The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the United States on 18 October 1985: about a year after I was born, and 40 years ago today. It’s as if the company sensed that a sucker who’d spend thousands of dollars on plastic toys and electronic games had just entered the world. Actually, it’s as if the company had sensed that an entire generation of fools like me was about to enter the world. Which is true. That was the time to strike. We were about to be drained of every dollar we received for birthdays, Christmases and all those times our dad didn’t want us to tell our mom about something. (Maybe that last one’s just me.)
Despite being slightly older than the NES, a horror I’m only now forced to face as I write this, it felt like that console had always existed in my life. I don’t have many memories from my baby years because I was too busy learning how to use my hands and eyes, but as far back as I can actually remember, “Nintendo” was a word synonymous with video games. Friends would ask if you had Nintendo (no “the”, no “a”) at your house the same way they might ask if you had Coca-Cola in the fridge.
Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Photograph: ArcadeImages/Alamy
My sister and I spent two years begging our parents to get the NES. My mom and dad weren’t concerned about the corrupting influence of video games – that would come later with Doom, Mortal Kombat and of course Stardew Valley – but they were definitely concerned about purchasing an expensive toy that only works if you buy additional expensive toys to put inside of it. Yes, the Nintendo Entertainment System was advertised in the US as an advanced piece of technology despite looking like a rejected design for a VHS cassette player, but we all knew it was meant to be played with. Whereas touching my dad’s home theater resulted in a lot of yelling, this was finally an electronic device that we children were allowed to use.
It’s also worth mentioning that I’m in the first generation that completely missed the Atari home consoles that dominated earlier in the 80s. Even though Atari systems were still around at the time, kids my age talked about them with the same historical distance we talked about the second world war. Even seeing an Atari felt like catching a glimpse of an ancient artefact that none of us understood well enough to enjoy. Watching a neighbour turn on their Atari was almost shocking to me: the basketball game literally used a square for the ball. No. No, no thank you. I need to sit down for a second.
But the NES – oh, the NES had graphics that actually looked like the arcade games. Was it perfect? Of course not! Some of them look downright terrible now! But when you’re five years old, an accurate but slightly washed out version of Pac-Man is still Pac-Man. While my parents never let me play shooting galleries at carnivals (who’s to say why?), Duck Hunt was the next best thing. No! Better! Because we all realised almost instantly that we could just press that stupid plastic gun to the screen and nail it every time. This is a point-blank technique that you can only learn from a 40-year-old video game or by becoming a mafia hitman.
The games on the NES also felt so much more open. Super Mario Bros seems quaint now, but the first time that plumber went down that pipe? My mind melted down into a finer, purer substance. These were games with worlds full of surprises and mysteries. Secrets and Easter eggs had been planted in games before, but now it felt as if they were meant to be found. They were there to help you, not as a kind of maddening inside joke for the developers. We were exploring fictional kingdoms that almost, kind of, sort of looked like living cartoons, jumping around to find hidden, invisible “?” boxes.
‘The games felt so much more open’… a NES. Photograph: Gary Hider/Alamy
Let’s not forget that the NES brought us Mario in the guise we know and love him. Yeah, he’d been a construction worker trying to take down Donkey Kong. Fortunately, he switched careers to plumbing and became a character that would soon adorn every folder, every backpack, every lunchbox, every flask and every bedsheet that I and most of my friends owned. Nintendo was an inside language, long before all references became internet memes seen by billions. We constantly quoted the original Legend of Zelda: “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!”
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Every generation gets its cultural touchstones. But the Nintendo Entertainment System solidified gaming culture, at least in America where the ZX Spectrum and other home computers never took off like they did in Europe. It was a shared language, a toy that let us explore our own imaginations – and certainly a way for my parents to get a break from their children. I still own the NES they bought us. And I still have to blow into the cartridges to get it to work, no matter how much The Man advises against it.
