SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:07Speaker 03

  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 guest, but the episode is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever, because boy oh boy did it. Please enjoy.

• 1:34Speaker 04

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:44Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and we're 10 years old right now, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Can I go ahead and admit something?

• 1:56Josh Clark?

  Oh, yes. I'm nervous, though, but yes, go ahead.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  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 boomed in popularity, right when I was sort of like 15, 16, and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world.

• 2:17Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  And I also did not own one, so like, I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Eventually, in college, I remember it had to have been a Super Nintendo in like,

• 2:34Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  92.

• 2:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  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 was, I've never owned a Nintendo.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and I was 10, 11 years old, not driving yet.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Wheelhouse.

• 2:56Josh Clark?

  And it was, and I owned one, too. So it was definitely in my wheelhouse.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, later in college, my, um, my good friend Clay got a, 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.

• 3:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I have to say I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I have friends who had those. Went off into the N64 world with GoldenEye.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32Josh Clark?

  You played that, right?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  My friend John had one of those, and I played a lot of that.

• 3:36Josh Clark?

  That was so great. And then I got the first PlayStation 2, the first PlayStation, I mean, not to be confusing.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 4:00Josh Clark?

  This was college, and I, it was, I never looked back.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Wow, so you were into them, huh?

• 4:05Josh Clark?

  I was big time into them. Yeah, it was. I 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 never a gamer or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games, maybe a little too much.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And you know, my deal is, you know, I've 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.

• 4:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'm with you. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to play video games, you know?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  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 a 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.

• 5:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's somehow two bit graphics, I think.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this, to be clear, what we're going to talk about today is the 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.

• 5:40Josh Clark?

  No, no.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  So there was plenty more material here, but this is just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season.

• 5:47Josh Clark?

  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 other, I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the Nest. Did you know that?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:04Josh Clark?

  Really? Yeah, some actual like legit gamers call it Nest. Other people call it NES, and apparently there's some big disagreement. I've always called it NES.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:13Josh Clark?

  But I always associate the NES with a pretty significant portion of my life, but like, it always is tied to Christmas as well.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:26Josh Clark?

  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

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:47Josh Clark?

  that people looked at video games, like imagine, 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.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  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.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Back in the day on tech stuff.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  I'll bet that was a fun one.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  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."

• 8:02Josh Clark?

  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?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I think it was a two-part thing. Like, kids got a little less interested because the games started to suck, quite frankly. And then I think you also had parents beating the drum of

• 8:25Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Hey, and Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The 2600 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.

• 8:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered, helped usher out video games was the personal computer starting to come into the world.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 8:53Josh Clark?

  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.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Castle Wolfenstein.

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  Exactly. Yes. I played Wolfenstein. Oh, I'm so glad you said that. Cause 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.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  That feels good.

• 9:24Josh Clark?

  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.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:40Josh Clark?

  That was kind of like the premise. So just to get across, I don't want to like 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.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  That's a swift fall.

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but as you pointed out, this was, we need to keep pointing out, this was the North American crash.

• 10:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, good point.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  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 a 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.

• 11:12Josh Clark?

  Well, I think it was kind of the only thing in Japan at the time, too.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you could also say it was the smallest.

• 11:18Josh Clark?

  That's true.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  But it was not a Nintendo product, right?

• 11:23Josh Clark?

  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.

• 12:07Josh Clark?

  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 of years later in North America.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  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 these, all these various units we're going to talk about is really a lot of fun.

• 12:47Josh Clark?

  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?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:02Josh Clark?

  I think there's a lot of people who have that, actually.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sure. So look up the EPOC 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 a, 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.

• 13:37Josh Clark?

  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, that controller design. And now you think about it, you look at it like the Nintendo brick, and especially the Famicom controllers, they look so old fashioned.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:04Josh Clark?

  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, 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.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  So it retailed for about 150 bucks back then, which is, what, close to 500 today?

• 14:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 400, something like that.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  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, 5, maybe?

• 14:53Josh Clark?

  I don't know.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there, 500 or 600 bucks.

• 14:57Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  I don't remember that.

• 15:06Josh Clark?

  It was pretty cool because it came out in like the 90s and you're like, oh, and we're pretty close to that now already, you know?

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. They bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. games and the Popeye games, which were basically about the same quality as you would get at the arcade.

• 15:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was huge.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  It 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.

• 15:37Josh Clark?

  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 FanCom games. And it took off like a rocket. It knocked the Epoch cassette vision

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:00Josh Clark?

  right off of the top place.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Into the history books, basically.

• 16:03Josh Clark?

  Essentially, yeah. They sold half a million units in two months after its release. I think by the end of 1984, they'd sold 2.5 million units.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:13Josh Clark?

  So in about a year or so. And they were like, okay, I think we're definitely on to something. And they had enough hubris, enough, I guess at least self-assurance, that they set their sights on North America. Again, which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video games were concerned.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  It's a great spot for a break.

• 16:34Josh Clark?

  I think so, too.

• 16:44Speaker 05

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• 18:49Speaker 03

  All right. I think where we left off the United States was a version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

• 18:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  And 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 US because, like you said, the video game uh 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 it was going to be a tougher sell, though they knew. So they knew they had to come up with something awesome. And their first crack at that was something called the the AVS, the Advanced Video System.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  And they said, well, give it a keyboard so it looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disk drive. It'll be able to do some stuff. It'll but it, you know, they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick, it had a keyboard, like a musical keyboard.

• 19:52Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and you really said a mouthful with the word wireless, man. 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 did. It didn't look like a video game system, right?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:26Josh Clark?

  So they they took it to CES, the the January version, and I think even back then was in Vegas. Um, but it's sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've never been to that, have you?

• 20:39Josh Clark?

  No, huh? Strickland has great stories from it, though.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he goes every year, I think.

• 20:43Josh Clark?

  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.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is a little bit surprising, looking back. Uh, 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, you know, it didn't work. They didn't get any response.

• 21:21Josh Clark?

  No, and I think that really goes to just kind of underline just how bad a reputation video games Yeah. had. Because, you know, Dave points out that the consoles that had been going for like $100, $150 the year before, these retailers were stuck with them and they were selling them for like 40 bucks, 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.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:52Josh Clark?

  And that's what Nintendo was working against, which is, as Dave, 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.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So they knew they had to have almost like a trick to get their foot in the door.

• 22:16Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  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?

• 22:27Josh Clark?

  I don't know. All I know is that the YouTube channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that are really interesting.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  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, you know, received toys and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob, the R O B, the robotic operating buddy, which is a very sweet name.

• 23:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:18Josh Clark?

  Right. But the thing is, Rob was a robot. He moved and he functioned, he interacted with the games that they came up with.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Very slowly.

• 23:27Josh Clark?

  Right, very slowly, but this was a time where like, robots were kinda hard to come by.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:33Josh Clark?

  They were not, like, it was not an easy thing to get your hands on, and now all of a sudden, there's this company saying like, "Hey, we have this whole thing, and it has a robot too."

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:41Josh Clark?

  And it was one of the greatest strokes of, of marketing genius that any company's ever come up with, as we'll see.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what they ended up with was a robot that didn't, uh, 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, uh, consoles in the door.

• 24:04Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  And, cause it was all part of the same system, and, and that's how it worked. They, they managed to get the little Trojan Horse robot through the door, and, uh, thanks to a guy named, uh, Lance Barr, uh, he, he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper ray gun, 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, um, they call it a zero-force solution, so there wasn't a lot of wear on the, on the cartridges, and it, you know, just worked really well.

• 24:38Josh Clark?

  Plus, it, it looked, like you said, it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at the time. And, um, I don't think we said, Chuck, so that January CES was, um, just a complete, like, catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time coming up with the advanced, um, video system, and it, it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi, told a couple of people like, "Hey, redesign 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, in North America, was essentially what he came up with in that one hour that he was given to do it.

• 25:18Josh Clark?

  Um, so they had, 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.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Well, notably Robot, because that's what all anyone cared about at first.

• 25:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Like at CES, the NES system was sort of to the side and everyone was just trying to get their hands on Rob and play Gyromite, which I'm telling you, you gotta 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.

• 26:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and was it the, um, the, um, Game Historian video that, that really kind of went into detail about how Rob played and setting up his accessories and everything?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  I watched a bunch of them, yeah.

• 26:23Josh Clark?

  Okay, I think it was that one, if not, it was another one I saw where they really kind of showed like the, the idea of Rob was pretty ingenious.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 26:32Josh Clark?

  Like, he, he was player two, but you were actually playing together.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:36Josh Clark?

  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.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Come back.

• 26:49Josh Clark?

  Get, get an eye exam and your glasses made in an hour or two. Um, 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 just, the execution was terrible. But he, he essentially just pushed the buttons on the player two controller. So if you got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you, you could just push the buttons on the player two controller yourself and play Gyromite that way. But the point was, they, they don't seem in retrospect to have really thought Rob was gonna take off. In fact, the games that that they he came with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the North American version of these. They

• 27:30Josh Clark?

  just put like kind of this like like fix on it that made it compatible with the North American system. But when you loaded up Gyromite, the the the intro screen showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning of it.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese writing and stuff.

• 27:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  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 Ataris over here that I can't even give away. Like, 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

• 28:33Speaker 03

  back. We'll send over a team in your store to set up these big marketing, interactive marketing displays. And we'll, 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.

• 28:48Josh Clark?

  That was a great Joe Pesci, by the way.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Oh, Joe Pesci.

• 28:52Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, they did this in 500 stores. And normally, when you, when you did like 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, that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that you, 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.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  I want to rock. Oh, okay. I want to rock. I want to hear that version.

• 29:28Josh Clark?

  Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Of I Want to Rock?

• 29:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the Twisted Sisters song.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  You got that MP3?

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  Or MP4, I don't know what the kids call these things. I bought it at Toys R Us.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Awesome, very cool.

• 29:44Josh Clark?

  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.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:55Josh Clark?

  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, like 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.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:35Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  And you wonder kind of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30,000 units, you know?

• 30:43Josh Clark?

  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.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes.

• 30:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and going outside.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Who needs it?

• 30:59Josh Clark?

  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, that's how well that marketing ploy worked. So, Rob had kind of served his 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.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 31:44Josh Clark?

  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?

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:53Josh Clark?

  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.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along in, actually with the 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 Day 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 that you, in 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.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  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?"

• 33:20Josh Clark?

  Hot dog. That's what I would have said.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  And that really?

• 33:26Josh Clark?

  Hot dog.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  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 and that's why you have like 40 games in your controller 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.

• 33:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything. I, I, I've, almost every single source that I've seen on the internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things, uses the word light years ahead

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:05Josh Clark?

  of everything else, because it really was. Um, there was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto. He designed the game very famously. He's, he obviously became a legend overnight because of it.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves, which uh, kind of rolled out in a few different ways. They, well, they had a lot of advertising money. That was sort of a given. They had about 20 million bucks uh, to spend off the bat, which is a ton of money for advertising uh, now and then. But they created a call center. Uh, they trained these uh, 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.

• 34:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Uh, they had Nintendo Power Magazine, which is a very big deal. And they created the first, you know, gaming championships where, uh, 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 uh, with the, the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood.

• 35:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can make the case that they created the esports phenomenon. They laid the groundwork for it to come at least, right?

• 35:21Speaker 03

  I would think so.

• 35:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, um, there was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout. Um, that found that 95% of teens polled said that they recommended the NES to their friends. And then I think 83% of adults and 85% of little kids. That is eye popping and that, 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.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was, uh, they did their best to try and keep bad games uh, from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari with the, the games got so bad. Uh, I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this in the ET game episode. Like ET 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.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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.

• 37:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and like, 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 that because it was so good. But they were basically so heavy handed about it.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:45Josh Clark?

  That they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around.

• 37:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Uh, and there were other companies out there trying to bootleg games. Still, there was one called TenGen that had a few licensed 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, uh, I guess.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Illegally? Because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won, so I mean, I don't know how all that patent law works. I wasn't, I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off.

• 38:28Josh Clark?

  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 was like gray, illegal gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Okay, makes sense.

• 38:41Josh Clark?

  You know what I mean?

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:42Josh Clark?

  So they just, Tengen rolled the dice and they lost, essentially.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Okay. Tengen, is that it?

• 38:48Josh Clark?

  I think so. I see, I've actually heard it both ways.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  I got you.

• 38:51Josh Clark?

  I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendo Drew, and he has a video called 10 Weird NES Facts. And he talks about that, 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, the lock chip. So that it wouldn't work anymore and now the game could be played. And as an example, he used a, he used a game from the developer tree and it was for Bible adventures.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Did you play that one?

• 39:29Josh Clark?

  Bible, no, I've never even heard of it. But if you put Bible adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brains so that you could play Bible adventures.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  I would think some of these might endanger the game console itself.

• 39:41Josh Clark?

  You'd think so, yeah, it's pretty, pretty reckless.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Jesus killed my Nintendo.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:28Josh Clark?

  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 is 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 square, and it would register

• 41:13Josh Clark?

  it as a hit. That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works.

• 41:21Josh Clark?

  Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the zapper and didn't go pew, pew, pew.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  All right, I guess here at minute 40, we'll take our second break.

• 41:31Josh Clark?

  Oh, man.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened next.

• 41:44Speaker 03

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• 44:13Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were as meh as Rob was, maybe even a little meh. 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.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Power Pad is, was a pad. It was, it had another use from another company. It was called the 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. Uh, and they're still like, uh, I played one not too long ago with my daughter, Dave and Buster's, where you do like track and field stuff is still around, but at home, a kid isn't gonna do like, they're inside kids because they don't want to be outside running around.

• 45:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  They want to be on the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with, uh, Rob. I almost called him Rod. Uh, uh, and then that glove though, the power glove, it was really cool and it looks cool today. Like if, um, imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes. Because it looks kind of neat, but Punch-Out, which is a great boxing game, uh, Power Glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove.

• 45:43Josh Clark?

  Right. I also saw there's a, a scene in the, um, Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a Power Glove and plays Rad Racer. So he's using it like he's, he's steering, but it just, they didn't really develop any game specifically for the Power Glove. So

• 45:59Speaker 03

  It was ahead of its time, I think.

• 46:01Josh Clark?

  It was a little bit because, um, they, Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually Nintendo came out with the Wii system, which used essentially the same kind of technology. Uh, but yeah, it was ahead of its time. So it ended up in the closet with the power pad and Rob.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Closet's getting full.

• 46:18Josh Clark?

  Exactly. But as, as kind of clunky as those were, that, that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's a writer at GamePro named TK Kim, who came up with this, uh, cool analogy that they found, which is that, uh, what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what, uh, 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. Uh, those buttons were revolutionary and they landed on the idea of hold, uh, kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Uh, thumbs and pointers. Fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs.

• 47:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the the red button, but you used your whole hand to 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 it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like you're saying, it it just laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come. Even today, still, it's based on those.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  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 a clock on it. So it told 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 of the D-pad. And it was it just seemed like the natural. And now they make the little mini joysticks, which are which are great. But some, I think the I think the Xbox, do they have joysticks? Or do they still use that D-pad?

• 48:22Josh Clark?

  I I don't know. I remember addicted, so I gave it up.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  So you never played an Xbox?

• 48:27Josh Clark?

  No, no. I've seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend, John Pendel, who you know, John? Yeah. Backstage in New York, John. He had the N64. He was my GoldenEye partner, but he also got an Xbox. And we were both addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.

• 48:52Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, that was a good game.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  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 that roof.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Pretty funny.

• 49:07Josh Clark?

  So the, um, the, another thing that those controllers did was, um, give us the cheat code.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:13Josh Clark?

  I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick, but they really came along thanks to the, uh, 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.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  I never, I guess you played a lot of Contra probably, huh?

• 49:50Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Now, what was Contra? I don't even know.

• 49:53Josh Clark?

  It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where, um, I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and aliens.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Ah, okay.

• 50:04Josh Clark?

  Um, 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, um, headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:15Josh Clark?

  Um, but, 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.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:28Josh Clark?

  Like a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the NES.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I, I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar.

• 50:36Josh Clark?

  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, um, right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great. Uh, they ended up, it's a staggering number still considering that they were, uh, kept a sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced, but, uh, they ended up with close to 700 games for the original NES. And, uh, I think in 95 is when they launched the 16 bit. No, no, uh, Super Nintendo was 91.

• 51:13Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario.

• 51:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  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 this, but the arcade Punch-Out had a boxer, the Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkinsky.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  So great.

• 51:44Josh Clark?

  And he got changed to Soda Popinsky, very famously. Anyone who played Punch-Out is

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:49Josh Clark?

  very familiar with Soda Popinsky. And one of the, 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.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 52:02Josh Clark?

  And when I realized that you could predict it, yeah. It just changed my life.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  That's funny. It changed your life and

• 52:09Josh Clark?

  It did.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know.

• 52:12Josh Clark?

  It's possible. That whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. Glass doors.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the glass ceiling. Yeah, different thing.

• 52:20Josh Clark?

  So, um, what else, Chuck? There's some other ones too that we have to shout out.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  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 I literally owe Tetris to my carpacking skills today.

• 52:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  When we go on road trips and stuff, Emily always still jokes like Chuck is gonna Tetris this thing. It was great. Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it, it's, uh,

• 52:50Speaker 03

  oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing, but it's, um, it's a game where you stacked different shaped blocks.

• 52:55Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  And when you got solid lines, a line would disappear. And the whole goal of this game is to, to keep those lines low. And as it built higher and higher and higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop and it would go, seemingly go faster and faster.

• 53:09Josh Clark?

  Oh, man. It like, it could induce panic. Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up and they're dropping and it's like, it drops right onto another block. You're up that high. It's just like, you know?

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:20Josh Clark?

  It's just, it is very stressful.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  It is, but

• 53:22Josh Clark?

  But it was fun.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  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?

• 53:40Josh Clark?

  I don't remember, probably four because the tallest block was four high.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:56Josh Clark?

  No, no, Tetris was pretty great. I loved it too.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  It was awesome.

• 54:00Josh Clark?

  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 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?

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Hmm, I was always into sports games. So I was, I played hockey and golf and

• 54:40Josh Clark?

  What about tennis?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Tennis. I played all those.

• 54:42Josh Clark?

  That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game?

• 54:45Speaker 03

  I'm not sure if I played that one.

• 54:47Josh Clark?

  That one was very addictive. RC Pro-Am, DuckTales 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.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was so into the sports games and I still play the PlayStation, uh, what is it PGA 2K for their golf game is still a lot of fun. But I played, well, 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.

• 55:38Josh Clark?

  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.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  It's a branded game.

• 55:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Uh, you should speak a little bit about Zelda though, the Legend of Zelda. That's a game again, that 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?

• 56:12Josh Clark?

  So I never liked Zelda.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 56:16Josh Clark?

  It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 56:22Josh Clark?

  It's almost like, have you ever, what's your grocery store, Kroger or Publix? I can't remember.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Both, but generally Publix.

• 56:29Josh Clark?

  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.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:49Josh Clark?

  That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it, but I know some people like have essentially dedicated their lives to that game. Like beyond playing, it's like probably dress up as Link, the main character.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 57:01Josh Clark?

  Have like all sorts of toys and stuff like that. Like Legend of Zelda was really big, too.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:20Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Where your avatar was a square.

• 57:24Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:39Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  An advanced one.

• 57:41Josh Clark?

  And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:46Josh Clark?

  What else you got, Chuck?

• 57:48Speaker 03

  I mean, not a whole lot else. I guess we should, 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?

• 58:04Josh Clark?

  Right. And you don't want to, actually. So did you know about that, right?

• 58:08Speaker 03

  I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges, too.

• 58:12Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 58:55Josh Clark?

  The first, the world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does.

• 59:00Speaker 03

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

• 59:17Josh Clark?

  30 days. Every day for 30 days.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 59:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I mean, that sound just triggered a tidal wave of nostalgia in me, Chuck. That was amazing.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  I'll remember that.

• 1:00:00Josh Clark?

  So don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges, people who still play Nintendo original NES.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Maybe we should follow this up again one day.

• 1:00:08Josh Clark?

  To do one on the music of Nintendo?

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  No, well, just sort of everything we didn't cover, because the N64 was such a big deal, and

• 1:00:14Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  I don't know, this could be a two-parter separated by time and space.

• 1:00:19Josh Clark?

  Okay, I like that idea, Chuck. Let's 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.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Oh, all right. Consider them spilled.

• 1:00:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they're spilled all over.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  All right. Speaking of spilling all over, this is a correction that, on something you said that I, I don't know how I didn't catch this, but

• 1:00:58Josh Clark?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  It's the, we'll call it the great Nutter Butter controversy of 2022.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. At the end of the Vodvail episode, Josh said it's weird how there were two types of Nutter Butters, and they're totally different. The wafer-y kind, and then the peanut-shaped cookie. And I don't remember what I said. I must have just been like, huh?

• 1:01:19Josh Clark?

  I think that's exactly what you said.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  And he mentioned both have 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 write in. The peanut-shaped cookies are the Nutter Butters, Josh, but the other wafer-y treats are Nutty Buddy Bars. Did you look? Is this what you meant?

• 1:01:40Josh Clark?

  No, I think this person is from an alternate Bear and Same Bears dimension. Because in our dimension, that there, it's the same thing. Same package, same name, same everything, just different cookies.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  But is the-

• 1:01:50Josh Clark?

  I'm standing by it.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Is the Nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though, is what I want to know?

• 1:01:55Josh Clark?

  In that person's dimension, yes.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Josh Clark?

  Okay?

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  It's easy to get them mixed up, guys, if you are not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick, uh, pick up on it, which was weird, because I love both. I don't, I never buy these, of course, but, boy, a Little Debbie Nutty Bar? So, so good.

• 1:02:16Josh Clark?

  I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters, the kind of wafer-y one. I think you would really like it.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  That's the Nutty Bar, or the Nutty Buddy.

• 1:02:25Josh Clark?

  No, that's the Nutter Butter, but I know what you're saying.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:02:29Josh Clark?

  Who, who wrote this email?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Uh, this is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever.

• 1:02:34Josh Clark?

  So George says, "P.S. Gotta go. It's raining donuts again outside."

• 1:02:40Josh Clark?

  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 and say hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to [email protected].

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:03:16Josh Clark?

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