Stuff You Should Know
SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What was the impact of the Nintendo Entertainment System on the gaming industry?
had so totally bottomed out that people looked at video games. Think about how big Atari was. People looked at it, it crashed so hard that it was a fad that was never coming back. It had already lived its life. Nintendo walked into this burning city that was the video game industry and said, let's give this another shot. They actually managed to succeed. Yeah. I mean, Atari was dead as disco.
We talked a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode. And I did a full Atari guest two-parter with Strickland back in the day on tech stuff. I'll bet that was a fun one. It was a lot of fun. But yeah, E.T. came along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this one game. It was sort of a flash in the pan for a few years.
And parents were also weighing in and saying, you know, I don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television. Like, I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily. It was pre-satanic panic. It was more along the lines of you're riding your brain. Right.
So was that the thing that triggered it or was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered what's called the North American video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it? Well, I mean, I think it was a two-part thing. Like kids got a little less interested because the games started to suck, quite frankly. Yeah.
And then I think you also had parents beating the drum of, hey, and Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The 2600 and the 5200 came along. I mean, rather the 5200 followed up and it was just okay. So they needed, something needed to happen. And that thing that needed to happen was Nintendo.
Yeah.
Yeah, and also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered, helped usher out video games was the personal computer starting to come into the world. And with the personal computer, you could, like, do your taxes, your kid could, like, practice math, and they played games on floppy disks, too. Castle Wolfenstein. Exactly. Yes. I played Wolfenstein.
Oh, I'm so glad you said that because I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disk and I'm like, it came out in 1990? Like I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man. You just made a really great neural pathway circuit like connect completely in my brain. That feels good.
But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in Wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future. And anything that just played games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. That was kind of like the premise.
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Chapter 3: How did Nintendo revive the video game market after the crash?
And they said, all right, here's what we'll do. We will ship them to your store from Japan for free. You can just sell what you sell and pay us for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us. We'll take them back. We'll send over a team in your store to set up these big interactive marketing displays.
And we'll take on all of the risk, and all you guys got to do is try and sell some of these. And they went, yeah, all right. That was a great Joe Pesci, by the way, I meant to say. Oh, Joe Pesci. So, yeah, they did this in 500 stores. And normally when you did like kind of a soft test release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas or somewhere that no one cares about, right?
Yeah. But they went full bore and hit New York City. And I think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times that, like, it was based on that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that if you made it in New York, you could make it anywhere. And they did make it in New York. Oh, I can't remember.
I Want to Rock.
Oh, okay. I want to rock. I want to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up. Of I Want to Rock? Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that MP3? Or MP4. I don't know what the kids call these things. Where'd you buy it? I bought it at Toys R Us. Awesome. Very cool. So they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily.
They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York. Yeah. I think like 50,000. But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the rest of the country. Another bold move, because normally after your first test test, like run your first test market, you do like four or five more. And he said, no, let's skip that.
Let's just go right to the rest of the country. And he did. Yeah. And that was the Christmas season too. So I get the feeling that they were, they weren't super disappointed. Yeah. but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going.
And you wonder kind of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30,000 units, you know? Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say like Nintendo, had Nintendo not been successful, like the games as we know them today would definitely not exist. We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes. Yeah, and going outside. Who needs it? So that was 1985 holiday season.
By 1986, they hit on something else. So, like, one of the things that they did was take a poll of people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo. And I think, like, the vast majority of them said that Rob, the robot, was the reason they had bought the whole system. Yeah. to get that robot. That's how well that marketing ploy worked. So Rob had kind of served his purpose, though.
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Chapter 4: What features made the NES controller revolutionary?
I played all those. It was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game? I'm not sure if I played that one. That one was very addictive. RC Pro-Am. Duck Tales was actually a lot of fun. And then there was an Army one called Jackal. And then if you liked skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skate or Die, which was pretty good.
But my money was on Town and Country Designs Skate and Surf, I think it was called. And you could skateboard and then you would go surf. And it was a lot of fun to play, too. Yeah, I was so into the sports games, and I still play the PlayStation PGA 2K for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun.
But I was addicted to the Atari beach volleyball game, wherein it was two players aside, and both players were connected to one another. They could not move independently.
Yeah.
So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern. Yeah, that's hilarious. That reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog chases the wagon from the Chuck Wagon commercials. It's a branded game. Yeah, who would have thought?
And then it would poop out food and the dog would eat the food. That was the point of the game.
Yeah.
You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though, The Legend of Zelda. That's a game, again, that by the time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing. And again, we couldn't afford an NES. So what was Zelda all about? So I never liked Zelda. Oh, interesting. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. Wow.
It's almost like, have you ever, what's your grocery store, Kroger or Publix? I can't remember. Both, but generally Publix. Okay. So there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and only Kroger. And I think my theory is that they're laid out in a certain way that they appeal to one type of person and then the other one appeals to a different type of person.
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