20 Years of NES 333
Twenty years ago, the NES changed the face of U.S. gaming. All this week, 1up.com has a series of features celebrating the anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System. From the site: "When the NES launched, America hated videogames. Well, sort of. The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software and, at first, retailers were reluctant to sell another system. But the NES was a hit, controlling a healthy 90 percent of the U.S. home videogame industry at the peak of its popularity."
where's the article? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought I'd found the path to the rest of the story when I got to this sentance:
And take a minute this week to unpack your dusty NES from its storage closet and go for a run-and-jump trip down memory lane.
there was link on "memory" (which has since disappeared) that went to dell.com's RAM catalog. Ugh.
Re:Trip down memory lane (Score:5, Insightful)
ArticleS (yes, plural) Here (Score:3, Insightful)
Tuesday [1up.com] - NES turns 20: EGM celebrates two decades of NES Mania
Wednesday [1up.com] - Solid Gold: You picked 'em, we praise 'em. 1UP's top 15 NES games.
And for the bandwidth savvy:
Monday [nyud.net] Tuesday [nyud.net] Wednesday [nyud.net]
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Atari 2600 had upset folks by flooding the market with bad software
What? I had an Atari 2600 and I don't remember being "upset at bad software" at all. Was everyone else upset and I just somehow missed it?
"Adult Gamers" (Score:5, Insightful)
Whichever system had the best NBA 2K or Madden game won the pack. The others followed suit.
Re:Boo. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still are doing it .
User base? (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly, Nintendo did more to destroy proper homebrew gaming than a thousand Ataris helped to establish it. I look forward to their doom thanks to the GamePark open handheld gaming platform.
Where can I buy GP2X at retail in Fort Wayne, Indiana (pop 200K)? How many hundred thousand GP2X units will be sold in North America? Is it worth it to port a game to GP2X given the system's expected small user base?
Re:NES #1? Ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, Nintendo was also going to market a disk drive (which was available for the Fanicom in Japan) so that people could use it as a home PC. As it turned out, the market accepted the Nintendo well enough that they eventually ditched the whole "home computer" idea.
Re:NES #1? Ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Antitrust (Score:3, Insightful)
As always, the reason they got nailed was not because they were a monopoly, but because they abused that position to eliminate competition.
Re:Boo. (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with liking someone who was once a criminal, and has since reformed (I won't get into the merits of punishment). It's also silly to say that I should blame one person for another's crimes, i.e. the reformed person, because "he did it first!"
Hated? What hate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trip down memory lane (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NES #1? Ignorance. (Score:3, Insightful)
You named everything that had to do with Pac-Man other than the 2600 port, and it was that game that helped America to learn to hate video games.
Pac-Man for the 2600 sucked long hard pixelated bars.
Re:Unauthorized Games (Score:2, Insightful)
Lawyers. Tengen (among others) reverse-engineered the lock-out chip and then fought Nintendo in court until they were able to use their work-around.
US Copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)
Intellectual property laws: they work so you don't have to.
Re:Boo. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Boo. (Score:2, Insightful)
These people will eventually die off from inbreeding, and if/when MS ever gets their act together, all will be forgiven.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The conventional wisdom (I am not sure if it is true) is that Atari made a huge mistake in letting almost any third-party release games for the 2600. There were hundreds of bad games.
Yah, I know there were tons of bad games available, but blaming that for the crash is just nonsense. There's thousands of terrible games available for the PC. I recall terrible games being available for the C64. I don't recall either of these game platforms dying.
All these platforms (including the 2600) suceeded because of the great games available for it. I remember playing a game at a friends house or in a store and knowing if it sucked or not. Word of good games travels fast. I don't know why the videogame industry crashed, but it didn't have anything to do with only sucky games being available. If I were to guess I think it was just out-competed by the games availble on personal computers at the time like the C64 or even the Apple II.
Re:Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)