Flashback NES

Gamespot has a piece in their Flashback series up, looking at the significance of the NES, Nintendo's original console offering in the United States. Last year the console celebrated its 20th year. Gamespot has a talk with Nintendo and reflects on the games that made the system great. From the article: "There was no denying that the NES was a phenomenon. By the 1990's one in every three American homes had an NES and video games had become a billion-dollar industry. Nintendo had taken over Saturday morning cartoons, cereal boxes, and the surface of commercial merchandise the world over. Through several different iterations, from the Japanese-exclusive Famicom Disk System to the 90's released top-loading NES, the NES dominated video game sales for nearly a decade."

Re:competition with PC games, then and now

[aichpvee]

Why do people keep propogating this myth? Consoles have reached or exceeded "parity" with PCs at just about every generation (maybe all of them, but I'm too lazy to look up sources to back that claim up), only to be surpassed as the PC platform upgrades and moves on and the consoles settle in to their far longer life cycle.

This isn't something new. And neither is claiming that consoles have "finally reach technological parity with PCs." So can we really hang this one up, at least until the next "Next Generation" of consoles?

Re:competition with PC games, then and now

[Anonymous Coward]

> The two have been synonymious throught modern computer-history

Only to the x86 weenies who think "modern computer history" started with the IBM-PC. :D

The term PC was in use as far back as '76, and possibly even in '72, which predates x86 machines. Here's what wikipedia says about it, which roughly matches my memory of the time (emphasis mine):

"The phrase "personal computer" was common currency before 1981, and was used as early as 1972 to characterize Xerox PARC's Alto. However, due to the success of the IBM PC, what had been a generic term came to mean specifically a microcomputer compatible with IBM's specification."

I do agree that the term *eventually* came to imply IBM compatible PCs, to the exlusion of other types of personal computers, and that is now the predominant usage. So there are many folks who grew up thinking PC == IBM compatible. But many of us were using the term long before there were IBM compatibles to call PCs. Even wikipedia lists Amigas and Ataris and C64s under "other types of PCs".

Re:Are we remembering the same 1986?

[Anonymous Coward]

Carrier Command was successfully converted to the ZX Spectrum. An 8-bit. A marvelous achievement by any standard...