Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Weird ten years old right now, and
Speaker 1: this is stuff you should know. Can I go ahead
Speaker 1: and admit something? Oh? Yes, I'm nervous though, but yes,
Speaker 1: go ahead. Well, I was a little bit old for
Speaker 1: Nintendo the ANYS system. Uh. And that's not to say
Speaker 1: that kids my age weren't playing it, but like it
Speaker 1: really booned in popularity right when I was sort of
Speaker 1: like fifteen sixteen and starting to sort of drive and
Speaker 1: get out in the world. Uh. And I also did
Speaker 1: not own one, so like I never played Mario Kart
Speaker 1: and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Uh. Eventually
Speaker 1: in college, I remember it had to have been a
Speaker 1: Super Nintendo and like my roommate had one, so that's
Speaker 1: where I first started playing Super Mario World. And I
Speaker 1: played stuff like Tetris and Mario and the game Boy
Speaker 1: that my brother had. But I was I've never owned
Speaker 1: a Nintendo. Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came
Speaker 1: out and I was ten eleven years old, not driving yet,
Speaker 1: and it was and I owned one too, so it
Speaker 1: was definitely in my Wheelhouse. Yeah. I mean later in college,
Speaker 1: my um my good friend Clay got a the first
Speaker 1: PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter
Speaker 1: and Mortal Kombat. And then I got on the PlayStation train.
Speaker 1: But it's just funny reading through this. I was like,
Speaker 1: I played some of these games here and there, but
Speaker 1: I was not Nintendo kid. Yeah, I have to say
Speaker 1: I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super Nintendo
Speaker 1: or Sike of Genesis, but I have friends who had those.
Speaker 1: Um went off into the End sixty four world with
Speaker 1: the Golden Eye played back right. My friend John had
Speaker 1: one of those, and I played a lot of that.
Speaker 1: That was so great. And then I got the first
Speaker 1: PlayStation two, the first PlayStation I mean, not to be confusing. Um.
Speaker 1: And at that point I realized that I was thinking
Speaker 1: about how to play games while I was not playing games,
Speaker 1: like when I was just walking around living life. And
Speaker 1: I made a decision, a very faithful decision that I've
Speaker 1: never regretted, that I was going to give up video
Speaker 1: games because I was too addicted to them. This is
Speaker 1: this was college and I it was I never looked back. Wow,
Speaker 1: so you were into him, huh? I was big time
Speaker 1: into him. Yeah, it was. It was like, this is
Speaker 1: if it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it,
Speaker 1: then yes, I was a little too into him, if
Speaker 1: you ask me. I was never a gamer or anything
Speaker 1: like that. I just really enjoyed playing games. Maybe a
Speaker 1: little too much in your favor, uh, in your defense, Rather,
Speaker 1: I would say that I think everyone who's ever played
Speaker 1: like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world as
Speaker 1: like Tetris boards occasionally if you're into it. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and you know my deal is that, you know I
Speaker 1: said before, as I was heavy Atari kid, big time
Speaker 1: arcade kid, and then played this kind of stuff with
Speaker 1: friends here and there, and then now every year I'll
Speaker 1: usually or every couple of years, I'll get two or
Speaker 1: three PlayStation games, play him obsessively for a couple of months,
Speaker 1: and then it sits for nine months to a year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm with ye. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy
Speaker 1: way to play video games. You know. Yeah, I've still
Speaker 1: enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun. Uh. But yeah,
Speaker 1: my my buddy Doug Dillard growing up, had one rich
Speaker 1: friend and he had a television, and so I had
Speaker 1: kind of some fun today watching the old because I
Speaker 1: remember thinking the in television football was really great, and
Speaker 1: when I looked at it today, I mean it's very
Speaker 1: very basic, but it was pretty good still, like your
Speaker 1: calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back. It
Speaker 1: was a big rush of nostalgia. Yeah. Um, it's somehow
Speaker 1: two bit graphics, I think. Yeah, and this, to be clear,
Speaker 1: what we're gonna talk about today is the the original
Speaker 1: any S. This could have been a two parter if
Speaker 1: we would have gone down the road of the sixty four. Like,
Speaker 1: we're not even talking about the music today at all,
Speaker 1: so there was plenty more material here. But this is
Speaker 1: just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean it's the holidays, so one of the
Speaker 1: greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisced
Speaker 1: nostalgically about holiday's past. And I definitely associate the Anyes
Speaker 1: or other I didn't realize this until I started researching it.
Speaker 1: Some people call it the nest. Did you know that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Some actual like legit gamers call it nest. Other people
Speaker 1: call it any S, and apparently there's some big disagreement.
Speaker 1: I've always called it an e S. But I always
Speaker 1: associate the n E S was a pretty significant portion
Speaker 1: of my life, but like it always is tied to
Speaker 1: Christmas as well. All right, well you're gonna wax nostalgic
Speaker 1: a bit more, even though I did play a little
Speaker 1: bit of Easier and there. Okay, so um. One of
Speaker 1: the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment System has an amazingly
Speaker 1: rate story to it, like it's it's just so fun
Speaker 1: to tell because Nintendo came along at a time when
Speaker 1: the video game market in North America had so totally
Speaker 1: bottomed out that people looked at video games like imagine
Speaker 1: think about how big Autari was. People looked at it.
Speaker 1: It crashed so hard that it was a fad that
Speaker 1: was never coming back, like it had already lived its life.
Speaker 1: And Nintendo walked into this burning um city that was
Speaker 1: the video game industry and said let's give this another shot,
Speaker 1: and they actually managed to succeed. Yeah, I mean Atari
Speaker 1: was dead as disco. We talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: it before, especially in the ET episode, and I did
Speaker 1: a full Attari guest two parter with Strickland. Yeah back
Speaker 1: in the day on tech Stuff. I bet that was
Speaker 1: a fun one. It was a lot of fun. But yeah,
Speaker 1: ET came along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it
Speaker 1: helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: just this one game. It was uh, sort of a
Speaker 1: flash in the pan for a few years, and parents
Speaker 1: were also weighing in and saying, you know, um, I
Speaker 1: don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't
Speaker 1: think it was a part of this satanic panic necessarily.
Speaker 1: It was pre Satanic panic that was more along the
Speaker 1: lines of your riding your brain, right. So, um, I
Speaker 1: was that the thing that triggered it? Or was it
Speaker 1: the terrible terrible games that really triggered the what's called
Speaker 1: the North American video game crash? Of it was the games,
Speaker 1: wasn't it? Well? I mean I think it was a
Speaker 1: two part thing. Like kids got a little less interested
Speaker 1: because the game started to suck quite frankly. Uh, And
Speaker 1: then I think you also had parents beating the drum
Speaker 1: of hey, and and Atari wasn't really coming out with
Speaker 1: you know, the new systems weren't that great. The THEFT
Speaker 1: undred came along, I mean, rather followed up, and it
Speaker 1: was just okay. So they needed something needed to happen,
Speaker 1: and that thing that needed to happen was a Nintendo. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also at the same time, one of the other
Speaker 1: things that had ushered helped usher out video games was, um,
Speaker 1: the personal computers starting to come into the world. And
Speaker 1: with the personal computer you could like do your taxes,
Speaker 1: your kid could like practice math, and they played games
Speaker 1: on floppy disc too, So exactly, yes, I played Wolf.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, I'm so glad you said that, because
Speaker 1: I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disc and I'm like, like,
Speaker 1: I was definitely playing it before that it was Wolf instead.
Speaker 1: Thank you, man, you just made a really great neural
Speaker 1: pathway circuit, like connect completely in my brain. But I
Speaker 1: saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who
Speaker 1: wrote an article on this and Wired back in two
Speaker 1: He said that video games were dead, dead dead, personal
Speaker 1: computers were the future, and anything that just played games
Speaker 1: and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. That was
Speaker 1: kind of like the premise. So just to get across,
Speaker 1: I don't want to like beat this drump too hard,
Speaker 1: but to get across how huge the crash was. The
Speaker 1: video game crash of North America. UM in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: Atari raked in two billion dollars Atari alone in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three they lost five hundred and thirty six million dollars.
Speaker 1: That's a swift fall, yes, but that's how quickly that
Speaker 1: it happened, and so people that basically, if it crashes
Speaker 1: that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of where we were at in n Yeah, but
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, this was we need to keep
Speaker 1: pointing out, this was the North American crash. Yeah, good point.
Speaker 1: It did not happen in Japan. UM in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: because we have arcades are we here that are flourishing. Uh.
Speaker 1: We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. It's still
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to play. Those games are still
Speaker 1: fun to play. And in nineteen eighty this was a
Speaker 1: few years before the United States crash, they said, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what, there's this gaming thing going on, home
Speaker 1: gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get
Speaker 1: together a team over here to just sort of poke around.
Speaker 1: Because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys, and
Speaker 1: we have for a long time, and we're big in
Speaker 1: the arcade world, but we don't have a really a
Speaker 1: console system going, and that led to a beat. I think. Actually,
Speaker 1: there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in
Speaker 1: nineteen eight one, and it was it was sort of
Speaker 1: the biggest thing in Japan at the time, but well,
Speaker 1: I think it was kind of the only thing in
Speaker 1: Japan at the time too, well, which makes it the biggest.
Speaker 1: I guess you could also say it was the smallest.
Speaker 1: But it was not a Nintendo product, right, No, it
Speaker 1: absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was it was Nintendo came
Speaker 1: along as a rival to to this um Cassette Vision
Speaker 1: epoch Cassette Vision. UM. So the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi
Speaker 1: Yamauchi um He apparently was this driving force. He had
Speaker 1: some really great people working for him in Japan and
Speaker 1: in North America, but he seems to have been this
Speaker 1: person who would be like, um, do this enormous undertaking
Speaker 1: and do it in an hour kind of thing. He
Speaker 1: kind of seems to have had a sense that there
Speaker 1: was a really narrow window that was open right now,
Speaker 1: that could close at any time, and that they needed
Speaker 1: to get this stuff done, but they also needed to
Speaker 1: do it really well and really right, basically out of
Speaker 1: the gate. And they actually managed to because in nineteen three,
Speaker 1: after just a couple of years of research and development,
Speaker 1: they released what's called the Family Colm or the Family Computer,
Speaker 1: which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment
Speaker 1: System that they released a couple of years later in
Speaker 1: North America. Yeah. I mean, it's not very often that
Speaker 1: a head of a company or a boss comes along
Speaker 1: and says, I want to do something better and cheaper
Speaker 1: than what is currently out there, and it actually happened. Uh.
Speaker 1: And listeners at home, if you can look this stuff
Speaker 1: up as you go safely, please do because just seeing
Speaker 1: these all these various units we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: is really a lot of fun. Yeah. They teeter on
Speaker 1: the edge of being creepy there, like at that age
Speaker 1: they're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy, but they're getting there
Speaker 1: given another decade or so, you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think they're cool looking at I mean, this is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on
Speaker 1: a shelf. As a collector. These days, I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who have that actually, oh I'm sure,
Speaker 1: um so look at the epoch cassette vision because that's
Speaker 1: kind of fun. But the Famicon was this red and
Speaker 1: white box. Uh. It top loaded, It had two wired controllers,
Speaker 1: and it had very importantly on the control pad. It
Speaker 1: had a had the deepad, It had the directional pad
Speaker 1: on on the left with the up and down, left
Speaker 1: and right arrows, and then an A and B button,
Speaker 1: which no one knew at the time, but that would
Speaker 1: kind of revolutionize the gaming world. As you know, they
Speaker 1: got a little fancy year over the years, but it's
Speaker 1: still sort of that's still the bones of what a
Speaker 1: controller is. Absolutely like it was I can never remember
Speaker 1: the full quote, but somebody said it was like they
Speaker 1: invented the airplane, uh and got it right fully out
Speaker 1: of the gate, like trade tables and everything. Essentially, it
Speaker 1: was like that's what they did with that that controller design. Uh.
Speaker 1: And now you think about it, you look at it,
Speaker 1: like the Nintendo brick and especially the fam Com controllers,
Speaker 1: they looked so old fashioned. But if you can put
Speaker 1: yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan and if
Speaker 1: you looked around at the other stuff available, it was
Speaker 1: it was just from the future. And that was one
Speaker 1: of the things that Nintendo did really really well during
Speaker 1: this period. They figured out what everyone thought, what the
Speaker 1: future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and
Speaker 1: they gave it to everybody. It was a really like
Speaker 1: exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought
Speaker 1: to the present and it was all thanks to Nintendo basically.
Speaker 1: So it retailed for about a hundred and fifty bucks
Speaker 1: back then, which is what close to five hundred today? Yeah,
Speaker 1: four hundreds something like that, all right, So I mean
Speaker 1: kind of on par with you know, the range of
Speaker 1: even modern gaming. Mean, what's the new PlayStation like five?
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, I'm not sure. I think it's
Speaker 1: somewhere in there five or six hundred bucks. Do you
Speaker 1: remember that PlayStation ad that was like for PlayStation seven,
Speaker 1: It was just people running around the real world. It
Speaker 1: was all like VR and augmented reality. I don't remember that.
Speaker 1: It was pretty cool because it came out in like
Speaker 1: the nineties and you're like, whoa, and we're pretty close
Speaker 1: to that now already, you know for sure? Uh. They
Speaker 1: they bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior games
Speaker 1: and the Popeye games, which uh, we're basically about the
Speaker 1: same quality as you would get at the arcade. And
Speaker 1: it was huge. It was a huge deal. I mean,
Speaker 1: especially if you grew up playing Atari. Uh I loved Atari,
Speaker 1: but Atari was Atari, and it had a lot of limits.
Speaker 1: And this was you know, you went to the arcade
Speaker 1: so you could play games better than it's aori. Now
Speaker 1: you could do it at home, right, Yeah, so that
Speaker 1: was an enormous progression. But it wasn't just like the
Speaker 1: graphics the quality of the look of it. It was
Speaker 1: also the game play too, Like it was way more
Speaker 1: fun than most of the games you were going to
Speaker 1: play on an atar. It was just funner to play
Speaker 1: some of these um fam com games. Um and it
Speaker 1: it took off like a rocket. Uh. It knocked the
Speaker 1: epoch um cassette vision right off of the top place
Speaker 1: into the history books basically essentially. Yeah, they sold half
Speaker 1: a million units in two months after its release. I
Speaker 1: think by the end of nine they'd sold two and
Speaker 1: a half million units, so in about a year or so.
Speaker 1: And they were like, Okay, I think we're definitely onto something.
Speaker 1: And they had enough Hubris enough I guess at least
Speaker 1: self assurance that they set their sights on North America again,
Speaker 1: which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video
Speaker 1: games were concerned. It's a great spot for a break.
Speaker 1: I think so too, all right. I think where we
Speaker 1: left off the United States was a version of Core
Speaker 1: mc McCarthy's The Road Yeah and the Walking Dead. And
Speaker 1: Nintendo came along and said, we are going to save
Speaker 1: you and bring you into the future. And it was
Speaker 1: a tough sell at first in the US because, like
Speaker 1: you said, the video game uh craze for lack of
Speaker 1: a better word, had kind of come and gone. This parents,
Speaker 1: we're still not you know. They were like, I'm glad
Speaker 1: that went away, basically, and now we have these PCs
Speaker 1: in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail
Speaker 1: or whatever. And they seem happy enough with that. And uh,
Speaker 1: Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew it
Speaker 1: was going to be a tougher cell that they knew,
Speaker 1: so they knew they had to come up with something awesome.
Speaker 1: And their first crack at that was something called the
Speaker 1: the a v S, the Advanced Video System, and they said, well,
Speaker 1: give it a keyboard so it looks like a computer.
Speaker 1: It'll have a little cassette disk drive. It'll be able
Speaker 1: to do some stuff. It'll but you know, they bundled
Speaker 1: it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick,
Speaker 1: had a keyboard like a musical keyboard, and it had
Speaker 1: this wireless which is well explain on how all this
Speaker 1: works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it
Speaker 1: had a little ray gun, a little zapper. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you really said a mouthful with the word wireless. Man,
Speaker 1: this was and this advanced video system came out with
Speaker 1: wireless controllers like it was. That's really impressive, and it
Speaker 1: was really slick looking to like, really futuristic looking. But
Speaker 1: also yes, they put enough computer um peripherals in it
Speaker 1: that it did it didn't look like a video game system, right,
Speaker 1: So they took it to c e S. The January
Speaker 1: UM version I think even back then was in Vegas UM.
Speaker 1: But it's sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never been to that of you, no, huh. Strickland
Speaker 1: has great stories from it them. Yeah, he goes every year,
Speaker 1: I think I think so. But at CS in January
Speaker 1: they're like, here you go, everybody, here's the future of
Speaker 1: the advanced video system and no one cared at all
Speaker 1: about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play,
Speaker 1: to mess around. No one could have cared less about
Speaker 1: that thing. Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back,
Speaker 1: because the games were good and they knew that. I
Speaker 1: guess they were just a little gun shy, but it
Speaker 1: seems like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there
Speaker 1: wasn't someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is
Speaker 1: going to be a real thing. But you know, it
Speaker 1: didn't work. They didn't get any response. No, And I
Speaker 1: think that really goes to just kind of underlined just
Speaker 1: how bad a reppy tasition video games had, because you know,
Speaker 1: Dave points out that, um, the consoles that have been
Speaker 1: going for like a hundred a hundred and fifty dollars
Speaker 1: the year before, these retailers were stuck with them and
Speaker 1: they were selling them for like forty bucks, which is
Speaker 1: how much the games used to go for. Now the
Speaker 1: games were like four dollars. So the retailers have been
Speaker 1: so badly burned. I think they all got caught with
Speaker 1: these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they were
Speaker 1: like never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against,
Speaker 1: which is as Dave Dave. Again, Dave helped us with this.
Speaker 1: As he points out, you were either a very foolish
Speaker 1: company to try this or a very smart one because
Speaker 1: again it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant
Speaker 1: that there was no competition in this enormous market right now. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: Uh So they knew they had to have almost like
Speaker 1: a trick to get their foot in the door, and
Speaker 1: they came up with one, and um day found this.
Speaker 1: Uh is Gaming Historian? Is it a I know it
Speaker 1: had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a
Speaker 1: full web site? I don't know. All I know is
Speaker 1: that the the YouTube channel where they make really high
Speaker 1: quality YouTube videos that are really interesting. It's good stuff.
Speaker 1: But someone at Gaming Historian came up with this very
Speaker 1: apt metaphor about a trojan horse, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: what they were looking for, was a way to get
Speaker 1: these things in the home by almost tricking parents into
Speaker 1: thinking it wasn't a gaming system and it was more
Speaker 1: just sort of like a toy because kids still gotten
Speaker 1: bought or you know, received toys and stuff. It's not
Speaker 1: like they shut down the toy industry. It was just
Speaker 1: home video games. So what they invented was the ROB
Speaker 1: the r O B the Robotic Operating Buddy, which is
Speaker 1: a very sweet name. You should totally go look at
Speaker 1: ROB online and especially YouTube videos of ROB in action
Speaker 1: and just be prepared for the speed of ROB. Right.
Speaker 1: But the thing is ROB was a robot. He moved
Speaker 1: and he functioned, he interacted with the games that they
Speaker 1: came up very slowly, right, very slowly. But this was
Speaker 1: a time where like, robots were kind of hard to
Speaker 1: come by. If they were not like that, it was
Speaker 1: not an easy thing to get your hands on. And
Speaker 1: now all of a sudden there's this company saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: we have this whole thing and it has a robot too,
Speaker 1: and it was one of the greatest strokes of of
Speaker 1: marketing genius that any company has ever come up with.
Speaker 1: As we'll see, Yeah, I mean what they ended up
Speaker 1: with was a robot that didn't I mean, it functioned
Speaker 1: as it should, but like I said, it's super super slow.
Speaker 1: They only ended up having a couple of games where
Speaker 1: you could use the robot, and it was just sort
Speaker 1: of a sneaky way to get these uh consoles in
Speaker 1: the door. And because it was all part of the
Speaker 1: same system and and that's how it worked. They managed
Speaker 1: to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door.
Speaker 1: And uh thanks to a guy named uh Lance Bar Uh.
Speaker 1: He helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed
Speaker 1: the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about in a sec but he designed it as
Speaker 1: a front loading system, which made sort of people think
Speaker 1: of VCRs. It was also a very um they called
Speaker 1: zero four solution, so there wasn't a lot of wear
Speaker 1: on the on the cartridges and it, you know, just
Speaker 1: worked really well. Plus it it looked like you said,
Speaker 1: it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at
Speaker 1: the time, and um, I don't think we said chuck.
Speaker 1: So that January c e S was um just a
Speaker 1: complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time
Speaker 1: coming up with the advanced video system and it got
Speaker 1: it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company,
Speaker 1: Hiroshi Yamauchi, told a couple of people like, hey, redesigned
Speaker 1: this in an hour, and they did. And Lance bar
Speaker 1: was the guy who did it, and he knocked it
Speaker 1: out of the park because that any yes, is a debut.
Speaker 1: Later on in in North America was essentially what he
Speaker 1: came up with in that one hour that he was
Speaker 1: given to do it. UM, so they had they did
Speaker 1: all this and had it done in time for the
Speaker 1: July c e s like six months after that huge,
Speaker 1: colossal failure, they went back to the drawing board and
Speaker 1: came back in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System
Speaker 1: fully fleshed out, including Robot and Zapper Gun, well notably Robot,
Speaker 1: because that's what it all. Anyone cared about it first. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, like et CE S, the the NES system
Speaker 1: was sort of to the side, and everyone was just
Speaker 1: trying to get their hands on Rob and play gyro Mite,
Speaker 1: which I'm telling you, you gotta just spend five minutes
Speaker 1: watching Rob play this game because it shows the split
Speaker 1: screen of the the TV screen of what's happening on
Speaker 1: the game, which really isn't much. And then Rob just
Speaker 1: very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't the UM the game historian video that
Speaker 1: that really kind of went into detail about how Rob
Speaker 1: played and setting up his accessories and everything. I watched
Speaker 1: a bunch of them. Yeah, I'm okay, I think it
Speaker 1: was that one. If out it was another one I
Speaker 1: saw where they really kind of showed, like the idea
Speaker 1: of Rob was pretty ingenious. Like he he was player two,
Speaker 1: but you were actually playing together, like you in gyro Might.
Speaker 1: You were kind of running through this maze and there
Speaker 1: were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had
Speaker 1: to get robbed to do it for you. And again
Speaker 1: he was so slowly. Yeah, get get an eye exam
Speaker 1: and your glasses made in an hour or two, um,
Speaker 1: And then yeah, he would have completed that and you
Speaker 1: could advance to the next column or whatever. It was
Speaker 1: a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it's
Speaker 1: just the execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed
Speaker 1: the buttons on the player to controllers. So if you
Speaker 1: got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could
Speaker 1: just push the buttons on the player to controller yourself
Speaker 1: and play gyro Mte that way. But the point was
Speaker 1: they don't seem in retrospect to have really thought Rob
Speaker 1: was going to take off. Um. In fact, the games
Speaker 1: that that they he came with in North America were
Speaker 1: the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the
Speaker 1: North American version of these. They just put like kind
Speaker 1: of this like um like fix on it that made
Speaker 1: it compatible with the North American system. But when you
Speaker 1: loaded up gyro Mite, the the um the intro screen
Speaker 1: showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning
Speaker 1: of it. I feel like I saw other games that
Speaker 1: had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: it's a memory um. It may have just been like
Speaker 1: boot up screens or something. So they decide, uh, it
Speaker 1: was such a you know, I grabber at cs that
Speaker 1: they decided, all right, let's go to New York City
Speaker 1: and let's test it out there in one city, roll
Speaker 1: it out, see what happens. The New York retailer said, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: I got look at this. I got a warehouse full
Speaker 1: of Atari's over here that I can't even give away,
Speaker 1: like I don't know about a new gaming system. And
Speaker 1: they said, all right, here's what we'll do. We will
Speaker 1: ship them to your store from Japan for free. We will.
Speaker 1: You can just sell what you sell and pay us
Speaker 1: for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us.
Speaker 1: We'll take them back. We'll send over a team in
Speaker 1: your store to set up these big marketing interactive marketing displays.
Speaker 1: And we'll we'll take on all of the risk, and
Speaker 1: all you guys gotta do is try and sell some
Speaker 1: of these. And they went, yeah, all right, that was
Speaker 1: a great Joe Pesci by the way, Joe bet So. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They did this in five hundred stores. And normally, when
Speaker 1: you when you did the kind of a soft test
Speaker 1: release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas.
Speaker 1: There's somewhere that no one cares about, right, But they
Speaker 1: went full bore and hit New York City. And I
Speaker 1: think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times
Speaker 1: that like it was based on that that Frank Sinatra song,
Speaker 1: the idea that you if you made it in New York,
Speaker 1: you can make it anywhere, and they did make it
Speaker 1: in New York. Um. Oh, I can't remember. I want
Speaker 1: to rock, okay, um, I want to run. I want
Speaker 1: to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP three
Speaker 1: is so good it still holds up if I want
Speaker 1: to rock. Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that
Speaker 1: MP three or MP four, I don't know what. I
Speaker 1: bought it at toys R. Very cool. So um. They
Speaker 1: they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They
Speaker 1: sold about half the units that they had produced for
Speaker 1: this test market in New York. Um, I think like fifty.
Speaker 1: But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give
Speaker 1: this a try. Let's let's roll out to the rest
Speaker 1: of the country. Another bold move because normally after your
Speaker 1: first test um, uh, like run your first test market,
Speaker 1: you do like four or five more. And he said, now,
Speaker 1: let's skip that, Let's just go right to the rest
Speaker 1: of the country. And he did. And that was the
Speaker 1: Christmas season too, So I get the feeling that they were, Um,
Speaker 1: they weren't super disappoin in it, but they weren't super
Speaker 1: pumped either. It felt like it was right in the area.
Speaker 1: And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right
Speaker 1: in that zone where it was just enough to keep
Speaker 1: it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors
Speaker 1: pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it
Speaker 1: sold thirty units, you know. Yeah, for sure, I saw
Speaker 1: somebody say, like the Nintendo. Had Nintendo not been successful,
Speaker 1: like the games as we know them today would definitely
Speaker 1: not exist. We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch
Speaker 1: of dopes. Yeah, and going outside. Who needs it? So
Speaker 1: that was holiday season. Um, night by six, they clear
Speaker 1: they hit on something else. So like one of the
Speaker 1: things that they did was take a poll of that
Speaker 1: people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo
Speaker 1: and I think like the vast majority of them said
Speaker 1: that UM rob the Robot was the reason they had
Speaker 1: bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how
Speaker 1: that's how well that mark getting employee worked. So UM
Speaker 1: Robin kind of served as purpose. Though everyone knew he
Speaker 1: was slow, they weren't releasing more games for them, so
Speaker 1: they came up with UM. Originally, the way you bought
Speaker 1: Nintendo it was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers,
Speaker 1: the zapper gun, Robbed the Robot, and all of Rob
Speaker 1: the Robots accessories, and then two games, one of which
Speaker 1: was Gyro Might that game you play with rob Right? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of stuff, and of course it was
Speaker 1: pretty expensive at the time, so for the national rollout
Speaker 1: they kept the deluxe set, but they also came up
Speaker 1: with something called the NES Control Deck, which was just
Speaker 1: the console to UM controllers and very very importantly Super
Speaker 1: Mario Brothers. And that was bucks and they sold those
Speaker 1: things as fast as they could make them for the
Speaker 1: holidays that year. Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance
Speaker 1: of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came
Speaker 1: along and uh with actually with a famicon, and it
Speaker 1: was just it was the most advanced looking game and
Speaker 1: playing game that any kid had ever seen. Uh. It was,
Speaker 1: as day points out. It was the first game that
Speaker 1: you could play and and have fun playing for forever,
Speaker 1: Like you could go on and on finding the hidden worlds,
Speaker 1: finding the easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections
Speaker 1: that you and other levels that you never even knew existed,
Speaker 1: banging away hidden bricks, like there were so many discoveries
Speaker 1: and places to go. And Super Mario Brothers they created, Um,
Speaker 1: it's sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey,
Speaker 1: how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How
Speaker 1: but put your cigarette down? How would you like to
Speaker 1: play a video game the same one for the next
Speaker 1: seven hours? Hot Dog? And that really hot Dog. It
Speaker 1: was a whole new deal though, because even when I played,
Speaker 1: it'sary like we played for hours at a time, but
Speaker 1: I don't know, you played a game for five minutes
Speaker 1: and you pop in another and that's why you had
Speaker 1: like forty games in your in your controller box because
Speaker 1: none of them you could play for hours and hours
Speaker 1: and hours in a row and not eventually be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is getting a little bit old, even as a kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything
Speaker 1: I've Almost every single source that I've seen on the
Speaker 1: Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things
Speaker 1: uses the word light years ahead of everything else, because
Speaker 1: it really was. Um. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto.
Speaker 1: He designed the game very famously. He's he obviously became
Speaker 1: a legend overnight because of it. They were also smart
Speaker 1: enough to do some really savvy marketing moves which uh
Speaker 1: kind of rolled out in a few different ways. They well,
Speaker 1: they had a lot of advertising money that was sort
Speaker 1: of a given. They about twenty million bucks uh to
Speaker 1: spend off the bat, which is a ton of money
Speaker 1: for advertising now and then. But they created a call center. Uh.
Speaker 1: They trained these UH players and these gamers basically to
Speaker 1: master these games and sit on the phone and you
Speaker 1: could call a number if you got stuck and talk
Speaker 1: to a human being that could like walk you through
Speaker 1: a level that you couldn't get through. Uh. They had
Speaker 1: Nintendo power magazine, which is a very big deal. And
Speaker 1: they created the first you know, gaming championships where uh
Speaker 1: and these are still just huge, you know where kids
Speaker 1: and adults alike. You know, now adults from all over
Speaker 1: the world come together to battle each other out. And
Speaker 1: the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the
Speaker 1: Grand Championships at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Yeah. I hadn't thought
Speaker 1: about that, but yeah, you can make the case that
Speaker 1: they created the sports phenomena. They lead the groundwork for
Speaker 1: it to come at least, right I would think, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. So um. There was a poll of
Speaker 1: Nintendo years after the national rollout um that found that
Speaker 1: of teams polled said that they recommended the n e
Speaker 1: s to their friends, and I think three percent of
Speaker 1: adults and of little kids. That is eye popping, and
Speaker 1: that means that they were successful. They used rob to
Speaker 1: get their feet in the door, and they knew that
Speaker 1: if they just got their console in the hands of Americans,
Speaker 1: they would change their minds forever about video games. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happened. And they avoided the Atari mistake,
Speaker 1: which was uh, they did their best to try and
Speaker 1: keep bad games from being able to play it on
Speaker 1: their system, and that's what happened with the game's got
Speaker 1: so bad. I mean they're hundreds and hundreds. We talked
Speaker 1: about this in the ET game episode, like ET gets
Speaker 1: unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release,
Speaker 1: But there were far worse games released on the ATR
Speaker 1: A system, hundreds and hundreds of really really bad games
Speaker 1: that just no one even remembers. And Tendo saw this
Speaker 1: play out in America and knew that they couldn't let
Speaker 1: that happen to them, so they designed a proprietary system
Speaker 1: where you could only play officially licensed any S games.
Speaker 1: He created a lock chip on their circuit board and
Speaker 1: only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the
Speaker 1: lot key or the key chip uh to unlock it.
Speaker 1: And that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing.
Speaker 1: They said even to third parties, they said, you can
Speaker 1: only make two of these games a year, like, don't
Speaker 1: come at us with two hundred games, Like make something
Speaker 1: really really good that will approve of and we will
Speaker 1: put the Nintendo sealo of quality on the front of
Speaker 1: the cover. Yeah. And then like they were really nitpicky too,
Speaker 1: Like as you were developing the game, you needed to
Speaker 1: send Nintendo, like, um, explanations of the game play, the characters,
Speaker 1: the design, all that stuff, and Nintendo would make notes
Speaker 1: and send it back and make you change stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And that that's what you could do if you had
Speaker 1: eight of the market as far as video games were,
Speaker 1: because people had to come to you. And then it
Speaker 1: was really smart for them to just kind of protect
Speaker 1: their intellectual property like that because it was so good.
Speaker 1: But um, they were basically so um heavy handed about
Speaker 1: it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at
Speaker 1: one point for their licensing practices. Yeah. I mean, anytime
Speaker 1: you control that much of a market, the FTC is
Speaker 1: gonna sniff around. Uh. And there were other companies out
Speaker 1: there trying to bootleg games. Uh. Still there was one
Speaker 1: called tin Gin that had a few license games, but
Speaker 1: they wanted more money, and so they went to the
Speaker 1: patent office and said, hey, can we take a look
Speaker 1: at that patent for these lock and key chips? And
Speaker 1: they said, sure, here it is and so they, uh,
Speaker 1: I guess illegally because they ended up getting sued and
Speaker 1: Nintendo one. So I mean, I don't know how all
Speaker 1: that patent law works. I wasn't I'm surprised that you
Speaker 1: could just go get a patent and rip it off.
Speaker 1: Well you you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem
Speaker 1: to have just ripped it off. But I think it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that it was like gray illegal,
Speaker 1: gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So they just tank and
Speaker 1: rolled the dice and they lost essentially, I think. So
Speaker 1: I've see I've actually heard it both ways. I just
Speaker 1: wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way.
Speaker 1: So there's this YouTuber named Ninten Drew and he has
Speaker 1: a video called ten Weird ny S Facts, and he
Speaker 1: talks about that that key chip thing where people were
Speaker 1: trying to get around it, and he said other companies
Speaker 1: UM didn't even bother to come up with a chip.
Speaker 1: They just used a low voltage spike to scramble the
Speaker 1: brains of the lock chip UM so that it wouldn't
Speaker 1: work anymore. And now the game could be played. And
Speaker 1: as an example he used to UM he used a
Speaker 1: game from the developer Tree and it was a Bible Adventures.
Speaker 1: But Bible no, I've never even heard of it. But
Speaker 1: if you put Bible Adventures in your ny S. It
Speaker 1: would scramble its brain so that you could play Bible Adventures.
Speaker 1: I would think some of these might endanger the game
Speaker 1: console itself. You'd think, so, yeah, it's pretty pretty reckless.
Speaker 1: Jesus killed my Nintendo, right. Uh so rob did not
Speaker 1: work out. Poor rob um did its job and got
Speaker 1: its foot in the little robotic foot in the door.
Speaker 1: But kids, uh, we're like, this is not so fun
Speaker 1: playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where
Speaker 1: it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. Um,
Speaker 1: and so rob you know, Dave kind of funnily points
Speaker 1: out Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet
Speaker 1: of every kid that probably owned one, and it just
Speaker 1: became about that any S system. But that's not to
Speaker 1: say all those peripheries were not a success, because that
Speaker 1: zapper uh and the game Duck Hunt were both big
Speaker 1: deals that kids love to play. Yeah, and um, I
Speaker 1: did not realize this, but the laser gun, the what
Speaker 1: was it called the zapper? It was not It didn't
Speaker 1: shoot anything at your TV because if you stop and
Speaker 1: think about, your TV is not set up to accept
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, or your TV screen certainly isn't.
Speaker 1: So what happened instead is it was a light detector.
Speaker 1: So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your
Speaker 1: screen and just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that,
Speaker 1: but still faster than you could register it. The screen
Speaker 1: went black and whatever ducks are on the screen turned
Speaker 1: into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing
Speaker 1: at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper
Speaker 1: would register that white flash of light that was a
Speaker 1: duck that square, and it would register it as a hit.
Speaker 1: That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious. Very ingenious. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they
Speaker 1: don't know how that stuff works exactly. There is no
Speaker 1: kid who picked up the zapper and did and go
Speaker 1: all right, I guess here a minute forty, we'll take
Speaker 1: our second break, and we'll come back and talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about what happened next. Okay, chuck so um.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of other peripherals that came along
Speaker 1: that were as mad as rob was, maybe even a
Speaker 1: little mayor. One was the power pad, the other was
Speaker 1: the power glove. And again these were things that were
Speaker 1: really cool and helped advance any system and made a
Speaker 1: bunch of money for everybody, but when you played with them,
Speaker 1: they weren't very good. Yeah. The power pad is uh,
Speaker 1: it was a pad. It was that it had another
Speaker 1: use from another company. It was called a fun fitness
Speaker 1: pad from Bandai, and Nintendo bought them out and basically
Speaker 1: repackaged it and said, hey, now you can do like
Speaker 1: track and field games by running on this dumb thing.
Speaker 1: And that technology is still very popular, like if you
Speaker 1: go to arcades, those dance games, uh, and they're still
Speaker 1: like I played one not too long ago with my
Speaker 1: daughter David Busters where you do like track and field
Speaker 1: stuff is still around. But at home a kid isn't
Speaker 1: gonna do like they're inside kids because they don't want
Speaker 1: to be outside running around. They want to be on
Speaker 1: the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well.
Speaker 1: It ended up in the closet with Rob I almost
Speaker 1: called him rod. Uh. And then that glove though, the
Speaker 1: power glove, it was really cool and it looks cool today,
Speaker 1: like if imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes
Speaker 1: because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which
Speaker 1: is a great boxing game, Uh, power Glove was kind
Speaker 1: of the only game where you really maximized what you
Speaker 1: could get out of the glove, right. I also saw
Speaker 1: there's a scene in the um Fred Savage movie The
Speaker 1: Wizard where this kid pulls out a power glove and
Speaker 1: plays rad Racer. So he's using it like he's he's steering.
Speaker 1: But it just they didn't really develop any games specifically
Speaker 1: for the power Glove, so it was a little bit
Speaker 1: because um they Dave likens it to we Eventually Nintendo
Speaker 1: came out with the Wee system, which used essentially the
Speaker 1: same kind of technology, but yeah, it was ahead of
Speaker 1: its time, so it ended up in the closet with
Speaker 1: the power pad and rob closets exactly. But as as
Speaker 1: kind of clunky as those were, that that controller we
Speaker 1: talked about that was revolutionary. Yeah. There's a writer, a
Speaker 1: game pro named Ti k Kim who came up with
Speaker 1: this cool analogy that they found, which is that what
Speaker 1: Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what uh
Speaker 1: Kim referenced as the language of console gaming, and that
Speaker 1: really of locks it down as to what they did.
Speaker 1: Like you know, we were talking earlier about that first
Speaker 1: nes brick. You know, it was all kind of there,
Speaker 1: like they grew and morphed, but that directional pad was revolutionary. Uh,
Speaker 1: those buttons were revolutionary, and they landed on the idea
Speaker 1: of a kid holding something in their two hands and
Speaker 1: mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Uh thumbs and
Speaker 1: pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: with the Atari joystick you would use your thumb for
Speaker 1: the red button, but you used your whole hand to
Speaker 1: to move the joystick. This was just totally different, um.
Speaker 1: And it was really simple, It was really sleek. Everything
Speaker 1: was laid out just right, and it was it was
Speaker 1: just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like
Speaker 1: you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of
Speaker 1: the console controllers to come even today. Still it's based
Speaker 1: on those Yeah, they had, Um, it didn't start there.
Speaker 1: They had initially on this handheld game called the Game
Speaker 1: and Watch, which if you look this it looks like
Speaker 1: it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's called a Game and Watch because it had
Speaker 1: a clock on it, so it told told the time
Speaker 1: and it was a game, So they call it the
Speaker 1: Game and Watch. But that's where the D pad came
Speaker 1: from and uh, Donkey Kong is a game that really
Speaker 1: took great advantage of of the D pad, and um
Speaker 1: it was it just seemed like the natural. And now
Speaker 1: they make the little mini joysticks which are which are great,
Speaker 1: but uh, some I think the uh I think the
Speaker 1: Xbox they have joysticks or do they still use that dpad?
Speaker 1: I I don't know remember addicted? So I gave it up.
Speaker 1: So you never played in Xbox? No, no, no, I've
Speaker 1: seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I played a lot of my same friend John Pendell,
Speaker 1: who you know John backstage in New York. John he
Speaker 1: had the in sixty four. He was my Golden Eye partner.
Speaker 1: But he also got an Xbox and we were both
Speaker 1: addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that was a good game. And that was
Speaker 1: a game that carried with you in real life because
Speaker 1: if you played enough Tony Hawk, you would just someone
Speaker 1: who had never skateboarded. You would be walking around in
Speaker 1: the world and going like I could totally grind that
Speaker 1: gutter on top of that that roof, right, It's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: So the another thing that those controllers did was give
Speaker 1: us the cheek code. I guess you could conceivably do
Speaker 1: on like an entire joystick. But they really came along
Speaker 1: thanks to the ny Yes, because there was a developer
Speaker 1: who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into
Speaker 1: a Nintendo game, and it was really hard, so he
Speaker 1: created this cheak code to make it easier to kind
Speaker 1: of game test for him so he wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: start over every time, and is extraordinarily famous. Up up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
Speaker 1: be a start. And that's called the Konami code because
Speaker 1: the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius,
Speaker 1: but it became much more famous with the game Contra.
Speaker 1: I never, I guess you played a lot of Contra,
Speaker 1: probably high for sure. Now what was Contra? I don't
Speaker 1: even know. It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter
Speaker 1: game where um I saw it described well as like
Speaker 1: a cross between Rambo and Aliens. Um. So, if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world
Speaker 1: and you and your buddy are kind of like buff
Speaker 1: and where like headbands, and you have like spiky blonde hair.
Speaker 1: Um but and you just shoot all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: and it's really neat because you get different kinds of
Speaker 1: weapons at shooting different ways. And now you're like, this
Speaker 1: is clunky and old. But at the time it was,
Speaker 1: there was just again nothing like it on the market,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of the games that we understand today
Speaker 1: originated on the n S. Yeah, for sure, I think
Speaker 1: I've seen contract that sounds familiar. But if you did
Speaker 1: the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, be
Speaker 1: a start with contra. If you did it at the
Speaker 1: intro screen, um, right before the game started, you would
Speaker 1: get thirty extra lives which you could use to great effect.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great. Uh, they ended up it's a staggering number,
Speaker 1: still considering that they were kept a sort of a
Speaker 1: heavy hand on the amount of games being produced, but
Speaker 1: they ended up with close to seven hundred games for
Speaker 1: the original NES and I think in is when they
Speaker 1: launched the sixteen bit, No no, no, Super Nintendo was
Speaker 1: one and that was the one that I guess my
Speaker 1: roommate had where ended up playing a lot of Super Mario,
Speaker 1: and then Super Mario two and three of course came along. Uh.
Speaker 1: We already mentioned punch Out. That was I remember playing
Speaker 1: punch Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was
Speaker 1: the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But
Speaker 1: there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up
Speaker 1: and I think I remember this, but the arcade punch
Speaker 1: Out had a boxer. The Russian boxers name was Vodka
Speaker 1: drunken Ski, so great, and he got changed to Soda
Speaker 1: Popinski very famously. Anyone who played punch Out is very
Speaker 1: familiar Soda Popinski. And one of the one of the
Speaker 1: big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger
Speaker 1: who wore a turban with a gem on it. His
Speaker 1: gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch.
Speaker 1: When I realized that you could protect it. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: just changed my life. That's funny. It changed your life
Speaker 1: in it did. Hey, you might not never become like
Speaker 1: a podcaster. You never know. It's possible that whole glass
Speaker 1: stores or the sliding doors glass stories. Yeah, the glass ceiling, Yeah,
Speaker 1: different thing. So um, what else, Chuck, There's some other
Speaker 1: ones too that we have to shout out. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: shout out Tetris because that's a game I played alone
Speaker 1: in the game Boy. Uh talk about addictive. Tetris was
Speaker 1: super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my
Speaker 1: car packing skills today when we go on road trips
Speaker 1: and stuff, Emily always still jokes like, Chuck is gonna
Speaker 1: Tetris this thing. Uh, it was great. Tetris is a
Speaker 1: very simple game. Uh. If you've never played it, it's
Speaker 1: uh oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing,
Speaker 1: but it's um. It's a game where you stacked to
Speaker 1: different shaped blocks, and when you got solid lines, a
Speaker 1: line would disappear, and the whole goal of this game
Speaker 1: is to to keep those lines low. And as it
Speaker 1: built higher and higher and higher, there was less room
Speaker 1: for those blocks to drop, and it would go seemingly
Speaker 1: go faster and faster. It was like it could very
Speaker 1: stress panic. Yeah, especially as they just kept building up
Speaker 1: and they're dropping in It's like it drops right onto
Speaker 1: another block. You're up there high. It's just like you know,
Speaker 1: it's just it is very stressful, it is, but it
Speaker 1: was fun well, and it's also I think one of
Speaker 1: the more satisfying games ever invented, uh in that when
Speaker 1: you would things would get a little hairy, and if
Speaker 1: you got like two in a row of the exact
Speaker 1: ones that you needed and made I think it was
Speaker 1: a tetris when you got like was it like five
Speaker 1: or was it four? I don't remember four because the
Speaker 1: tallest block was four high? Was it four high? But
Speaker 1: it would make all four disappear at once, And if
Speaker 1: you got a couple of those and you went from
Speaker 1: like seventy high to down to in an instant, there's
Speaker 1: no feeling like that. No, Toutris was pretty great. I
Speaker 1: loved it too. It was awesome. I want to shout
Speaker 1: out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which
Speaker 1: I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster
Speaker 1: and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to
Speaker 1: beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid.
Speaker 1: But it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't like
Speaker 1: some path you I had to stick to, like you
Speaker 1: were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff
Speaker 1: before you could advance to the next level. That was
Speaker 1: pretty new actually, So Metroid was groundbreaking two. And then
Speaker 1: there are other ones that were just fun to play,
Speaker 1: like ice hockey. Did you play that one? M I
Speaker 1: was always into sports games, so I was I played
Speaker 1: hockey and golf, about tennis, tennis, I played all that.
Speaker 1: It was fun. Did you play the MLB Baseball game.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I played that one. That one
Speaker 1: was very addictive. R C Pro Am Ducktails was actually
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. And then there was an army
Speaker 1: one called jack Hole. And then if you like skateboarding
Speaker 1: at the time, which I did, there was Skate or Die,
Speaker 1: which was pretty good. But my money was on Town
Speaker 1: and Country Designs Skate and Surf I think it was called,
Speaker 1: and you could skateboard and then you would go surf
Speaker 1: and it was a lot of fun to play too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was so h into the sports games and I
Speaker 1: still play the PlayStation Uh uh, what is it? P
Speaker 1: G A two K for their golf game is still
Speaker 1: a lot of fun, but I played. I was addicted
Speaker 1: to the Atari Beach volleyball game, wherein it was two
Speaker 1: players aside and both players were connected to one another.
Speaker 1: They could not move independently, so when you're moving your
Speaker 1: joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's hilarious. That sounds. It reminds me of another game
Speaker 1: that Dave doug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which
Speaker 1: was just about as bad as it got for a
Speaker 1: tari where a dog chases the wagon from the Chuck
Speaker 1: Wagon commercials branded poop out? Yeah, who who would have thought?
Speaker 1: And then it would poop out like food and the
Speaker 1: dog would eat the food. That was like the point
Speaker 1: of the game. Uh. You should speak a little bit
Speaker 1: about Zelda though, the legend of Zelda. That's a game
Speaker 1: again that by the time that came out, it felt
Speaker 1: like a kid's thing. Uh, and again we couldn't afford
Speaker 1: an ne s. So what was Zelda all about? So?
Speaker 1: I never liked Zelda. It did something to my mind
Speaker 1: or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: It's almost like, have you ever um, what's your grocery store?
Speaker 1: Kroker republics? I can't remember both, but generally publics. Okay.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of people out there who are
Speaker 1: only publics and only Kroger. And I think my theory
Speaker 1: is that they're laid out in a certain way that
Speaker 1: they appeal the one type of person, and then the
Speaker 1: other one appeals to a different type of person. So
Speaker 1: if you are a public's person and you go into
Speaker 1: a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place, and
Speaker 1: reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda
Speaker 1: maybe feels. So I never got into it, but I
Speaker 1: know some people, like I've essentially dedicated their lives to
Speaker 1: that game, like beyond playing, it's like probably dress up
Speaker 1: as link the main character, have like all sorts of
Speaker 1: toys and stuff like that. Like, Legend of Zelda was
Speaker 1: really big too. Yeah, and it was certainly not the
Speaker 1: first open world game, but uh, and I think there's
Speaker 1: not a solid agreement on what that was. Um, there
Speaker 1: are some arguments for the Great Atari Game Adventure that
Speaker 1: was the first open world game I played. Your Avatar
Speaker 1: was a square, but it was so much fun because
Speaker 1: you could go anywhere for the first time. It was
Speaker 1: really different new But I think Zelda is kind of
Speaker 1: regarded as or the Legend of Zelda as one of
Speaker 1: the first open world like really good open world games.
Speaker 1: I guess it advanced one and it was by the
Speaker 1: same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.
Speaker 1: What else you got, Chuck, I mean, not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of else. I guess we should we should definitely
Speaker 1: talk about blowing in those cartridges, because I even made
Speaker 1: that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working,
Speaker 1: and uh, Dave, who's sitting in for Jerry, said, unplugged
Speaker 1: the cable and just plug it back in. I said,
Speaker 1: should I blow in it? All right? And you don't
Speaker 1: want to actually, so did you know about that? Right?
Speaker 1: I blew in a lot of cartridges at Aory cartridges too,
Speaker 1: So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, um,
Speaker 1: you would take it out of the VCR like um
Speaker 1: entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew
Speaker 1: on it, and you put it back in and it
Speaker 1: would work. The thing is, it wasn't doing anything when
Speaker 1: you blew on it. You weren't helping it. It just
Speaker 1: hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when
Speaker 1: you took it out and put it back in, the
Speaker 1: chances were that you were making the correct connection then
Speaker 1: and then the game would work. But you, being a
Speaker 1: dumb ten year old, thought, well, I blew on it,
Speaker 1: so that fixed it. But there the Nintendo long said
Speaker 1: do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them,
Speaker 1: and no one listened until there was this guy who
Speaker 1: came along and actually ran a study, the first, the
Speaker 1: world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge
Speaker 1: does and it didn't work. This is his name was
Speaker 1: Frankie Bit Truelo, And you know it was a very
Speaker 1: rudimentary study, but I mean, how else you gonna do it.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have a control game you don't blow into,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna have game you blow into. And after
Speaker 1: how long did he do this? Thirty days? Every day.
Speaker 1: The guys spent a month blowing on this game. Took
Speaker 1: this the blown cartridge out at the end and showed
Speaker 1: that it was. It was corroded and kind of gross,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's it's funny, like you don't know what kid.
Speaker 1: You always wonder who invented this because every kid did it,
Speaker 1: because every kid saw another kid do it who just
Speaker 1: got it from some other kid, but was just sort
Speaker 1: of known. Like you would take it out and it
Speaker 1: was always the same thing. You would do it really
Speaker 1: quick and just go and like run the cartridge back
Speaker 1: and forth in front of your mouth and then stick
Speaker 1: it back in. Yeah, I mean that sounds just triggered
Speaker 1: a tidal wave of nostalgiam and chuck. Remember that, So
Speaker 1: don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges. People who still playing
Speaker 1: Nintendo Original and yes, you should follow this up again
Speaker 1: one day to to do one on the music of Nintendo. No, well,
Speaker 1: just sort of everything we didn't cover because the in
Speaker 1: sixty four was such a big deal. And uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, this could be a two parter separated by
Speaker 1: time and space. Okay, I like that idea, Chuck, let's
Speaker 1: definitely do that. Um. And in the meantime, since Chuck
Speaker 1: and I just hashed out a second part to this episode,
Speaker 1: of course, that means we've just unlocked listener mail. Maybe
Speaker 1: next Christmas it can be, are you know, because this
Speaker 1: is kind of every year we try to do a toy,
Speaker 1: a famous toy. Yeah. No, I have the same thought.
Speaker 1: I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh all right,
Speaker 1: consider them spilled. Yeah, they're spilled all over all right,
Speaker 1: speaking of spilling all over, Uh, this is a correction
Speaker 1: that on something you said that I I don't know
Speaker 1: how I didn't catch this, but it's the we'll call
Speaker 1: it the Great Nutter butter controversy of Hey guys. At
Speaker 1: the end of the Vaudeville episode, Josh said, it's weird
Speaker 1: how there were two types of nutter butters and they're
Speaker 1: totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shape
Speaker 1: cookie And I'm I don't remember what I said. It
Speaker 1: must have just been like, huh, I think that's exactly
Speaker 1: what you said. And you mentioned both of the same logo,
Speaker 1: same packaging, which is not true, just two different types
Speaker 1: of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, because we had a bunch of people
Speaker 1: right in. The peanut shape cookies are the Nutter butters, Josh,
Speaker 1: but the other wafer retreats are nutty Buddy bars. Did
Speaker 1: you look as this what you meant? No, I think
Speaker 1: this person is from an altar that barn, same bear's dimension,
Speaker 1: because in in our dimension that there, it's the same thing,
Speaker 1: same package, same name, say everything, just different cookies. But
Speaker 1: is the nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though?
Speaker 1: Is what I want to know in that person's dimension? Yes, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: it's easy to get a mixed up guys, if you're
Speaker 1: not a true nuts specialist. Uh. And Chuck didn't pick
Speaker 1: pick up on it, which was weird because I love both.
Speaker 1: I don't never buy these, of course, but boy, a
Speaker 1: little Debbie nutty bar so good. I think you would
Speaker 1: like the other version of Nutter butters, the kind of
Speaker 1: way free one. I think you would really like it.
Speaker 1: That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy. No, that's
Speaker 1: the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying. Oh man,
Speaker 1: who wrote this email? This is George. I think Georgeton
Speaker 1: is going to be more confused now than ever. So
Speaker 1: George says, PS, gotta go. It's raining donuts again outside.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, George. Were ciate the dispatch from your dimension.
Speaker 1: Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too.
Speaker 1: And if you want to be like George and reach
Speaker 1: out and say hello, you can do that in an email.
Speaker 1: Send it to Stuff podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
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