Every good piece needs an opening monologue of sorts, and while I don’t expect my project to be great, I still need an introduction of sorts. As I stated, I’m beginning my NES Retrospect event – a review of the initial sixteen launch titles for the classic Nintendo console as well as some additional side pieces. Now everyone knows about Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt; those were the more popular of the titles, but what about the rest of the games? What’s so special about Ice Climber that they would be included in the current series of Smash Bros. games? Why does my copy of Gyromite have hard levels? Here’s where we look at some old games for old times’ sake. But first…
The Nintendo Entertainment System was considered to be the pinnacle of video games. It is often difficult to see a world where the NES hadn’t been introduced or even become the success it was. While more powerful video game consoles have passed the old system by, most can remember their fondest gaming memories on the classic gray box.
In a twist of irony, however, the console wasn’t initially touted as a video game system, but rather as a toy, with focal points being not the successful pack-in game Super Mario Bros, but the robot peripheral ROB and Zapper light gun. Instead of game cartridges, you had game paks. You had better graphics than the old gaming systems and the titles were larger in scope, unlike the video games of old and their simplistic-minded design. These days, when a company like Sony puts out a video game system and calls it a computer entertainment system, you’d cry foul, but this sort of strategy was exactly what Nintendo needed for their fledgling console (which had undergone several revisions before hitting stores).
The reasoning behind this was simple: video games were passe and for a good while now, people had been burned out by the market of horrid Atari games that had plagued shelves. For some reason, people thought differently when it came to this new machine from Japan. Maybe people actually enjoyed the ROB and the two games designed for it, who knows?
During the initial launch of the NES, Nintendo released two configurations for its soon-to-be-popular system:
The Deluxe Set, initially priced at $249, included the console itself, two Nintendo gamepads, ROB the Robot, a Zapper light gun, and two games; Gyromite (made for the robot) and Duck Hunt (made for the Zapper).
The Control Deck set, initially priced at $199, included the console itself, two Nintendo gamepads, and the launch title that would make Nintendo and its star protagonist famous, Super Mario Bros.
Along with these sets, sixteen games were initially launched, the three pack-in games included. Over the course of the next month, I will be either reviewing each of the games or the series of games that were initially launched. In addition to the reviews, I’ll be providing some history lessons on the NES’ rise, fall, and revival in relevance and reveals means on how you can play the games today on modern hardware or classic hardware.
dtm666 