – it didn't start there. They had it initially on this handheld game called a Game & Watch, which if you look at this, it looks like it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy. And it's called a Game & Watch because it had a clock on it. So it told the time, and it was a game. So they call it the Game & Watch. But that's where the D-pad came from. And Donkey Kong is a game that really took great advantage of the D-pad. And it just seemed like the natural, and now they make the little mini joysticks, which are great. But some, I think the Xbox, do they have joysticks or do they still use that D-pad?

43:11I don't know. I remember addicted, so I gave it up. So you never played an Xbox? No, no. I've seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller. Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend, John Pendell, who you know, John. He's backstage in New York, John. He had the N64. He was my GoldenEye partner, but he also got an Xbox, and we were both addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year. Oh, yeah, that was a good game. And that was a game that carried with you in real life, because if you played enough Tony Hawk, someone who'd never skateboarded, you would be walking around in the world and going like, I could totally grind that gutter on top of that roof.

43:56It's pretty funny. So another thing that those controllers did was give us the cheat code. Which I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick. But they really came along thanks to the NES. Because there was a developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into a Nintendo game. And it was really hard. So he created this cheat code to make it easier to kind of game test for him so he wouldn't have to start over every time. And is extraordinarily famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. And that's called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami.

44:33And it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra. I guess you played a lot of Contra probably, huh? For sure. Now, what was Contra? I don't even know. It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and aliens. Ah, okay. So if I remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world and you and your buddy are kind of like buff and wear like headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair. Oh, yeah. And you just shoot all sorts of stuff. And it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons that shoot in different ways.

45:10And now you're like, this is clunky and old. But at the time, there was just, again, nothing like it on the market. Like a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the NES. Yeah, for sure. I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar. But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, BA start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect. Oh, that's great. They ended up, it's a staggering number still, considering that they kept sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced.

45:49But they ended up with close to 700 games for the original NES. And I think in 95 is when they launched the 16-bit. No, no, no. Super Nintendo was 91. And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario. Right. And then Super Mario 2 and 3, of course, came along. We already mentioned Punch-Out. That was, I remember playing Punch-Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up, and I think I remember this, but the arcade Punch-Out had a boxer. The Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkensky.

46:33So great. And he got changed to Soda Popinski, very famously. Anyone who played Punch-Out is very familiar with Soda Popinski. And one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a gem on it, his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch. Oh, who's a tell? And when I realized that you could predict it, yeah, it just changed my life. That's funny. It changed your life. It did. Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know. It's possible. That whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. I love it. Glass doors. Yeah, the glass ceiling.

47:09Yeah, different thing. So what else, Chuck? There's some other ones, too, that we have to shout out. Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I played a lot on the Game Boy. Talk about addictive. Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today. Yeah. When we go on road trips and stuff, Emily always still jokes like, Chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great. Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it, it's, oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing, but it's a game where you stack to different shaped blocks. And when you got solid lines, a line would disappear.

47:48And the whole goal of this game is to keep those lines low. And as it built higher and higher and higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop, and it would seemingly go faster and faster. Oh, man. It could induce panic. Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up and they're dropping, It drops right onto another block. You're up that high. It's just like, you know, it is very stressful. It is. But it was fun. Well, and it's also, I think, one of the more satisfying games ever invented in that when things would get a little hairy, and if you got like two in a row of the exact ones that you needed and made, I think it was a Tetris when you got like, was it like five or was it four?

48:30I don't remember. Probably four because the tallest block was four high. Was it four high? But it would make all four disappear at once. And if you got a couple of those and you went from like 70 % high down to like 20 % in an instant, there's no feeling like that. No. No, Tetris was pretty great. I loved it too. It was awesome. I want to shout out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster. Should have bought it. And would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid.

49:05But it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't, like, some path you had to stick to. Like, you were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to the next level. That was pretty new, actually. So Metroid was groundbreaking, too. And then there were other ones that were just fun to play, like ice hockey. Did you play that one? I was always into sports games. So I played hockey and golf. What about tennis? Tennis. I played all those. That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game? I'm not sure if I played that one. That one was very addictive. RC Pro-Am. DuckTales was actually a lot of fun.

49:42And then there was an Army one called Jackal. And then if you liked skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skate or Die, which was pretty good. But my money was on Town and Country Designs Skate and Surf, I think it was called. And you could skateboard and then you would go surf. And it was a lot of fun to play too. Yeah, I was so into the sports games, and I still play the PlayStation, what is it, PGA2K for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun. But I played, I was addicted to the Atari beach volleyball game, wherein it was two players a side, and both players were connected to one another.

50:21They could not move independently. So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds, it reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog chases the wagon from the Chuck Wagon commercials. It's a branded game. And it would poop out, yeah. Who would have thought? And then it would poop out like food and the dog would eat the food. That was like the point of the game. You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda.

50:51That's a game, again, that by the time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing. and again we couldn't afford an NES so what was Zelda all about? So I never liked Zelda. Oh, interesting. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. Wow. It's almost like have you ever what's your grocery store? Kroger or Publix? I can't remember. Both but generally Publix. Okay, so there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and only Kroger and I think my theory is is that they're laid out in a certain way, that they appeal to one type of person, and then the other one appeals to a different type of person.

51:31So if you are a public's person and you go into a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place, and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it. But I know some people have essentially dedicated their lives to that game. Beyond playing it, probably dress up as Link, the main character, have all sorts of toys and stuff like that. Legend of Zelda was really big too. Yeah, and it was certainly not the first open world game, and I think there's not a solid agreement on what that was. There are some arguments for the great Atari game Adventure that was the first open world game I played.

52:10Oh, really? Your avatar was a square. Okay. But it was so much fun because you could go anywhere for the first time. It was really different and new. But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as, or The Legend of Zelda, as one of the first open world, like really good open world games, I guess. Right, yeah. And advanced ones. And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising. Yeah. What else you got, Chuck? I mean, not a whole lot else. I guess we should definitely talk about blowing in those cartridges, because I even made that joke before we recorded, because my microphone wasn't working.

52:47And Dave, who's sitting in for Jerry, said, unplug the cable and just plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it? Right. And you don't want to, actually. So you know about that, right? I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges too. So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, you would take it out of the VCR-like entry point, and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it. And you put it back in, and it would work. The thing is, it wasn't doing anything. When you blew on it, you weren't helping it. It just hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when you took it out and put it back in, the chances were that you were making the correct connection then, and then the game would work.

53:29But you, being a dumb 10-year-old, thought, well, I blew on it, so that fixed it. But Nintendo long said, do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them. And no one listened until there was this guy who came along and actually ran a study. The world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does. And it didn't work. This was in 2012. His name was Frankie Bitruelo. And, you know, it was a very rudimentary study. But, I mean, how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into. And you're going to have a game you blow into. And after, how long did he do this?

54:0730 days. Every day for 30 days. So the guy spent a month blowing on this game. Took the blown cartridge out at the end. and showed that it was corroded and kind of gross. And it's funny, like you don't know what kid, you always wonder who invented this because every kid did it because every kid saw another kid do it who just got it from some other kid. But it was just sort of known, like you would take it out and it was always the same thing. You would do it really quick and just go, and like run the cartridge back and forth in front of your mouth and then stick it back in. Yeah. I mean, that sound just triggered a tidal wave of nostalgia in me, Chuck.

54:47That was amazing. I'll remember that. So don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges, people who still play Nintendo original NES. Maybe we should follow this up again one day. To do one on the music of Nintendo? Well, just sort of everything we didn't cover because the N64 was such a big deal. Sure. I don't know. This could be a two-parter separated by time and space. Okay. I like that idea, Chuck. Let's definitely do that. And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed out a second part to this episode, of course that means we've just unlocked listener mail.

55:24Maybe next Christmas it can be our, you know, because this is kind of, every year we try to do a toy, a famous toy. Yeah, no, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh, all right. So you consider them spilled. Yeah, they're spilled all over. All right. Speaking of spilling all over, this is a correction that on something you said that I don't know how I didn't catch this, but it's the we'll call it the great Nutter Butter controversy of 2022. Hey, guys, at the end of the Vaudeville episode, Josh said it's weird how there were two types of Nutter Butters and they're totally different.

56:01The wafery kind and then the peanut shaped cookie. And I don't remember what I said. It must have just been like, huh? I think that's exactly what you said. And he mentioned both have the same logo, same packaging, which is not true. Just two different types of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what you're talking about because we had a bunch of people write in. The peanut-shaped cookies are the Nutter Butters, Josh, but the other wafery treats are Nutty Buddy Bars. Did you look? Is this what you meant? No, I think this person is from an alternate Berenstain Bears dimension. Because in our dimension, it's the same thing.

56:37Same package, same name, same everything, just different cookies. I'm standing by it. Is the Nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though, is what I want to know? In that person's dimension, yes. Okay. Okay? It's easy to get them mixed up, guys, if you're not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick up on it, which was weird because I love both. I never buy these, of course, but, boy, a Little Debbie Nutty Bar. So, so good. I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters, the kind of wafery one. I think you would really like it. That's the Nutty Bar. Or the Nutty Buddy. No, that's the Nutter Butter, but I know what you're saying.

57:18Oh, man. Who wrote this email? This is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever. So George says, P.S., gotta go. It's raining donuts again outside. Thanks a lot, George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension. Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too. And if you want to be like George and reach out and say hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:05This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.