AlfredoTurkey said:
| Shadow1980 said:
I remember those days. I actually did get my NES on Christmas Day 1988, and I was engrossed by it. I was all Nintendo, all the time. I had a Mario lunchbox, ate Nintendo cereal, and read Nintendo Power magazines until they started to fall apart. Even before then, I knew all about it. Friends at school talked about it. I had played it with friends outside of school. I still remember seeing an NES in action for the first time probably back in '87 and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. The NES was the hottest thing around back then for us young Gen X-ers. From 1987 to 1990, "Nintendo" was synonymous with video games. Those of us old enough to remember those days remember how dominant Nintendo was. It wasn't until around the time Sonic came out that Nintendo had any real competition from Sega, and even then Nintendo was still hugely popular and still had the support of most major third parties of the time, the SNES producing just as many games that would go on to remain among the best ever.
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Thanks for sharing that story. It brought back some good memories. It stands as evidence against the absurd idea that 2017 was Nintendo's best ever. There's no way anyone would say that if they either engrossed themselves in the history of the industry or lived through it. And even if a younger person DID study everything, they would only at best be able to agree with us. You really just had to be there to understand how popular and dominant Nintendo was.
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I think about all of the cultural impact the NES and Nintendo had throughout the late 80s and early 90s. It had TV shows like Captain N and Super Mario Super Show w/ Zelda on Fridays. There were also video game themed shows like Video Power, the Power Team and eventually Nick Arcade. There were also the movies The Wizard and the Super Mario Bros Movie. On top of all this there was all of the merchandising. I remember the breakfast cereal (not limited release) plus a huge amount of the usual fare: lunchboxes, hats, T shirts, bed sheets, ect.... Nintendo has not had nearly this kind of cultural impact since.
The really nuts thing is that the Famicom was even bigger in Japan than the NES was in the US. (Your post made me remember that I actually HAD been studying the Famicom's impact on Japan.) They had a ton of games that never made it to the US. A lot of these are games we probably wouldn't have wanted like Mah Jong games and several dozen baseball games, but on the other extreme some are Nintendo developed games like Famicom Wars that they just decided not to port over for no good reason. But the bigger thing is that gaming is a really huge part of Japanese culture even today, bigger than the US or any other country in the world. They still have plenty of arcades with current games by SEGA and Capcom and the like, and also they have huge gaming shops and several shops that just sell gaming merchandise and so on. It's all because of the Famicom. Gaming became a part of their culture with the Famicom and it just stayed that way forever.
