Atari might have created the video game industry, but it was Nintendo who brought things back from the dead after the disastrous video game crash in the U.S. in 1983-84. They did so via the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was only through the development and subsequent success of the earlier Japanese version of the game console, called the Family Computer or Famicom, that Nintendo had the confidence, technical know-how and financial means to take on America.
Who knows how many years it would have taken for video games to come back without the Famicom? Five? Ten? It’s hard to deal in hypotheticals, but what we can do is take a look back at one of the most important consoles in video gaming history. 30 years ago, on July 15th, 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan. Here’s how it happened:
Here is the last of the TDE articles detailing various aspects of the Famicom, as well as the NES, the North American version of the console released in 1985. These posts celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Famicom, and lead up to the full history of the Famicom, to be posted tomorrow. The post today also falls on the 30th anniversary of Mario Bros., so two koopa’s with one fireball, so to speak. While Famicom project lead Masayuki Uemura and his team at R&D2 labs at Nintendo do great work putting together the hardware of the famed video game console, it’s the games for the system that give it longevity. And there’s few games that boost Famicom and NES sales as much as Super Mario Bros..
As part of our celebration of the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Famicom, the Japanese video game system by Nintendo that was later adapted for the North American market as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), I’m posting my review of The Wizard. It’s a 1989 Fred Savage vehicle that many consider as simply a 100 minute commercial for Nintendo. I made this initially for Ten Point Review, where we rate a movie according to four criteria, and then add and/or subtract points as we see fit in order to come up with a numerical rating between 0 – 10. Time to watch people play games!
If you entered a video arcade on July 1, 1983, you’d probably wonder what all the fuss was about. You’d be met by a huge crowd of people gathered around a new game. There’d be such a large crowd that the arcade owner would have installed a monitor on top of this game so everyone could watch it being played. If you checked out what was on the monitor, you’d see a video game like none other before it.
You’d be seeing Dragon’s Lair, released 30 years ago today. With rich, vibrant animation by Don Bluth, driven by laser disc technology from Rick Dyer and his RDI Video Systems company, it truly seemed like the waning days of the arcade had just gotten a huge shot in the arm. No matter that, due to the extravagant cost of the game to arcade operators (averaging $4,300), it was the first game to cost 50 cents to play. No matter that, despite the lush visuals, gameplay locked players on a rail that was minimally interactive. It was new, it was cool, and it was wonderful.
Even though Dragon’s Lair and the laser disc game phenomena that followed in its wake were conceptual dead-ends that were quickly left behind by gamers, their memories remain. I don’t think there is another game that so typifies the 80’s video game arcade to me as much as Dragon’s Lair.
To go for a spin through the development and aftermath of Dragon’s Lair, please check out our article on the Laser Game Craze.
Work continues on the next instalment of the Bitstory section here at TDE. There will be two entries, in fact, and they represent the first coverage of “modern” consoles on this website. Modern, compared to PONG and Atari, that is. For a taste of what’s in store, here is a video for your enjoyment.
Reverberating throughout the 80’s landscape of bleeping arcades and flashing colours of home video game consoles is Nancy Reagan’s simplistic anti-drug slogan “Just Say No”. Every First Lady needs a bugaboo to pursue while the President rules in office, and Reagan’s was youth drug use. I’m not saying that trying to reduce drug abuse among youth is akin to merely chasing a boogeyman, but if you reduce your anti-drug campaign down to a catch-phrase, well then that’s how the public is going to perceive it. It no doubt went in one ear and out the other of kids impatiently waiting to drop a quarter into Dragon’s Lair and Afterburner.
On the evening of Sept 4th, 1986 Americans turned on their TVs and were visited by President Reagan and his wife Nancy, sitting on a couch in the West Hall of the White House, espousing the dangers of drugs to the nation’s youth. Known as the “Just Say No” speech, it reverberated particularly fiercely a couple of years later inside the head of a man named Cliff Roth.
At the time Roth was teaching audio engineering at the Millennium Film Workshop in New York City, and gave his students an assignment to re-edit the audio track of the speech to reverse the message and have the Reagans espouse the benefits of drug use. Subsequently getting ahold of a film reel of the speech, Cliff then took two years to painstakingly edit the visuals to the joke audio track. Released in 1988 to film festivals and public television stations, the video Roth named The Reagans Speak Out On Drugs slowly became an underground, viral sensation; a meme before easy access to editing technology and the global distributing power of the Internet made such creations commonplace.
Roth’s video is both amazing and hilarious to watch. Naturally, it has circulated on YouTube for quite awhile, although Roth has now uploaded a high-quality version of it to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its creation. It is a pinpoint example of culture jamming in a fun, important and creative way, one every lolcat mememaker should take note of:
The following is a hilarious video plea from Peter Weller about plans in Detroit to build a statue of the character Robocop, a role he played through the movies Robocop (1987) and Robocop 2 (1990). They made another theatrical sequel, a made-for-TV movie and a TV series, but Weller stamped robotically away from those projects.
The movement to cast the metal lawbringer in bronze is spearheaded by a very active Facebook page, currently enjoying, at the time of this writing, Like nods from 1573 people. There is also a Kickstarter page if you’d like to kick in a buck or two for the effort. The best guess to why this campaign is catching fire, aside from the fact that Robocop is awesome, is that Detroit, being the city the movies are based in, has come up against seriously hard times over the last decade, and people need to make something positive out of it. Sure, it seems like a frivolous gesture in the face of such hardships, but sometimes a frivolous gesture can make all the difference. Having a life-size statue of Robocop would be a tourism-generating landmark, at the very least.
The gang at AGD Interactive have taken it upon themselves to remake several classic Sierra-Online adventures, and have just released their makeover of King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human, originally released by Sierra in 1986. The game graphics aren’t completely modernized to today’s standards, but are a nice SVGA overhaul. The addition of a point-and-click interface, as opposed to the original’s text parser, is also greatly appreciated.
It also retains the original’s epic story of a royal baby stolen and a quest to regain a rightful place on the throne. It was with KQIII that the storytelling powers of creator Roberta Williams really began to come into full blossom.
At a grand total of free, the price can’t be beat. Available for the PC and Mac.
After 13 years online, I guess it’s time to put up a blog on TDE. It will be a repository of my thoughts, with a focus on site updates and other happenings with classic gaming and gaming in particular. For this 1st entry, I will call your attention to the first major article I’ve published in awhile.
It is a retrospective of three video game focused movies from the early 80’s, the three that really shaped me as a gamer: Tron, The Last Starfighter and WarGames. It’s an epically sized article that took about five or so months to research and write. So, if you have some time on your hands, please check it out:
