Oct. 18 came and went with little fanfare, but had certain events not occurred 20 years ago on this very same date, college would be a much different place. What, you may ask, could make such a difference in the lives of college students two decades after its conception? Oct. 18, 2005, marked the 20th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The NES was not the first video-game system released in America, of course, but after the video-game industry crashed, many thought that the industry was dead. In 1983 a confluence of events destroyed the fledgling video-game industry: the economy was beginning to weaken, and high sales of substandard video games led to a string of very poor-quality games being released. Programmers were churning out games in caffeine-fueled binges, often over the course of just a few weeks. The industry was teetering on the brink of disaster, and, finally, one game pushed it over the edge.
E.T. was going to be the biggest game ever released. It was one of the largest creative properties and had the largest budget for a video game yet: $20 million. However, it was also one of the worst games ever created, and its release almost single-handedly destroyed Atari. Atari produced more E.T. cartridges than there were systems in existence, and, if you want one today, you can take a shovel down to Alamogordo, N.M., where most of the remaining copies lie in a landfill.
Nintendo, however, would soon be the industry’s savior. Nintendo did not start out as a video-game company and was actually founded in 1889. Originally, the company produced hanafuda cards, for use in the Japanese card game of the same name. In the 20th century, the company tried its hand at a number of different industries, including “love hotels” (imagine a motel designed specifically for couples to come have sex in) and a taxi service. Around the 1960s, the son of Nintendo’s then-president decided that video games were going to be the future of the company. They produced a number of light-gun games before releasing their first video-game system, the Color TV Game 6. The Color TV Game 6 contained six very simple variations on Pong and proved to be a moderate success. The company then created its first handheld system, Game & Watch, designed by the late Gunpei Yokoi, the future creator of the Game Boy. Game & Watch sold very well, thus securing Nintendo’s entrance into the videogame industry.
Nintendo then expanded, branching out into arcade games, where a young artist by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto created the most popular arcade game yet, Donkey Kong. Miyamoto would go on to create such other classics as Mario, Zelda and essentially every other Nintendo franchise of note. Riding high on its success, Nintendo decided to release the Famicom (the Japanese equivalent of the NES), which sold phenomenally-over 500,000 units in the course of two months.
Having seen the industry crumble before their very eyes, retailers were at first wary of the NES. They were not convinced that the video-game industry could actually sustain itself. Nintendo, however, was convinced that it could convey its success in Japan into success in America, so the company went to work on a Trojan horse to get the system onto the shelves.
The first tactic was to completely change the aesthetics of the NES. The Famicom had been a bright red, top-loading system, very reminiscent of earlier Atari machines. Nintendo wanted to distance itself from Atari and thus produced a drab, front-loading box that very much resembled a VCR. By making it look like a standard piece of audio-visual hardware, Nintendo achieved its intended effect.
Nintendo’s changed design would allow the company to get itself onto the shelves of department and electronic stores, but one question remained: How would they get onto the shelves of toy stores, especially now that they had a drab design that would not appeal to children? The answer came in the form of R.O.B.-the Robotic Operating Buddy. R.O.B. could plug into the controller port and would move and light up according to the action on the screen (assuming that the game being played was an R.O.B.-compatible game, which was rare considering only two were ever developed). With this extra toy addition, very similar to a lot of other animatronic toys popular in the mid ’80s, Nintendo had the in it needed to get onto toy retailers’ shelves.
Nintendo single-handedly revitalized the video-game industry, and all of the hours wasted since can be directly traced back to Oct. 18, 1985. Sony has since taken a commanding lead in the market, Microsoft is burning cash in its attempt to take Sony down and Nintendo, lacking the requisite power, has gone mad with creativity. No one knows how this next generation is going to play out, but were it not for Oct. 18, it wouldn’t have ever been a possibility.