Nes saved gaming

While the home gaming industry in the United States was experiencing its death throes, Nintendo was gearing up to fill the void. In , the same year as the crash, Nintendo released their Family Computer, commonly called Famicom, in Japan. It suffered a few speed bumps, but by the following year, it was the most popular game console in the country. By , Nintendo had sold more than 60 million consoles worldwide, becoming synonymous with home gaming in the same way that Coke became synonymous with soda.

The Nintendo Entertainment System , as it was known in the United States, was far from the first home console, but to most people, it might as well have been. To this day, regardless of what hardware is actually being used, some segments of the population refer to gaming as "playing Nintendo.

Here are just a few of the ways Nintendo re-imagined home consoles. In a issue of The Vindicator , Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi said, "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games. Because previous consoles were made with common parts, it was both easy and legal to allow interplay between competing manufacturers.

In fact, prior to The Crash, ColecoVision offered a converter which allowed consumers to play Atari cartridges on Coleco consoles. While this was undoubtedly a win for consumers, it was a symptom of a larger problem. The complete lack of control exercised by console manufacturers, over software content, meant that just about anyone could produce a game for play.

This sort of creator free-for-all might seem utopian but it was a death blow for an industry already plagued by decreasing consumer confidence. When your Pac-Man port tanks and your E. This is the problem Nintendo set out to fix. By controlling what games were available for the NES, Nintendo was able to enforce a certain level of quality.

Consumers knew that when they bought a game with the Nintendo seal on it, they weren't going to be disappointed. This tradition of quality control has continued into the modern age.

Even now, you can't buy a game for Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox, without it having the company logo on it. That's not to say that all games are well-received, but it's been almost forty years since millions of units were buried in a dump beneath a layer of concrete like so much nuclear waste.

The Robotic Operating Buddy, or R. Released in the United States in October of , R. Famicom cartridges are formed somewhat in an unexpected way. Different from NES games, official Famicom cartridges were delivered in numerous colors of plastic. In Japan, a few organizations made the cartridges for the Famicom. This permitted these organizations to build up their designs for other gaming companies if they ever stopped making cartridges for Famicom.

The cartridge, not the console, did save games. The NES itself had no internal storage to talk about. This meant being able to save would rely totally upon the game.

This capacity required additional storage or hardware to be included in the cartridge. They generally utilized a password system because of this restriction.

A few games presented a battery reinforcement, which could take into consideration saved information. In the long run, the battery will pass on, and this RAM will quit working until the battery is removed. This is a precursor to present-day flash memory. This system was impressive in its ambition and came with accessories, including controllers, a light gun, and a cassette drive that were all meant to interface with the console wirelessly, via infrared. The still-terrible market for video games made such a complex and, likely, expensive system a tough sell, though, and after a lukewarm reception, Nintendo went back to the drawing board to work on what would become the Nintendo Entertainment System we still know and love today.

You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Nintendo's Family Computer, or Famicom, turns 30 today! Update, December 9, Masayuki Uemura, the lead architect for both the Famicom and Super Famicom, passed away on December 6 at the age of Uemura worked at Nintendo from to and oversaw notable accessories like the Famicom Disk System and the Super Famicom's Satellaview modem accessory. The Nintendo Advanced Video System communicated with its peripherals wirelessly through infrared.

Flickr user Gingerbeardman. Andrew Cunningham Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica with over a decade of experience in consumer tech, covering everything from PCs to Macs to smartphones to game consoles.