Stuff You Should Know - SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

For the holidays in 1986 (and ’87) (and ’88) the most stupendous, most wanted, most amazing thing any kid could possibly get – outside of a pony, *maybe* – was the NES. That year, video games came back from the dead and changed forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Chuck here again, continuing on with our 12 Days of Christmas toys playlist. Right now, I'm going to serve up a delicious serving of nostalgia for anybody that's probably Gen Xers would be my guess. But the episode is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever. because boy oh boy did it. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we are 10 years old right now, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Can I go ahead and admit something? Oh, yes. I'm nervous, though, but yes, go ahead. Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo, the NES system. And that's not to say that kids my age weren't playing it, but, like, it really booned in popularity right when I was sort of like 15, 16

and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world. Right. And I also did not own one. So, like, I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these clubs. Classic Games, eventually in college, I remember it had to have been a Super Nintendo in like 92. Yeah. My roommate had one, so that's where I first started playing Super Mario World. And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario and the Game Boy that my brother had.

But I've never owned a Nintendo. Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and I was 10, 11 years old, not driving yet. And it was, and I owned one too. So it was definitely in my wheelhouse. Yeah, I mean, later in college, my good friend Clay got the first PlayStation, and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And then I got on the PlayStation train. But it's just funny reading through this, I was like,

I played some of these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo Kid. Yeah, I have to say, I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, I have friends who had those. Went off into the N64 world with the Golden Eye. Yeah. You played that, right? My friend John had one of those, and I played a lot of that.

That was so great. And then I got the first PlayStation 2, the first PlayStation, I mean, not to be confusing. And at that point, I realized that I was thinking about how to play games while I was not playing games, like when I was just walking around living life. And I made a decision, a very fateful decision, that I've never regretted. that I was going to give up video games because I was too addicted to them. Oh, wow.

This was college, and I never looked back. Wow, so you were into him, huh? I was big time into them, yeah. It was like this is, if it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it, then yes, I was a little too into them, if you ask me. I was ever a gamer or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games,

maybe a little too much. In your favor, in your defense, rather, I would say that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world as like Tetris boards occasionally if you're into it. Yeah. And, you know, my deal, as I said before, is I was heavy Atari kid, big time arcade kid, and then played this kind of stuff with friends here and there.

And then now every year I'll usually, or every couple of years, I'll get two or three PlayStation games, play them obsessively for a couple of months, and then it sits for nine months to a year. Yeah. I'm with you. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to play video games, do you know? Yeah, I still enjoy it, though.

It's a lot of fun. But, yeah, my buddy, Doug Dillard growing up, had one rich friend, and he had an Intellivision. And so I had kind of some fun today watching the old, because I remember thinking the Intellivision football was really great. And when I looked at it today, I mean, it's very, very basic, but it was pretty good still. Like, you're calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back.

It was a big rush of nostalgia. Yeah. It's somehow two-bit graphics, I think. Yeah. And this, to be clear, what we're going to talk about today is the original NES. This could have been a two-parter if we would have gone down the road of the 64. Like, we're not even talking about the music today at all. No, no. So there was plenty more material here, but this is just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season. Yeah, because, I mean, it's the holidays.

So one of the greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisce nostalgically about holidays. past, and I definitely associate the NES, or I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the NES. Did you know that? No. Really? Yes. Yeah. Some actually, like, legit gamers call it NES. Other people call it NES,

and apparently there's some big disagreement. I've always called the NES. Yeah. But I always associate the NES with a pretty significant portion of my life, but, like, it always is tied to Christmas as well. All right. Well, you're going to wax nostalgic a bit more, even though I did play a little

bit of these here and there. Okay. So one of the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment System has an amazingly great story to it. Like, it's just so fun to tell because Nintendo came along at a time when the video game market in North America had so totally bottomed out that people looked at video games. Like, think about how big Atari was. people looked at it, it crashed so hard that it was a fad that was never coming back. Like, it had already lived its life.

And Nintendo walked into this burning city that was the video game industry and said, let's give this another shot. And they actually managed to succeed. Yeah, I mean, Atari was dead as disco. We talked a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode. And I did a full Atari guest.

two-parter with Strickland back in the day on tech stuff I'll bet that was a fun one it was a lot of fun but yeah ET came along and certainly didn't kill Atari

but it helped usher in the end of Atari and it wasn't just this one game it was sort of a flash in the pan for a few years and parents were also weighing in and saying you know I don't like my kid playing

this much garbage on the television Like, I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily. It was pre-Satanic panic. It was more along the lines of you're riding your brain. Right. So was that the thing that triggered it, or was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered the what's called

the North American video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it? Well, I mean, I think it was a two-part thing. Like, kids got a little less interested because the game started to suck, quite frankly. and then I think you also had parents beating the drum of, hey, and Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The 2,600 and the 5200 came along.

I mean, rather the 5200 followed up. And it was just okay. So they needed, something needed to happen, and that thing that needed to happen was Nintendo. Yeah, and also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered, helped usher out video games was the personal computer is starting to come into the world.

Absolutely. And with the personal computer, you could, like, do your taxes. Your kid could, like, practice math. And they played games on floppy disk, too. So I saw it. Exactly. Yes.

I played Wolfensstein. Oh, I'm so glad you said that. Because I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disk, and I'm like, it came out in 1990. Like, I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man. You just made a really great neural pathway circuit.

like connect completely in my brain. That feels good. But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in Wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future. And anything that just played games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward.

Yeah. That was kind of like the premise. So just to get across, I don't want to beat this drum too hard, but to get across how huge the crash was, the video game crash of North America, In 1982, Atari raked in $2 billion, Atari alone. In 1983, they lost $536 million.

That's a swift fall. Yes, but that's how quickly that it happened. And so people, basically, if it crashes that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's kind of where we were at in 1983. Yeah, but as you pointed out, this was, we need to keep pointing out, This was the North American crash. Yeah, good point. It did not happen in Japan.

In 1983, they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about because we have arcades over here that are flourishing. We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. It's still a lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun to play. Yeah, for sure. And in 1980, this was a few years before the United States crash, they said, hey, you know what, there's this gaming thing going on,

home gaming going on in America. and maybe we should get together a team over here to just sort of poke around because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys and we have for a long time and we're big in the arcade world but we don't have really a console system going.

And that led to, I think actually there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in 1981 and it was sort of the biggest thing in Japan at the time. Well, I think it was kind of the only thing in Japan at the time too. Well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you could also say it was the smallest. That's true.

But it was not a Nintendo product, right? No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was, Nintendo came along as a rival to this cassette vision, epoch cassette vision. So the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, he apparently was this driving force. He had some really great people working for him in Japan and in North America. But he seems to have been this person who would be like, do this enormous undertaking and do it in an hour kind of thing.

He kind of seems to have had a sense that there was a really narrow window that was open right now that could close at any time and that they needed to get this stuff done, but they also needed to do it really well and really right, basically, out of the gate. And they actually managed to because in 1983, after just a couple of years of research and development, they released what's called the Famicom or the Family Computer, which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System that they released a couple years later in North America. Yeah, I mean, it's not very often that a head of a company or a boss comes along

and says, I want to do something better and cheaper than what is currently out there, and it actually happened. And listeners at home, if you can look this stuff up as you go safely, please do, because just seeing all these various units we're going to talk about It was really a lot of fun. Yeah, they teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're like at that age. They're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy,

but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on a shelf as a collector these days. I think there's a lot of people who have that, actually. Oh, I'm sure. So look up the Epoch cassette vision, because that's kind of fun. But the Famicom was this red and white box.

It top-loaded. It had two wired controllers. And it had, very importantly, on the control pad, it had the D pad, it had the directional pad on the left with the up and down, left and right arrows, and then an A and B button, which no one knew at the time, but that would kind of revolutionize the gaming world as, you know, they got a little fancier over the years, but it's still sort of, that's still the bones of what a controller is. Absolutely. Like, it was, I can never remember the full quote, but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane and, got it right fully out of the gate like tray tables and everything essentially. It was like

that's what they did with that controller design and now you think about it, you look at it like the Nintendo brick and especially the Famcom controllers they look so old-fashioned. But if you can put yourself in the mindset of somebody

in Japan in 1983 if you looked around at the other stuff available it was just from the future. And that was one of the things that Nintendo did really, really well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought the future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and they gave it to everybody. It was a really, like, exuberant time.

It was like the future had been brought to the present, and it was all thanks to Nintendo, basically. So it retailed for about 150 bucks back then, which is, what, close to 500 today? Yeah, 400, something like that. All right. So, I mean, kind of on par with, you know, the range of even modern gaming. I mean, what's the new PlayStation, like, five maybe? I don't know. I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there, five or six hundred bucks. Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was, like, for PlayStation 7, it was just people running around the real world.

It was all, like, VR and augmented reality. I don't remember that. It was pretty cool, because it came out in, like, the 90s, and you're like, ooh, and we're pretty close to that now already, you know? Oh, for sure. they bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior games and the Popeye games which were basically about the same quality as you would get at the arcade

Yeah, that was a huge deal I mean especially if you grew up playing Atari I loved Atari but Atari was Atari and it had a lot of limits and this was you know you went to the arcade so you could play games better than Atari now you could do it at home Right, yeah so that was an enormous progression but it wasn't just like the graphics, the quality

of the look of it. It was also the gameplay, too. Like, it was way more fun than most of the games you were going to play on an Atari. It was just funner to play some of these Famcom games. And it took off like a rocket.

It knocked the epoch cassette vision right off of the top place. Into the history books, basically. Essentially, yeah. They sold half a million units in two months after its release. I think by the end of 1984, they'd sold two and a half million

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was a version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yeah, yeah. And the Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said, we are going to save you and bring you into the future. And it was a tough sell at first in the U.S. Because, like you said, the video game craze, for lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone.

This was 1985. Parents were still not, you know, they were like, I'm glad that went away, basically. And now we have these PCs in our homes, and my kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever, and they seem happy enough with that. And Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew what was going to be a tougher sell. So they knew they had to come up with something awesome. and their first crack at that was something called the AVS, the advanced video system,

and they said, well, give it a keyboard, so it looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disc drive. It'll be able to do some stuff. But they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick, it had a keyboard, like a musical keyboard, and it had this wireless, which is, we'll explain how all this works in a little bit.

It's pretty cool. But it had a little ray gun, a little zapper. Yeah, and you really said a mouthful with the word wireless, man. Yeah. This was 1985, and this advanced video system came out with wireless controllers. Like, it was, that's really impressive. And it was really slick looking, too, like really futuristic looking. But also, yes, they put enough computer peripherals in it that it didn't look like a video game system, right?

Yeah. So they took it to CES, the January version. and I think even back then was in Vegas. But it's sorry, it's the consumer electronics show, right? Yeah, I've never been to that of you. No, huh? Strickland has great stories from it, though. Yeah, he goes every year, I think.

I think so. But at CES in January of 1985, they're like, here you go, everybody. Here's the future, the advanced video system. And no one cared at all about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play, to mess around. no one could have cared less about that thing. Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back because the games were good

and they knew that I guess they were just a little gun-shy, but it seems like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there wasn't someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is going to be a real thing. But it didn't work. They didn't get any response. No, and I think that really goes to just kind of underline just how bad a reputation video games had.

Because, you know, Dave points out that the consoles that have been going for like $100, $150 the year before, these retailers were stuck with them, and they were selling them for like $40, which is how much the games used to go for. Now the games were like $4. So the retailers have been so badly burned. I think they all got caught with these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they were like never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against, which is, as Dave, again, Dave helped us with this. As he points out, you were either a very foolish company to try this or a very smart one. Because, again, it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant that there was no competition in this enormous market right now. Yeah, absolutely.

So they knew they had to have almost like a trick to get their foot in the door. And they came up with one, and Dave found this, is gaming historian, is it a, I know it had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a full website? I don't know. All I know is the YouTube channel where they make really high-quality YouTube videos that are really interesting. It's good stuff. But someone at gaming historian came up with this very apt metaphor about a Trojan horse. And that's kind of what they were looking for was a way to get these things in the home by almost tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system. And it was more just sort of like a toy because kids still got and bought or received toys and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video game. So what they invented was the Rob, the Robb, the robotic operating buddy, which is a very sweet name. You should totally go look at Rob online and especially YouTube videos of Rob in action and just be prepared for the speed of Rob. Right.

But the thing is, Rob was a robot. He moved and he functioned. He interacted with the games that they came up. Very slowly. Right, very slowly. But this was a time where, like, robots were kind of hard to come by. Yeah. They were not, like, it was not an easy thing to get your hands on.

And now, of a sudden, there's this company saying, like, hey, we have this whole thing. And it has a robot, too. Yeah. And it was one of the greatest strokes of marketing genius that any company's ever come up with, as we'll see. Yeah. I mean, what they ended up with was a robot that didn't, I mean, it functioned as it should. But like I said, it's super, super slow. They only ended up having a couple of games where you could use the robot.

And it was just sort of a sneaky way to get these consoles in the door. Because it was all part of the same system. And that's how it worked. They managed to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door. And thanks to a guy named Lance Barr, he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper Raygun, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a sec. But he designed it as a front-loading system. which made sort of people think of VCRs.

It was also a very, they call it zero-for solution. So there wasn't a lot of wear on the cartridges, and it, you know, just worked really well. Plus, it looked, like you said, it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at the time. And I don't think we said, Chuck, so that January CES was just a complete, like, catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time coming up with the advanced video system. And it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi, told a couple of people like, hey, redesigned this in an hour.

And they did. And Lance Barr was the guy who did it. And he knocked it out of the park because the NES as it debuted later on in North America was essentially what he came up with in that one hour that he was given to do it. So they did all this and had it done in time for the July. 1985 CES, like six months after that huge colossal failure, they went back to the drawing board and came back in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System fully fleshed out, including robot and zapper gun.

Well, notably robot, because that's what all anyone cared about it first. Yeah, for sure. Like at CES, the NES system was sort of to the side, and everyone was just trying to get their hands on Robb and play gyromite, Which I'm telling you, you've got to just spend five minutes watching Rob play this game because it shows the split screen of the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which really isn't much.

And then Rob just very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin. Yeah, and was it the game historian video that really kind of went into detail about how Rob played and setting up his accessories and everything? I watched a bunch of them, yeah. I think it was that one, if not it was another one I saw, where they really kind of showed. Like, the idea of Rob was pretty ingenious. Sure. Like, he was player too, but you were actually playing together.

Yeah. Like you, in gyromite, you were kind of running through this maze, and there were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get Rob to do it for you. And again, he would move so slowly, yeah. Come back. Get an eye exam and your glasses made in an hour or two. And then, yeah, he would have completed that and you could advance to the next column or whatever.

It was a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it's just the execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on the player two controller. So if you got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could just push the buttons on the player two controller yourself and play gyromite that way. But the point was they don't seem, in retrospect, to have really thought Rob was going to take off.

In fact, the games that he came with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the North American version of these. They just put kind of this like fix on it that made it compatible with the North American system. But when you loaded up gyromite, the intro screen showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning of it.

I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's a memory. It may have just been like boot up screens or something. So they decide, it was such a, you know, eye grabber at CES that they decided, all right, let's go to New York City and let's test it out there. In one city, roll it out, see what happens. The New York retailer said, hey, buddy, I got, look at this. I got a warehouse full of Atari's over here that I can't even give away. I don't know about a new gaming system and they said all right here's what we'll do we will ship them to your store

from Japan for free we will you can just sell what you sell and pay us for those whatever you don't sell you can return to us we'll take them back we'll send over a team

in your store to set up these big marketing interactive marketing displays and we'll take on all of the risk and all you guys got to do is try and sell some of these and they went, yeah, all right. That was a great Joe Pesci, by the way, I meant to see.

Oh, Joe Petchy. So, yeah, they did this in 500 stores, and normally when you did kind of a soft test release of something like this, you might choose, like, Topeka, Kansas, or somewhere that no one cares about, right? But they went full bore and hit New York City, and I think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times that, like, it was based on that Frank Sinatra song,

the idea that if you made it in New York, You can make it anywhere. And they did make it in New York. Oh, I can't remember. I want to rock. Oh, okay. I want to rock. I want to hear that version.

Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up. Of I want to rock? Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that MP3? Or MP4. I don't know what the kids called on these two.

I bought it at Toys R.S. Awesome. Very cool. So they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York, I think, like $50,000. But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the rest of the country. Another bold move, because normally after your first test run, your first test market, you do like four or five more.

And he said, no, let's skip that. Let's just go right to the rest. of the country. And he did. Yeah. And that was the Christmas season, too. So I get the feeling that they were, they weren't super disappointed, but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken

had it sold 30,000 units, you know? Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say, like, Nintendo had Nintendo not been successful. Like, the games, as we know them today, would definitely not exist. We'd still be playing checkers, like a bunch of dopes. Yeah, and going outside. Who needs it? So that was 1985 holiday season.

By 1986, they hit on something else. So, like, one of the things that they did was take a poll of that people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo. And I think, like, the vast majority of them said that Rob, the robot, was the reason they had bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how well that marketing ploy worked. So Rob had kind of served as purpose, though. Everyone knew he was slow. They weren't releasing more games for them.

So they came up with originally the way you bought Nintendo. It was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers, the Zapper Gun. Nice. Rob the Robot, and all of Rob the Robot's accessories, and then two games, one of which was gyromite, that game you play with Rob, right? Yeah. Okay, that's a lot of stuff,

and of course it was pretty expensive at the time. So for the National Rollout, they kept the deluxe set, but they also came up with something called the NES control deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and, very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers. And that was 99 bucks, and they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year. Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along in, actually with a Famicom in 1985.

And it was just, it was the most advanced looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen. It was, as Dave points out, it was the first game that you could play. and have fun playing for forever. Like you could go on and on, finding the hidden worlds, finding the Easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections and other levels that you never even knew existed,

banging away hidden bricks. Like there were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario Brothers. They created sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark? put your cigarette down how would you like to play

a video game the same one for the next seven hours hot dog that's what I would have said and that really hot dog it was a whole new deal though because even when I played Atari

like we played for hours at a time but I don't know you played a game for 30, 45 minutes and you'd pop in another one and that's why you had like 40 games in your control troller box, because none of them you could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, okay, this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid.

Yeah, so the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything. Almost every single source that I've seen on the Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers change things uses the word light years ahead of everything else, because it really was. There was a guy named Shigiru Miyamoto. He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a legend overnight because of it. They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves,

which kind of rolled out in a few different ways. Well, they had a lot of advertising money. That was sort of a given. They had about $20 million to spend off the bat, which is a ton of money for advertising now and then. But they created a call center. They trained these players and these gamers, basically, to master these games and sit on the phone.

and you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could, like, walk you through a level that you couldn't get through. Yeah. They had Nintendo Power Magazine, which is a very big deal. And they created the first, you know, gaming championships where, and these are still just huge, you know, where kids and adults alike, you know, now adults from all over the world, come together to battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the grand championship.

at Universal Studios Hollywood. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can make the case that they created the e-sports phenomenon or they laid the groundwork for it to come, at least, right? I would think so. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So there was a poll of Nintendo players

after the national rollout that found that 95% of teens polled said that they recommended the NES to their friends. And I think 83% of adults and 85% of little kids. That is eye-popping. And that means that they were successful. They used Rob to get their feet in the door

and they knew that if they just got their console in the hands of Americans, they would change their minds forever about video games and that's exactly what happened. And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did their best to try and keep bad games from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari.

The games got so bad. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this in the ET. game episode, like E.T. gets unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release. But there were far worse games released on the Atari system, hundreds and hundreds of really, really bad games that just no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen to them. So they designed a proprietary system where you could only play officially licensed NES games. He created a lock chip on their circuit board.

and only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip to unlock it and that really kept quality control under their wing they said even to third parties they said you can only make two of these games a year like don't come at us with 200 games like make something really really good that we'll approve of and we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the cover Yeah, and they were really nitpicky, too.

Like, as you were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo, like, explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff. And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff. And that's what you could do if you had 80% of the market as far as video games were because people had to come to you. And it was really smart for them to just kind of protect their intellectual property like because it was so good, but they were basically so heavy-handed about it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.

Yeah, I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around. Yeah. And there were other companies out there trying to bootled games still. There was one called Ten Gen that had a few license games, but they wanted more money. And so they went to the patent office and said, hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and key chips? And they said, sure, here it is. And so they, I guess, illegally?

Because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won. So, I mean, I don't know how all that patent law works. I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off. Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to have just ripped it off. But I think it's one of those things that it was like a legal gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court. Oh, okay, makes sense.

You know what I mean? Yeah. So they just, Tengen rolled the dice and they lost, essentially. Okay. Tengen? Is that it? I think so. All right.

I've actually heard it both ways. I got you. I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendrew, and he has a video called Ten Weird NES Fax, and he talks about that key chip thing, where people were trying to get around it. And he said other companies didn't even bother to come up with a chip.

They just used a low voltage spike to scramble the brains of the lock chip so that it wouldn't work anymore. And now the game could be played. And as an example, he used a game from the developer tree, and it was for Bible adventures. Did you play that one? No, I've never even heard of it. But if you put Bible adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brain. so that you could play Bible adventures. I would think some of these

might endanger the game console itself. You'd think so, yeah. It's pretty reckless. Yeah. Jesus killed my Nintendo. Right. So Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did its job

and got its foot, the little robotic foot in the door. But kids were like, this is not so fun playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. And so Rob, you know, Dave kind of funnily points out, Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet of every kid that probably owned one.

And it just became about that NES system. But that's not to say all those peripheries were not a success because that Zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids loved to play. Yeah, and I did not realize this, but the laser gun, what was it called, the Zapper? It was not, it didn't shoot anything at your TV, because if you stop and think about it, your TV's not set up to accept that kind of thing. Your TV screen certainly isn't. So what happened instead is it was a light detector. So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your screen in just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that, but still faster than you could register it, the screen went black and whatever ducks were on the screen turned into white squares.

And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck, that's square, and it would register it as a hit. That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious. Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works. Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the zapper and didn't go,

boop, beo, pew, peo. All right, I guess here at minute 40, we'll take our second break. Oh, man. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened next. No one can resist a rule of culture. So here's one for the dating files. Rule of culture number 72. Chemistry isn't just vibes.

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This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Okay, Chuck. So there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were, as meh, as Rob was, maybe even a little ma'er.

One was the power pad, the other was the power glove. And again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance the NES system and made a bunch of money for everybody. But when you played with them, they weren't very good. Yeah, the power pad is, it was a pad. It had another use from another company. It was called a Fun and Fitness Pad from Bandai.

And Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can, do like track and field games by running on this dumb thing. And that technology is still very popular. Like if you go to arcades, those dance games, and they're still like, I played one not too long ago with my daughter, Dave and Busters, where you do like track and field stuff is still around. But at home, a kid isn't going to do, like, they're inside kids because they don't want to be outside running around. Yeah. They want to be on the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with Rob.

I almost call them Rod. And then that glove, though, the Power Glove, it was really cool, and it looks cool today. Like, imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, Power Glob was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove. Right. I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie The Wizard, where it was. this kid pulls out a power glove and plays Rad Racer, so he's using it like he's steering, but it just, they didn't really develop any games specifically for the power glove.

So it ended up, it was ahead of its time, I think. It was a little bit, because Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually, Nintendo came out with the Wii system, which used essentially the same kind of technology, but yeah, it was ahead of its time. So it ended up in the closet with the power pad and Rob. Oh, man, closet's getting full. Exactly. But as kind of clunky as those were, that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary.

Yeah, there's a writer at GamePro named Tai K. Kim, who came up with this cool analogy that they found, which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming. And that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like, you know, we were talking earlier about that first NES brick, you know, it was all kind of there. Like, they grew and morphed, but that directional pad was revolutionary. Those buttons were revolutionary, and they landed on the idea of a kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs. Yeah, because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the red button, but you used your whole hand to move the joystick.

This was just totally different. And it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything was laid out just right. And it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come. Even today still, it's based on those. Yeah, they had, it didn't start there. they had it initially on this handheld game called a game and watch, which if you look

this, it looks like it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy, and it's called a game and watch because it had a clock on it. So it told the time, and it was a game. So they call it the game and watch, but that's where the D-pad came from. And Donkey Kong is a game that really took great advantage of the D-pad. And it just seemed like the natural... And now they make the little mini joysticks, which are great.

But some, I think the Xbox, do they have joysticks, or do they still use that D-pad? I don't know. I remember addicted, so I gave it up. So you never played an Xbox. No, no. I've seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller.

Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend, John Pendell, who you know, John. He's backstage in New York, John. He had the N64. He was my golden eye partner, but he also got an Xbox, and we were both addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year. Oh, yeah, that was a good game. And that was a game that carried with you in real life, because if you played enough Tony Hawk, you would just, someone who'd never skateboarded, you would be walking around in the world and going, like,

I could totally grind that gutter on top of that roof. It's pretty funny. So another thing that those controllers did was give us the cheat code. I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick, but they really came along thanks to the NES because there was a developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into a Nintendo game, and it was really hard. So he created this cheat code to make it easier to kind of game test for him,

so he wouldn't have to start over every time. and is extraordinarily famous, up, up, down, down, left right, left right, B, A, start. And that's called the Konami Code, because the guy worked for Konami, and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra. I guess you played a lot of Contra probably, huh? For sure. Now, what was Contra? I don't even know. It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and aliens.

Ah, okay. So if I remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world, and you and your buddy are kind of like buff and wear like headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair. Oh, yeah. And you just shoot all sorts of stuff. And it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons that shoot in different ways. And now you're like, this is clunky and old. But at the time, it was, there was just, again, nothing like it on the market. Like a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the NES.

Yeah, for sure. I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar. But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B.A. start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect. Oh, that's great. They ended up, it's a staggering number still, considering that they were kept sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced. But they ended up with close to 700 games for the original.

and I think in 95 is when they launched the 16 bit. No, no, no, Super Nintendo was 91. And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario. And then Super Mario 2 and 3, of course, came along. We already mentioned Punch Out. That was, I remember playing Punch Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up. And I think I remember. remember this, but the arcade punchout had a boxer, the Russian boxer's name was vodka drunkenski. So great. And he got changed to Soda Poppinski very famously. Anyone who played Punch Out is very familiar with Soda Poppinski. And one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a gem on it, his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch. Oh, who's a tell? And when I realized that you could ticked it, yeah. It just changed my life. That's funny. It changed your life. It did.

Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know. It's possible. That whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. I love it. Glass doors. Yeah, the glass ceiling. Yeah, different thing. So what else, Chuck? There's some other ones, too, that we have to shout out. Well, I'll shout out Tetris, because that's a game I played a lot on the Game Boy. Talk about addictive. Tetris was super addictive. I think to I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today.

Yeah. When we go on road trips and stuff, Emily, I always still jokes like Chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great. Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it, it's, oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing. But it's a game where you stack to different shaped blocks. And when you got solid lines, a line would disappear.

And the whole goal of this game is to keep those lines low. And is it built higher and higher and higher. higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop, and it would seemingly go faster and faster. Oh, man. It got very stressful. Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up and they're dropping, and it drops right onto another block. You're up that high.

It's just, it is very stressful. It is. But it was fun. Well, and it's also, I think, one of the more satisfying games ever invented in that when you would, things would get a little hairy. and if you got like two in a row of the exact ones that you needed and made, I think it was a Tetris when you got like, was it like five or was it four? I don't remember.

Probably four because the tallest block was four high. Was it four high? But it would make all four disappear at once. And if you got a couple of those and you went from like 70% high to down to like 20% in an instant, there's no feeling like that. No, Tetris is pretty great. I loved it too. It was awesome.

I want to shout out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster. And it would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid. But it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't like some path you had to stick to. Like you were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to the next level. That was pretty new, actually. So Metroid was groundbreaking, too.

And then there were other ones that were just fun to play, like ice hockey. Did you play that one? I was always in a sports game, so I played hockey and golf and... What about tennis? Tennis. I played all those. That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game?

I'm not sure if I played that one. That one was very addictive. R.C. Pro-Am. Ducktails was actually a lot of fun. And then there was an Army one called Jackal. And then if you liked skateboarding at the time, which I did, There was Skate or Die, which was pretty good, but my money was on town and country designs, skate and surf, I think it was called. And you could skateboard and then you would go surf, and it was a lot of fun to play too.

Yeah, I was so into the sports games, and I still play the PlayStation, what is it, PGA 2K for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun. But I played, I was addicted to the Atari beach volleyball game, wherein it was two players. aside and both players were connected to one another. They could not move independently. So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds, it reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon,

which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog chases the wagon from the chuck wagon commercials. It's a branded game. Poop out, yeah, who would have thought? And then it would poop out, like, food and the dog would eat the food. That was like the point of the game. You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda, that's a game again.

By the time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing. And again, we couldn't afford an NES. So what was Zelda all about? So I never liked Zelda. Oh, interesting. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. It's almost like, have you ever, what's your grocery store, Kroger or Publix?

I can't remember. both, but generally Publix. Okay, so there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and only Kroger. And I think my theory is that they're laid out in a certain way that they appeal to one type of person and then the other one appeals to a different type of person. So if you are a Publix person and you go into a Kroger,

it feels weird and out of place and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it. But I know some people have essentially dedicated their lives to that game. Like, beyond playing, it's like probably dress up as Link, the main character. Oh, sure.

Have, like, all sorts of toys and stuff like that. Like, Legend of Zelda was really big, too. Yeah, and it was certainly not the first open-world game, but, and I think there's not a solid agreement on what that was. There are some arguments for the great Atari game adventure that was the first open-world game I played, where your avatar was a square. Okay. But it was so much fun because you could go anywhere for the first time. It was really different and new. But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as, or the legend of Zelda,

as one of the first open world, like really good open world games, I guess. Right. Yeah. And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising. Yeah. What else you got, Chuck? I mean, not a whole lot else. I guess we should definitely talk about blowing in those cartridges,

because I even made that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working. And Dave, who's sitting in for Jerry, said, unplug the cable and just plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it? Right. And you don't want to, actually. So did you know about that, right?

I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges, too. So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, you would take it out of the VCR-like entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it, and then you put it back in, and it would work. The thing is, it wasn't doing anything. When you blew on it, you weren't helping it.

It just hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when you took it out and put it back in, the chances were that you were making the correct connection then, and then the game would work. But you, being a dumb 10-year-old, thought, well, I blew on it, so that fixed it. But Nintendo long said, do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them. And no one listened until there was this guy. who came along and actually ran a study, the world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does.

And it didn't work. This is in 2012. His name was Frankie Vitruello. And, you know, it's a very rudimentary study. But, I mean, how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into, and you're going to have a game you blow into. And after, how long did he do this?

30 days. Every day for 30 days. So the guy spent a month blowing on this game. took the blown cartridge out at the end and showed that it was corroded and kind of gross and it's funny like you don't know what kid

you always wonder who invented this because every kid did it because every kid saw another kid do it who just got it from some other kid but it was just sort of known like you would take it out and it was always the same thing you would do it really quick

and just go and like run the cartridge back and forth in front of your mouth and then stick it back in. Yeah. I mean, that sound just triggered a tidal wave of nostalgia. That was amazing.

I'll remember that. So don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges, people, who still play Nintendo, original NES. Maybe we should follow this up again one day. To do one on the music of Nintendo? Well, just sort of everything we didn't cover because the N-64 was such a big deal.

Sure. I don't know. This could be a two-parter separated by time and space. Okay. I like that idea, Chuck. definitely do that. And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed out a second part to this episode, of course that means we've just unlocked listener mail.

Maybe next Christmas, it can be our, you know, because this is kind of, every year we try to do a toy, a famous toy. Yeah, no, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh, all right. Consider them spilled. Yeah, they're spilled all over. All right, speaking of spilling all over, this is a correction that on something you said that I'm, I don't know how I didn't catch this, but it's the, we'll call it the great nutter butter controversy of 2022.

Hey guys, at the end of the vaudeville episode, Josh said it's weird how there were two types of nutter butters and they're totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shaped cookie. And I don't remember what I said. It must have just been like, huh? I think that's exactly what you said. And he mentioned both of the same logo, same packaging, which is not true, just two different types of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what you're talking about, because we had a bunch of people ride in. The peanut-shaped cookies are the nutter butters, Josh, but the other wafery treats are nutty-buddy bars.

Did you look? Is this what you meant? No, I think this person is from an alternate, Berenstain Bears dimension. Because in our dimension, it's the same thing. Same package, same names, everything, just different cookies. I'm standing by it. Is the Nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though, is what I want to know. In that person's dimension, yes.

Okay. It's easy to get a mixed up, guys, if you are not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick up on it, which was weird, because I love both. I never buy these, of course, but, boy, a little Debbie Nutty Bar. Oh, so good. I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters, the kind of wafery one. I think you would really like it. That's the nutty bar or the nutty buddy.

No, that's the nutter butter, but I know what you're saying. Oh, man. Who wrote this email? This is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever. So George says, P.S. got to go. It's raining donuts again outside. Thanks a lot, George.

We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension. Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too. And if you want to be like George and reach out. out and say, hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him. Gabe Ortiz is a cop.

His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late. He was the head of this gang. You're going to push that line for the cause. Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it. When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle the dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew. Listen to the brothers Ortiz on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Stefan Curry, and this is gentlemen. cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product with every sip you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cuturban.com or your nearest total wines

or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Hey, everybody. As is our annual custom, we are raising money for our favorite charity, the Cooperative for Education, which helps break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala by making sure that kids who otherwise wouldn't have an education get to school.

That's right. And here is this year's call to action. You can join co-ed for $20 a month to collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program. And if you set up that gift by December 19th, you can have a chance to win a virtual Zoom hangout with Josh and I. We do it every year and it's a lot of fun. That's right. You can go to cooperative for education.org slash sysk, set up your $20 a month sponsorship. You can also go make a one-time donation if you like. And we may see you for a very virtual hangout this January. Thank you for giving. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.