Nintendo Entertainment System Turns 25

harrymcc writes "On October 18th 1985, Nintendo launched its NES console in the US, reviving a near-dead video game industry and establishing Nintendo as a leader in home consoles. We've celebrated with a roundup of some of the stranger spinoffs that the NES has inspired over the last quarter century, from odd controllers to a lock parents could use to disable the console to do-it-yourself projects like an NES built into a Super Mario cartridge."

Crazy...

[grub]

I remember going to parties, getting pissed and stoned out of my tree, and playing NES with my buddies.

Now we play some of the same old games on the Big Ass Emulation Disc for XBOX with the family. Minus the booze and drugs, of course. That's pretty impressive staying power for those games.

wireless

[snookerhog]

according to the Nintendo store in NYC, the NES was originally designed to have wireless (IR?) controllers. They have the prototype on display.

Sure makes you feel old

[mirix]

I remember getting my NES for christmas when I was a child.

Most of my favourite games are still from that era. New games seem to be missing some sort of soul... mind you, there were a lot of truly horrible games for NES too!

Re:Crazy...

[Krau Ming]

I never knew how old NES was... I was ~4 years old when my Dad came home with an NES and mario/duck hunt one day, and given my birthyear of '81, he must have bought it within the first year of release. I'm pretty sure that qualifies him as an old school tech geek...

Re:Obituary != Birthday Card

[Sowelu]

Me and my roommates still huddle around it to play Mario. When the gray screen and flashing light got too prevalent, I went down to my local retro game store (more NES games than you used to be able to buy in the old days!) and picked up a brand new 72-pin connector, and replaced my old one. It works like it's new again, and I got some new games, too. Wizards and Warriors is hard. All my old battery games still work, and when I bought Wizardry used, it came with the last owner's dead party members in the dungeon still. I found them and hauled them back to the surface, and now they're in my party; it's almost like I was playing Shadows of Yserbius. My PS2 died. The only console I now own is my NES. Hell, it's the only thing I use my TV for since it doesn't get that new digital whatever (and I wouldn't watch it anyway). I beat both quests of Zelda on my NES while waiting on some long downloads and compiles over the course of a long weekend.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:The mark of good games...

[Fallingcow]

There are around 1000 NES games playable in English, counting fan-translation ROM patches. Maybe 1100.

I just finished sorting through mine to weed out the ones that suck or that I'm otherwise not interested in (by which I mean I favorited the good ones and set my emulator manager to only show favorites--the things are so small that there's no sense in deleting any).

Even being pretty aggressive in removing games--cutting the ones that were and are good on the system, but which exist in a better form on another platform (mostly arcade ports like TMNT:Arcade, for example) and damn near all the sports games, many of which were fine then but aren't something I'm going to play now (all of the football games got cut--Sega systems all the way for that--but a few other gems like Ice Hockey are so damn good that I couldn't cut 'em) I still only got it down to a bit over 130. Cut out some that few others like but that I left on because they're personal favorites from my days playing on an actual NES (like High Speed and To the Earth) and you're looking at a bare minimum of 100 English-language games that are best on (or exclusive to) the NES and are still fun to play.

10% after 25 years in the US isn't so bad, IMO. Probably twice that many would have been considered top-notch back in 1993 or so when there weren't a lot of options on newer systems to displace NES games, and things like MAME didn't exist. I was surprised there were that many that were still good, personally; I'd never dug through the whole library like that before, and had assumed nostalgia was making the system better in my mind than it had been. It's no SNES, Playstation, or PS2 in the games-library department, but there are tons of good titles there.