DC comics book review: The Nintendo Entertainment System: Geek Life

Tagged with: Geek Life Nintendo Video Games

The New Obsession – The Nintendo Entertainment System

October 18, 1985 is a day that changed every kid’s life. It is the date that kids began to stay inside all day, even when it was beautiful and sunny out. Stacks of books and comics suddenly found themselves unread and barely touched. It was the day the Japanese released a brand new obsession for everyone in North America. It was the day home video games leaped into the future. It was the day the Nintendo Entertainment System hit stores, and that very video game console is the topic of the eleventh issue of Geek Life.

Ralph Baer, the father of video game consoles.

To understand the true power Nintendo had, let’s back up a bit to the earlier days of home video gaming. As early as 1951, the idea of creating an interactive experience with a television set was the goal of one man, engineer Ralph Baer. It wouldn’t be until 1966 before he would see his earlier concept become something he could sell. It was working as the Chief Engineer at an equipment design company that he built a game called Chase. In this very primitive game, two players could control pixels that would dart across the screen until one pixel caught the other. Later, a second engineer was brought on board to design the first “light gun” – a toy gun that would try to shoot a moving target controlled by a second player.

As the 60s reached its end, Baer put the finishing touches on the first home gaming system called the Brown Box. That system included two controllers, a light gun, and came with sixteen switches that, depending on which switch you threw, controlled what game you were to play. He sold the idea to Magnavox who changed the switch system to a series of plug-in circuits. This new version of the Brown Box was released in mid-1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey.

A Pong Console from the 1970s.

By the mid-70s, a home video game called Pong would dominate homes. Several companies released their own version of Pong, but all had the same idea – they were to be connected to your TV and each system came with two controllers to play with your friends. During this era, two giants in the video game industry would emerge. The first, here in America, was Atari who had partnered with Sears to release their own Pong console. The other, a Japanese company, took the idea started by the Odyssey and added color and matched some of Atari’s earliest games. Though it hadn’t arrived on our shores yet, Nintendo was already proving to itself that it could be a leader in video gaming.

The 70s closed with a market crashed caused when a couple companies abandoned their gaming consoles and sold their systems cheap. Only the Odyssey and Atari would survive this first crash. Atari was able to survive primarily through its VCS (the Video Console System). Never heard of the VCS? I beg to differ, my friends. The VCS was later renamed the Atari 2600. The 2600 became the dominant gaming system of the Second Generation Video Game Console Era. But like all great things, this second generation would experience a crash that many thought would kill the home gaming system industry for good.

The Atari 2600

Atari was an interesting company. It was primarily a company of long haired youngsters who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a suit and tie. A core group of only a couple dozen, Atari was the picture perfect model of an anti-corporate, progressive company. They were smart and cutting edge. They even had cookouts and beers on the clock. With the 2600, every employee of Atari became rich. Atari was also a household name.

Today, you might not be able to find many people who could name more than a dozen or so Atari games. Most of those games could be named because of their popular arcade versions. I’m betting less than 20% of today’s gamers would remember games such as Barnstorming, Adventure, Berzerk, Surround, or, my personal favorite, Maze Craze. Atari was the platform in which the most popular video game icon since Pac-Man first hit home. Yes, Mario got his start at the arcades, but later could be played on your TV as a 2600 game.

Mario wouldn’t be the only icon to come to the Atari 2600. Frogger, Q-Bert, Donkey Kong, and even Pac-Man all took their bows on the system as popular games. Even big mythological characters such as Superman, Spider-Man, and Luke Skywalker got their chances to be immortalized on the 2600. But there would be two huge movie stars that certainly did not help the video game industry – Indiana Jones and E.T.

Ask anyone who’s old enough to have played much Atari, and they will tell you that Raiders of the Lost Ark is about one of the hardest, most frustrating games ever released on the console. There were so many things you had to do and had to do in a certain order or at a certain time for you to progress in the game. Raiders was so confusing, you actually had to play with both controllers despite it being a one player game. In fact, I believe you had to use the 2nd player controller to move Indy around.

None of that would compare to the insanity of E.T. You controlled the alien. It seemed fairly simple for a premise. All you had to do is put a phone together and “phone home”. Easy, right? Not at all. You had to avoid men in black and not fall into pitfalls. If you fell into a pitfall, you could get out by using some levitation powers, but you had to have enough points to pull yourself out of the hole. You see, as you levitated, your points decreased. If you didn’t have enough points, you were stuck. Not just stuck for a little bit of time, but stuck in a way you just had to shut the game off. It was the worst, god-awful abomination ever conceived. In 1983, E.T. single handily destroyed Atari.

E.T. on Atari... This screen is as good as this game ever got.

Anyone who worked for Atari would tell you that they were their own downfall. Poor or rushed programming on games like E.T. would lead to bad games which led to poor sales. This was just one year after a poorly developed port of Pac-Man showed cracks in the Atari stronghold. When retailers lost faith in the gaming industry, after losing money when poor reception of games like E.T., Atari was caught in the middle of a financial meltdown. This led to the widely known story of the company taking millions of unsold cartridges and burying them in a landfill, though the legitimacy of that story is still widely disputed. The only second gen system to survive the crash was Intellivision, who was Atari’s main competition during this time. Intellivision, under new ownership, would continue to produce games until 1991. All other consoles were discontinued by 1984.

The door was left wide open for anyone who dared walk through it. Stores weren’t high on selling video games anymore. If you were going to make it in America, you would have to have something pretty damn good to sell. Boy, did Nintendo have something pretty damn good.

The Nintendo Entertainment System’s birth in Japan came in 1983 as the Famicom (short for Family Computer). Shortly after their homegrown success, Nintendo starting ironing out a plan with Atari to bring it to America. When Atari fell, Nintendo took their system back to the drawing board and made plans to release it themselves. Just in time for Christmas 1985, Nintendo invaded America and quickly conquered the entire United States and Canada.

The Nintendo Entertainment System Deluxe Set

Upon its release, my three older brothers worked at a toy store called Children’s Palace (pretty much the largest toy store chain next to Toys R Us). I’ll never forget that night in the Spring of 1986 when my brothers came home with a big ass box with the word Nintendo sprawled across it. Being a young and impressionable kid, I was right in the thick of the hubbub as they unpacked their recently purchased Nintendo Entertainment System Deluxe Set and the fistful of games they picked out for our new gaming console.

The Deluxe Set wasn’t just the console and a couple of controllers. Oh no… This set also came with this black and gray gun thing, two games (Duckhunt and Gyromite), and a peculiar little robot guy named R.O.B. (Robotic Operation Buddy). R.O.B. “helped” you play Gyromite, but he pretty much sucked. Even I knew that after about 30 seconds of playing with him.

Along with the two games that came with the console, my brothers also brought home Golf, Baseball, Super Mario Brothers, Commando, Excitebike, 1942, and Winter Games. I know early on we had many of the first wave Konami games, Rad Racer, and Ghosts ‘N Goblins, but I’m not sure exactly when we got those. The night, I knew my life would never be the same. Sleep was suddenly no longer an interest of mine. I only ever went outside if it meant I was going over to someone’s house who had a Nintendo. I think it was at this point that I realized I could never be President of the United States. All I wanted to do was play the Nintendo.

Seriously... What is going on with this cover?

There were a lot of games that very quickly imprinted their 8-bit awesomeness on my life. Working at a toy store, my brothers got some promotional stuff from time to time. One night, they brought home a tube of posters advertising the first wave Konami games. We each took two. I was the lucky bastard who got the Castlevania poster and I will revisit that particular game later in this article, but I also got this other curious poster for the most bizarre cover to any game I’ve ever seen - Stinger. There were these robot looking ships with boxing gloves and there were flying coat hangers with mean faces and a bell and… Holy crap, I would stare at that poster and wonder to myself what the hell could that game be about. It was about as close to an acid trip a 9 year old could get.

It was in these early days of Nintendo that I learned many things. The Nintendo family of games provided the most fun. Capcom brought the shoot ‘em ups. Konami games were the most challenging and most memorable. Then there was LJN. Ugh… It didn’t take long for me to realize to stay the hell away from those games.

Mike Tyson is waiting for you...

Super Mario Bros. might have been the game that changed everything, but, in its infancy, there were three games produced by Nintendo that I will always love more than Mario’s adventure against the Koopas. First, there was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. No boxing game has ever lived up to what you got out of Punch-Out. You were Mac, a tiny boxer going up against some of the most brutal fighters in the sport. To hit them in the face, you literally had to jump to reach their ugly mugs. Like Rocky, you were chasing the seemingly impossible dream of becoming a champion. As you progressed through the game, starting with the ridiculously weak Glass Joe, each fighter got harder. Each opponent was a stereotypical figure from their home country. Piston Honda, from Japan, acted like a World War II Kamikaze. King Hippo was a fatass from some Polynesian island who was as mysterious as King Kong himself. Soda Popinski was a Russian who got drunk off soft drinks. If you won all your bouts, you eventually worked your way up to Mike Tyson. To this day, I think I’ve ever only landed about 8 punches to Iron Mike’s face. One punch from Kid Dynamite landed you on your ass. Two punches and you couldn’t get up. No final “boss” in any game up to that point was more difficult to defeat.

The other two games that captured my heart in those days were Metroid and Kid Icarus. Both games introduced something new to video games – the password feature. Whenever you died, you got a password. If you entered it correctly when you started a new game, you got to continue either at the start of a particular stage or at the start of the game, but in either case, you retained everything you had gained up to that point. Both titles were full of adventure and enemies flying at you from all angles. They relied heavily on maps and knowing where you had to go to either get items or meet a boss.

Oh my god I'm so sorry! I thought you were a dude!

Samus, the main character of Metroid, could get upgrades to weapons and had to enter certain sections of the game’s map to face the main bosses. Eventually, Samus would meet up with the game’s title characters. Metroids would latch onto Samus and drain energy until you died. Metroids were the creation of Mother Brain – a giant brain that served as the game’s final boss. Once Mother Brain was destroyed, that didn’t end the game for you. A self-destruct code activated and you had to get topside as quickly as you can or you died and had to fight the last stage all over again. The biggest surprise in gaming came at the end when you celebrated your victory. You see Samus’ helmet come off and you realize that this whole time Samus is a girl. Sometimes you just saw her flowing hair in the wind, and sometimes she took off her armor to reveal a shapely bikini body. It’s safe to say that Samus was the first video game heroine.

An Eggplant Wizard from Kid Icarus. A total asshole.

In Kid Icarus, you played as Pit, a young cherub trying to defeat Medusa and her hordes of mythological monsters to save the Goddess of Light, Palutena. In all, there were 13 levels Pit had to fight through. In each set of four stages, there were three stages that either scrolled up or horizontally. Each set’s fourth stage, you entered a temple-like structure where you faced a boss. However, it didn’t do you much good if you don’t have a map in the temples. Each of the three temples became progressively larger and more difficult. Of all the villains in gaming history, none were more frustrating than the damn Eggplant Wizards. They tossed these eggplants that could turn you into an eggplant with legs if they landed on you. Each temple had a hospital that served as the only place to release the eggplant spell and return you to normal. Each temple’s hospital was placed further off track than the last. If you were in the third temple and got struck with an eggplant, you had to go so far off track to get to the hospital, you might as well committed suicide because you’d likely die before getting back on track. In my opinion, the Eggplant Wizards are the biggest assholes in video game history.

Despite living in a single parent household, I was the first kid I knew that lived in a two Nintendo home. I received my very own Nintendo for my 11th birthday. It was then when the next two games entered the same pantheon as Punch-Out!!, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Castlevania. The first of these was a game that came in a glorious golden cartridge. Of course you know what I’m talking about… Hell yeah, it’s The Legend of Zelda.

Zelda... A game so awesome it truly was golden.

Zelda’s new innovation was a battery pack that didn’t require you to leave your system on or a password to save your progress. It contained it’s own memory that, as long as you had set up a profile, you could pick up your game right where you left off. You played as Link, a young elf whose object of affection, Princess Zelda, had been kidnapped by the evil Ganon. The world of Hyrule was a sprawling landscape lousy with monsters to defeat. The more you played, the more items you picked up. You got these items by entering labyrinths and going into secret rooms underground. As you defeated each labyrinth, you picked up a piece of the all powerful Tri-Force which helped you in the final Labyrinth by making Ganon visible.

There aren’t many games where I can remember pretty much every monster’s name that you faced. It probably didn’t help that there was a bizarrely frantic commercial with a really weird guy who used different voices when he called off the name of one of the creatures. Zelda led the way for the next generation of supremely popular characters after the Mario Brothers. The gameplay was catastrophically addictive – forcing me to eat many a meal in my bedroom while I pressed on in Hyrule in search for the Princess. The combination of popular characters, large world, and gameplay led to many sequels that remain just as popular today as the original was back then.

The next game I remember playing until my eyeballs bled was a game that, for me, ranks right up there with Castlevania, another Konami masterpiece. This one was The Goonies II. Instead of a film sequel, The Goonies’ ongoing adventures played out in video game form. You were Mikey and you had to save your kidnapped buddies and a mermaid named Annie. Of course all of the original movie’s villains, the Fratellis, were found in this game too, along with spiders, scorpions, and other creepy crawlies that were out to get you.

The Goonies II - one of my favorite games of all time.

As much as I loved The Goonies II, it was a very hard game to play. I think one of the things that helped my love for this game was how I got it. As I said, we lived in a single parent home. My mom worked damn hard to keep us all in clothes and under shelter. She worked nights so she could make more money. Thankfully, for me, my dad was always around too so while my mom and brothers all worked their shifts, I had a place to be that was a second home. We never had a great deal of nice things. I was very lucky to have grandparents who could help keep a young boy rich in Transformers, Nintendo games, and other assorted fun things. Regardless of all the help, and to no fault of my mom’s because I’ve always been very thankful for all she ever did for me and my brothers, I didn’t have everything I could have ever wanted growing up. It was just the way it was, and it made me appreciate what I had more.

One day, I was with my mom getting new clothes for the upcoming start of a new school year. We were at Target picking out what she could afford. I remember I had to also get an alarm clock. That might seem kinda insignificant, but it was my first one. I guess I remember it because it was the start of me realizing that I was growing up. Plus, I used that alarm clock until just a few years ago. Anyway, we were looking around and I saw The Goonies II at the store. I don’t remember if a new game was already part of the plan that day or if I had to beg for it or anything. I just know that despite a tight budget, I got that game. Maybe the idea was the sum total of hours spent entertained by a game would be greater than the sum total of a bunch of comic books or little toys. Maybe I was just lucky that day. Either way, I got the game and played the hell out of it. In fact, if I had my old NES hooked into my TV right now, I’d probably be playing it instead of writing this article.

My little, black bible

The complexity of games such as The Goonies II, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus showed gaming was moving into a new direction. These games required outside help in order to complete them. Nowadays, most games have an accompanying game guide to help you figure out the secrets or where to go when you don’t see any other path. Way back in the early days of the NES, the first game guide of it’s kind sat by my side at all times. The Official Nintendo Game Player’s Guide was a book full of info and secrets for many games of the time. I always called it my “black book” and later referred to it as my “bible”. The cover of the book was a fairly simple glossy black cover. There weren’t any pictures of games, just the symbols of the different game genres with the big, white words.

My little black bible had so many creases in the binding. I had to have it open whenever I played a game like The Goonies II because I needed to know if I went through a door, would it lead me out to where I had to be, or what path did I have to take in Zelda to get to Labyrinth #5, or where did I go in Metroid to get Screw Attack. My bible even featured our first look at Zelda II: The Adventures of Link that didn’t hit the shelves for a whole two years after the book was published.

The very first Nintendo Power... Every kid's dream magazine.

Not long after that, a new magazine called Nintendo Power gave us tips on some of the most difficult and confusing games on the shelves and provided previews of games not yet released. A hotline could be called to ask an expert how to get past certain sections of certain games. Comics featured some of our favorite characters. Each issue came with a poster you could try to tear out of the center if you dared. Nintendo Power was the predecessor to websites and other publications that gave you the lowdown on all the upcoming games. Even XBox and Sony’s Playstation created their own magazines. Also, let’s not forget the catchy jingle Nintendo Power commercials featured urging us all to “get the power… Nintendo Power!”

The Nintendo Entertainment System gave way to other cartridge platforms like the 16-Bit Sega Genesis, and the dawn of the disc platforms like the Playstation and XBox. Everyone wanted a piece of what Nintendo had. No matter what, though, Nintendo’s pure power and name recognition allowed them to continue to press forward with new systems and innovations.

In the early 90s, to compete with the popular Genesis, Nintendo came out with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Because I had a Genesis, I did not have an SNES, but many of my friends did and it wouldn’t take long before I realized that I would have to get used to having so many buttons on one controller to use. Since I skipped the SNES, I did get a Playstation in the early days of that console. It would be this system that re-ignited a passion I had for one of the NES’ most popular games.

Castlevania... Konami's opus.

Being a fan of horror movies that are heavier on atmosphere than gore, Castlevania was about as awesome as a game could get for me. Moving through a creepy castle hunting monsters from the classic Universal movies while trying to avoid skeletons, Medusa heads, and zombies literally kept you on your toes and could make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. In the first two games of the Castlevania franchise, you were Simon Belmont, a vampire hunter from a family with a rich history of fighting Dracula. The game was a perfect mixture of fun, great soundtrack, and action. However, a later game in the franchise would take my top spot for the greatest game I’ve ever played.

Symphony of the Night...

On the original Sony Playstation, the newest entry in the Castlevania series would cause me to lose many hours of sleep and pull me in like no other game. The year was 1997 and I was playing the hell out of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. You were in control of Alucard, Dracula’s son. Alucard is pretty damn powerful and certainly had no love for his father. Early in the game, you are slicing through just about anything you come across until you run into Death, who strips you of every special item in your arsenal. The rest of the game is spent with you going through the castle, picking your items up, and defeating bosses. That is until you reach a certain point in the game when the castle is turned upside down and you have to go back through it. Never before had I loved a game so engrossing and never since have I given myself and my free time over to a game like this. Oh, and as far as atmosphere goes, in the background you’d hear wolves howling and the wind blowing through trees and whistling through the cracks in the castle walls. If you are looking for the perfect game to play around Halloween, Symphony of the Night is the one for you.

N64's GoldenEye

After the SNES, Nintendo ventured into the 64-bit, über-graphic territory with the N64. With it came a couple games that are part of my generation’s greatest moments in video game history. The first was a new Mario Kart that was an upgrade from the SNES version. As fun as the racing aspect is in Mario Kart 64, nothing beats a good old battle with three of your friends. Another giant on the N64 was GoldenEye. Based on the James Bond movie of the same name, you were James Bond working through the story of the movie, but in the multiplayer version, you could hunt your friends down and a large cast of current and former Bond characters were there for the choosing. Want to really try your patience? Play the multi-player mode with someone who knows exactly how to use proximity mines. GoldenEye was the main reason why I ended up getting an N64. Being a huge Bond fan, how could I not get one?

The N64′s days were kinda numbered from the start. Playstation and the new kid on the block, Microsoft’s XBox, were producing the games adult gamers wanted to play. Suddenly, Nintendo was facing the most competition it had ever faced before. Relegated to a role that made people think of Nintendo as more of the family or kid friendly platform didn’t exactly help the N64. That’s not even mentioning the price tags on the heavy N64 cartridges. It was hard for parents to think of buying an N64 with games costing nearly $70 each. In the 64-Bit era, cartridges were the lumbering dinosaur in a world that had moved on.

Nintendo’s new venture, the Game Cube, seemed almost like they conceded the adult gamers to Playstation and XBox, who were both evolving with new systems. The Game Cube featured family friendly games. This didn’t help to close the gap between Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft. For the first time ever, people began to wonder if Nintendo was doomed to extinction.

Nintendo back with a vengeance - the Wii.

Suddenly, Nintendo came back with a vengeance. Using technology neither of the other two systems had, the Nintendo Wii arrived and made gaming even more interactive. The Wii used remotes to control the action in the games. Some games required only slight flicks of the wrist and some required your whole body to get involved. Not really being much of a gamer myself, I was immediately drawn to the Wii. I saw it as a workout and something I could completely throw myself into for a more complete feeling. Once again, Nintendo was the innovator and it’s taken over three years for either Sony or Microsoft to respond.

So, now with the Christmas shopping season fully underway, when you pick up a new XBox Kinect for yourself or your family, take a second to think about how far we’ve come in video games. From humble beginnings with the Odyssey, to the phenomenon of Pong, to the Kinect, video games have been around for over 40 years. If it wasn’t for Nintendo, all those cool adventures we went on as kids and all those kills in World War II we racked up as an adult would never have been possible.

If you’re wondering what the Nintendo Entertainment System’s legacy is, just go to YouTube or search around the net. It won’t be long before you run into a site offering clues and walkthroughs for that 25 year old Nintendo game you’re playing. People are still playing those games on their hand held gaming devices, or through emulators, or on their Wiis. As any man who’s at least 25 years old how they feel about Nintendo. You might find yourself in a much longer conversation than you expected. Even the hardest boiled XBox killing machine is likely to get misty eyed when remembering the days of the NES.

I bet you thought I wasn't going to include a picture of Mario...

Thanks for joining me for another trip down memory lane. In two weeks, we get closer to the end of the 1980s and what better way to spend the penultimate 80s episode of Geek Life than to talk about the day that made it possible for superheroes to successfully exist on the big screen with enough levity to entertain adults as well as kids. I’m not going to come right out and say it, but I’ll give you that date – June 23rd, 1989.

To find out more about what this series of articles are all about check out What is Geek Life? To see what other topics I’ve written about, check out the Geek Life tag!

DC comics book review

FREE Comics Manga Download

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Nintendo Entertainment System: Geek Life

0 comments:

Post a Comment