Latest / Stuff You Should Know / SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

Transcript

SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Chuck here again, continuing on with our twelve
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Days of Christmas Toys playlist. Right now, I'm going to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: serve up a delicious serving of nostalgia for anybody that's
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: probably Gen xers would be my guest. But the episode
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever because
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: oil Boy did it. Please enjoy.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: and we're ten years old right now, and this is
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: stuff you should know.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Can I go ahead and admit something?
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: Oh? Yes, I'm nervous though, but yes, go ahead.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo the
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Nees system. And that's not to say that kids my
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: age weren't playing it, but like it really boomed in
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: popularity right when I was sort of like fifteen sixteen
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: and starting to sort of drive and get out in
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: the world. And I also did not own one, so
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: like I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of these classic games. Eventually, in college, I remember it
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: had to have been a Super Nintendo in like ninety two.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: My roommate had one, so that's where I first started
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: playing Super Mario World, and I played stuff like Tetris
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: and Mario and the game Boy that my brother had.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: But I've never owned a Nintendo.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: I was ten eleven years old, not driving yet, and
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: it was and I owned one too, so it was
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: definitely in my wheelhouse.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean later in college, my my good friend
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And then
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: I got on the PlayStation train. But it's just funny
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: reading through this. I was like, I played some of
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo kid.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I have to say I jumped from Nintendo. I
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: have friends who had those. Went off into the N
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: sixty four world with the GoldenEye.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I played that, right. My friend John ed one
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: of those, and I played a lot of that.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: That was so great. And then I got the first
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: PlayStation too, the first PlayStation, I mean, not to be confusing,
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: and at that point I realized that I was thinking
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: about how to play games while I was not playing games,
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: Like when I was just walking around living life and
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: I made a decision, a very faithful decision that I've
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: never regretted, that I was going to give up video
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: games because I was too addicted to them. Oh wow,
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: this was college and I never looked back.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Wow, so you were into them, huh?
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: I was big time into him. Yeah. It was like
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: this is if it's reaching out from beyond the time
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: I'm playing it, then Yes, I was a little too
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: into him if you ask me, was ever a gamer
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: Maybe a little too much.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: In your favor. In your defense, rather, I would say
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Tetris dreams and sees the world has like Tetris boards
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: occasionally if you're into it. Yeah, and you know my deal,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: as you know said before, as I was heavy Atari kid,
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: big time arcade kid, and then played this kind of
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: stuff with friends here and there. And then now every
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: year I'll usually or every couple of years, I'll get
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: two or three PlayStation games, playing them obsessively for a
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: couple of months, and then it sits for nine months
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: to a year.
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm with ye. I think that's healthy. That's a
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: healthy way to play video games, you know.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I still enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: But yeah, my buddy Doug Dillard growing up, had one
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: rich friend and he had a and television, and so
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: I had kind of some fun today watching the old
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: because I remember thinking the in television football was really great,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: and when I looked at it today, I mean it's
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: very very basic, but it was pretty good still, like
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: your calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: It was a big rush of nostalgia.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's somehow two bit graphics, I think.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And this, to be clear, what we're going to
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: talk about today is the original NES. This could have
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: been a two parter if we would have gone down
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: the road of the sixty four. Like we're not even
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: talking about the music today at all. No, So there
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: was plenty more material here. But this is just a
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: bit of an homage for the Christmas season.
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because I mean it's the holidays, So one of
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: the greatest things you can do during the holidays is
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: reminisced nostalgically about holidays past. And I definitely associate the
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: NES or other. I didn't realize this until I started
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: researching it. Some people call it the NESTS. Did you
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: know that?
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: No?
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: Really? Yeah, Some actual like legit gamers call it ness.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: Other people call it NES, and apparently there's some big disagreement.
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: I've always called it NES. Yeah, but I always associate
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: the NES was a pretty significant portion of my life.
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: But like it always is tied to Christmas as well.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: All right, well, you're gonna wax nostalgic a bit more,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: even though I did play a little bit of ease
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: here and there.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, So one of the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: System has an amazingly great story to it, like it's
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: it's just so fun to tell because Nintendo came along
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: at a time when the video game market in North
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: America had so totally bottomed out. Yeah, that people looked
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: at video games like imagine think about how big Atari was.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: People looked at it. It crashed so hard that it
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: was a fad that was never coming back, like it
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: had already lived its life. Yeah, and Nintendo walked into
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: this burning city that was the video game industry and said,
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: let's give this another shot, And they actually managed to succeed.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Atari was dead as disco. We talked
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and I did a full Atari guest two parter with Strickland.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah back in the day on tech stuff.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: I'll bet that was a fun one.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: It was a lot of fun. But yeah, ET came
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: one game. It was sort of a flash in the
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: pan for a few years, and parents were also weighing
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: in and saying, you know, I don't like my kid
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: playing this much garbage on the television, Like, I don't
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: think it's good for their brains. I don't think it
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: was a part of the Satanic panic necessarily. It was
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: pre Satanic panic that it was more along the lines
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: of your writing your brain, right.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: So I was that the thing that triggered it? Or
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered the
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: what's called the North American video game crash of nineteen
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: eighty three. It was the games, wasn't it.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean I think it was the two part thing,
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Like kids got a little less interested because the game
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: started to suck quite frankly, and then I think you
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: also had parents beating the drum of okay, hey, and
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Atari wasn't really coming out with you know, the new
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: systems weren't that great. The twenty six hundred and the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: fifty two hundred came along, I mean, rather the fifty
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: two hundred followed up, and it was just okay. So
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: they needed something needed to happen, and that thing that
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: needed to happen was Nintendo.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And also at the same time, one of the
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: other things that had ushered helped usher out video games
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: was the personal computers starting to come into the world absolutely,
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: and with the personal computer, you could like do your taxes,
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: your kid could like practice math, and they played games
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: on floppy disc too. So exactly, yes, I played Wolf
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: and Oh. I'm so glad you said that, because I
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: was looking at Castle Vania on floppy disk and I'm like,
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: it came out in nineteen ninety, like I was definitely
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: playing it before that. It was Wolf and Style. Thank you, man,
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: you just made a really great neural pathway circuit, like
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: connect completely in my brain.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: Good.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: But I saw it described by a guy named Chris
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: Kohler who wrote an article on this and wired back
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: in twenty ten. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead,
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: personal computers were the future, and anything that just played
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. That
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: was kind of like the premise. So just to get across,
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: I don't want to beat this jrump too hard, but
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: to get across how huge the crash was. The video
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: game crash of North America. In nineteen eighty two, Atari
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: raked in two billion dollars. Atari alone in nineteen eighty
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: three they lost five hundred and thirty six million dollars.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: That's a swift fall, yes, but that's how quickly that
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: it happened, and so people basically, if it crashes that hard,
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: people hate your product. And I think that's kind of
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: where we were at in nineteen eighty three.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but as you pointed out this, we need to
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: keep pointing out this was the North American crash.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, good point.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: It did not happen in Japan in nineteen eighty three.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: They were just like, I don't know what you're talking about,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: because we have arcades over here that are flourishing. We
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. It's still a
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: to play, yeah, for sure. And in nineteen eighty this
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: was a few years before the United States crash, they said, hey,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: you know what, there's this gaming thing going on, home
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: together a team over here to just sort of poke
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: around because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: and we have for a long time, and we're big
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: in the arcade world, but we don't have really a
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: console system going. And that led to I think actually,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, and it was sort of the biggest
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: thing in Japan at the time.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: But well I think it was kind of the only
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: thing in Japan at the time.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Too, well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: could also say it was the smallest. That's true. But
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: it was not a Nintendo product, right.
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was Nintendo came
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: along his rival to this cassette vision, Epoch Cassette Vision.
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: So the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, he apparently was
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: this driving force. He had some really great people working
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: for him in Japan and in North America, but he
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: seems to have been this person who would be like,
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: do this enormous undertaking and do it in an hour
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: kind of thing. He kind of seems to have had
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: a sense that there was a really narrow window that
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: was open right now that could close at any time,
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: and that they needed to get this stuff done, but
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: they also needed to do it really well and wright
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: basically out of the gate. And they actually managed to
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: because in nineteen eighty three, after just a couple of
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: years of research and development, they released what's called the
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: Family Coom or the Family Computer, which was essentially the
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment system that they released
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: a couple of years later in North America.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's not very often that a head
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: of a company or a boss comes along and says,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I want to do something better and cheaper than what
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: is currently out there, and it actually happened. And listeners
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: at home, if you can look this stuff up as
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: you go safely, please do because just seeing these all
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: these various units we're going to talk about is really
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: a lot of fun.
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: like at that age, they're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy,
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so,
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: you know what I mean.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: a shelf as a collector these days.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of people who have that.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Actually, oh I'm sure, so look up the epoch cassette
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: vision because that's kind of fun. But the Famicon was
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: this red and white box. It top loaded, It had
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: two wired controllers, and it had very importantly on the
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: control pad it had. It had the dpad. It had
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: the directional pad on the left with the up and down,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: left and right arrows, and then an A and B button,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: which no one knew at the time, but that would
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: kind of revolutionize the gaming world. As you know, they
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: got a little fancy over the years, but it's still
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: sort of that's still the bones of what a controller is.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Absolutely like it was. I can never remember the full quote,
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: and got it right fully out of the gate, like
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: tray tables and everything Essentially, it was like, that's what
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: they did with that controller design. And now you think
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: about it, you look at it, like the Nintendo brick
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: and especially the Famcom controllers, they look so old fashioned.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but if you could put.
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: Yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan in nineteen
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: eighty three, if you looked around at the other stuff available,
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: it was it was just from the future. And that
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: was one of the things that Nintendo did really really
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: the future was, what it contained, what it looked like,
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: and they gave it to everybody. It was a really
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: like exuberant time. It was like the future had been
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: brought to the present and it was all thanks to
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Nintendo basically.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: So it retailed for about one hundred and fifty bucks
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: back then, which is what close to five hundred.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: Today, Yeah, four hundred something like that.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: All right, So, I mean kind of on par with,
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: you know, the range of even modern gaming. I mean,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: what's the new PlayStation like five maybe I don't know,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there, five
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: or six hundred bucks.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was like for
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: PlayStation seven it was just people running around the real world.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: It was all like VR and augmented reality.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I don't remember that.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: It was pretty cool because it came out in like
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: the nineties and you're like, whoah, and we're pretty close
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: to that now already, you know.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Oh for sure. They bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Kong Junior games and the Popeye games, which were basically
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: about the same quality as you would get at the arcade.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was huge.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: It was a huge deal. I mean, especially if you
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: grew up playing Atari. I loved Atari, but Atari was
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Atari and it had a lot of limits. And this
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: was you know, you went to the arcade so you
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: could play games better than Atari. Now you could do
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: it at home.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, so that was an enormous progression. But it
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: wasn't just like the graphics the quality of the look
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: of it. It was also the gameplay too, Like it
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: was way more fun than most of the games you
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: were going to play on an Atari. It was just
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: funner to play some of these famcom games. And it
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: took off like a rocket. It knocked the epoch cassette
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: vision right off of the top place into the history books.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: Basically essentially. Yeah, they saw half a million units in
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: two months after its release. I think by the end
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: of nineteen eighty four, they'd sold two and a half
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: million units, so in about a year or so. And
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: they were like, Okay, I think we're definitely onto something,
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: and they had enough hubris enough I guess, at least
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: self assurance that they set their sights on North America again,
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: games were concerned.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: It's a great spot for a break.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: I think so too, all right.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: I think where we left off the United States was
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: a version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yeah, yeah, and
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: The Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said we
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: are going to save you and bring you into the future.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: And it was a tough sell at first in the
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: US because, like you said, the video game craze for
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: This was nineteen eighty five. Parents were still not you know,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: they were like, I'm glad that went away, basically, and
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: now we have these PCs in our homes and my
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever. And they seem
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: happy enough with that, and Nintendo knew all this was
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: going on. They knew it was going to be a
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: tougher sell that they knew, so they knew they had
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: to come up with something awesome. And their first crack
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: at that was something called the AVS, the Advanced Video System,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: And they said, we'll give it a keyboard, so it
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disk drive,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: it'll be able to do some stuff. It'll but you know,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: had a joystick, it had a keyboard like a musical keyboard,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: and it had this wireless which is we'll explain how
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: all this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: But it had a little raygun, a little zapper.
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you really said a mouthful with the word wireless. Man.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: This was nineteen eighty five, and this Advanced Video System
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: came out with wireless controllers like it was. That's really impressive.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: And it was really slick looking too, like really futuristic looking.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: But also yes, they put enough computer peripherals in it
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: that it did it didn't look like a video game system, right. Yeah,
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: So they took it to CEES. The January version that
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: I think even back then was in Vegas. But it's sorry,
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've never been to that, of you.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: No, huh. Stricklin has great stories from it, though.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he goes every year, I think, I think so.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: But at CES in January nineteen eighty five, they're like,
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: here you go, everybody, here's the future, the advanced video system.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: And no one cared at all about it. They didn't
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: even get people coming over to play, to mess around.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: No one could have cared less about that thing.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back, because
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: the games were good and they knew that. I guess
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: they were just a little gun shy, But it seems
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there wasn't
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is going
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: to be a real thing. But it, you know, it
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: didn't work. They didn't get any response.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: No, And I think that really goes to just kind
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: of underline just how bad a reputation video games had, because,
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: you know, Dave points out that the consoles that had
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: been going for like one hundred, one hundred and fifty
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: dollars the year before, these retailers were stuck with them,
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: and they were selling them for like forty bucks, which
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: is how much the games used to go for. Now
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: the games were like four dollars. So the retailers have
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: been so badly burned. I think they all got caught
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: with these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: were like never again. Yeah, and that's what Nintendo was
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: working against, which is as Dave Dave again, Dave helped
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: us with this, as you were either a very foolish
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: company to try this or a very smart one because
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: again it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: that there was no competition in this enormous market right now.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So they knew they had to have almost
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: like a trick to get their foot in the door,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: and they came up with one and they found this.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Uh is Gaming Historian Is it a I know it
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: full website.
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: I don't know. All I know is of the YouTube
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: are really interesting.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: It's good stuff. But someone at Gaming Historian came up
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: with this very app metaphor about a trojan horse, and
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: that's kind of what they were looking for was a
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: way to get these things in the home by almost
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system and
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: it was more just sort of like a toy because
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: kids still got and bought or you know, received toys
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: It was just home video game. So what they invented
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: was the ROB the rob the robotic Operating Buddy, which
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: is a very sweet name. You should totally go look
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: at ROB online and especially YouTube videos of rob and
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: action and just be prepared for the speed of ROB.
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: Right. But the thing is ROB was a robot. He
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: moved and he functioned, He interacted with the games that
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: they came up.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: With very slowly, right, very slowly.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: But this was a time where like robots were kind
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: of hard to come by. Yeah, they were not like that.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: It was not an easy thing to get your hands on.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: And now all of a sudden there's this company saying like, hey,
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: we have this whole thing and it has a robot too. Yeah,
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: and it was one of the greatest strokes of marketing
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: genius that any company's ever come up with. As we'll see.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean what they ended up with was a
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: robot that didn't I mean, it functioned as it should,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: but like I said, it's super super slow. They only
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: ended up having a couple of games you could use
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: the robot, and it was just sort of a sneaky
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: way to get these consoles in the door. And because
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: it was all part of the same system and that's
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: how it worked, they managed to get the little Trojan
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Horse robot through the door. And thanks to a guy
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: named Lance bar he helped design a lot of this stuff.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: little bit more about in a sec but he designed
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: it as a front loading system, which made sort of
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: people think of VCRs. It was also a very they
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: call it zero four solution, so there wasn't a lot
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: of wear on the on the cartridges and it just
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: worked really well.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Plus it looked like you said, it looked like a VCR.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: Those were wildly popular at the time, and I don't
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: think we said chuck. So that January CEES was just
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: a complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: time coming up with the advanced video system and it
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: went nowhere. So again the head of the company Hiroshi
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: Yamauchi told a couple of people like, hey, redesign this
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: in an hour, and they did. And Lance Barr was
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: the guy who did it, and he knocked it out
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: of the park because the NEES as it debuted later
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: on in North America was essentially what he came up
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: with in that one hour that he was given to
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: do it. So they had they did all this and
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: had it done in time for the July nineteen eighty
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: five CEES like six months after that huge colossal failure.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: They went back to the drawing board and came back
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System fully fleshed out,
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: including Robot and zappor Gun.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Well notably Robot, because that's what it all. Anyone cared
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: about it.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: First, Yeah, for sure.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: Like at CES, the NES system was sort of to
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: the side and everyone was just trying to get their
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: hands on Rob and play Gyromite, which I'm telling you
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: you got to just spend five minutes watching Rob play
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: this game, because he shows a split screen of the
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: really isn't much, and then Rob just very slowly picking
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: up these spindle tops and making them spin.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I wasn't the the game historian video that
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: that really kind of went into detail about how Rob
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: played and setting up his accessories and everything.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: I watched a bunch of them.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure, Okay, I think it was that one.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: If not, it was another one I saw it where
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: they really kind of showed like the idea of Rob
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: was pretty ingenious. He was player too, but you were
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: actually playing together like you in gyro Might. You were
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: kind of running through this maze and there were like
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: Rob to do it for you. And again he got
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: some lunch so slowly. Yeah, good, get an eye, examine
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: your glasses. Made in an hour or two and then yeah,
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: he would have completed that and you could advance to
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: the next column or whatever. It was a great idea.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: It was a cool concept, but it just the execution
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: the player two controller, So if you got tired and
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could just push the
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: buttons on the player two controller yourself and play gyro
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: Mighte that way. But the point was They don't seem
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: in retrospect to have really thought Rob was going to
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: take off. In fact, the games that they he came
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: even bothered to make the North American version of these.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: They just put like kind of this like like fix
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: on it that made it compatible with the North American system.
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: But when you loaded up gyro Mighte, the intro screen
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: of it.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: writing and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's a memory.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: It may have just been like boot up screens or something.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: So they decide it was such a you know, I
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: grabber at cees that they decided, all right, let's go
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: to New York City and let's test it out there
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: in one city, roll it out, see what happens. The
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: New York retailer said, hey, buddy, I got look at this.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: I got a warehouse full of Atari's over here that
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: I can't even give away, like I don't know about
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: a new gaming system. And they said, all right, here's
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: what we'll do. We will ship them to your store
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: from Japan for free. We will. You can just sell
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: what you sell and pay us for those. Whatever you
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: don't sell you can return to us. We'll take them back.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: We'll send over a team in your store to set
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: up these big marketing interactive marketing displays, and we'll we'll
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: take on all of the risk and all you guys
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: got to do is try and sell some of these.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: And they went, yeah, all right.
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: That was a great Joe Pesci by the way, saw
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: Joe Pecchi. So yeah, they did this in five hundred stores.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: And normally, when you when you did like kind of
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: a soft test release of something like this, you might
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: choose like to Peka Kansas, or's somewhere that no one
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: cares about, right, But they went full bore and hit
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: New York City. And I think I've seen it, you know,
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: mentioned a few times that like it was based on
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: that that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that you if
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: you made it in New York, you could make it anywhere,
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: and they they did make it in New York. Oh,
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: I can't remember.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: I want to rock one, okay, I want I want
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: to hear that version.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: Man, I've got that MP three. It's so good. It
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: still holds up.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: I want to rock.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the Twisted Sister song.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: You got that MP three or MP four, I don't
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: know what they buy it.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: I bought it at Toys r US.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Very cool.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: So they they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: They sold about half the units that they had produced
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: for this test market in New York. Yeah, I think
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: like fifty thousand, but it was enough for Yamauchi to say,
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: rest of the country. Another bold move because normally, after
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: your first test, like run your first test market, you
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: do like four or five more And he said, now,
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: let's skip that, Let's just go right to the rest
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: of the country. And he did.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that was the Christmas season too, So I
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: get the feeling that they were They weren't super disappointed,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: like it was right in that zone where it was
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: have taken had it sold thirty thousand units, you know.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say, like Nintendo. Had
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Nintendo not been successful, like the games as we know
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: them today would definitely not exist.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes.
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and going outside and needs it. So that was
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: nineteen eighty five holiday season. By nineteen eighty six, they
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: hit on something else. So like one of the things
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: that they did was take a poll of that people
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: in the test market who had bought the Nintendo and
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: I think like the vast majority of them said that
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Rob the Robot was the reason they had bought the
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: whole system to get that robot. That's how well that
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: marketing ployee worked. So Rob had kind of served as
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: purpose though everyone knew he was slow, they weren't releasing
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: more games for them, so they came up with Originally
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: the way you bought Nintendo, it was the Nintendo Entertainment
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: System console, two controllers, the zapper gun, Rob the Robot,
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: and all of Rob the Robot's accessories, and then two games,
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: one of which was gyro mighte that game you play
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: with Rob, Right, Yeah, Okay, that's a lot of stuff,
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: and of course it was pretty expensive at the time.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: So for the national rollout, they kept the Deluxe set,
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: but they also came up with something called the ANS
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: Control Deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: very very importantly Super Mario Brothers. And that was ninety
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: nine bucks. And they sold those things as fast as
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: they could make them for the holidays that year.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: That was a game that came along and with actually
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: with a Famicon in nineteen eighty five, and it was
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: just it was the most advanced looking game and playing
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: game that any kid had ever seen. It was as
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: day points out. It was the first game that you
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: could play and have fun playing forever. Like you could
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: go on and on finding the hidden worlds, finding the
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections that you
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: and other levels that you never even knew existed, banging
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: away hidden bricks, like there were so many discoveries and
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: places to go in Super Mario Brothers. They created sort
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: of a new way of gaming, which was like, Hey,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: but put your cigarette down? How would you like to
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: play a video game? The same one for the next
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: seven hours?
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: Hot Dog? That's what I would have said, and that
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: really hot dog.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: It was a whole new deal though, because even when
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: I played Autari, like we played for hours at a time,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: but I don't know, you played a game for thirty
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: forty five minutes and you'd pop in another. And that's
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: why you had like forty games in your in your
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: controller box, because none of them you could play for
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours in a row and not
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: eventually be like, Okay, this is getting a little bit old,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: even as a kid.
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so the gameplay was just light years ahead of
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: anything I've almost every single source that I've seen on
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: the Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers change
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: things uses the word light years ahead, yeah, of everything else,
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: because it really was. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: legend overnight because of it.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: They were also smart enough to do some really savvy
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: marketing moves which kind of rolled out in a few
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: different ways. They well, they had a lot of advertising money.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: That was sort of a given. They had about twenty
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: million bucks to spend off the bat, which is a
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: ton of money for advertising now and then. But they
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: created a call center. They trained these players and these
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: gamers basically to master these games and sit on the
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: phone and you could call a number if you got
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: stuck and talk to a human being that could walk
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: you through a level that you couldn't get through. They
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: had Nintendo Power magazine, which is a very big deal.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: And they created the first you know, gaming championships where
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: and these are still just huge, you know, where kids
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: and adults alike. You know, now adults from all over
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: the world come together to battle each other out. And
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Grand Championships at Universal Studios, Hollywood.
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: make the case that they created the esports phenomena. They
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: lead the groundwork for it to come at least, right
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: I would think, so, yeah, that's pretty cool. So there
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: that found that ninety five percent of teams polled said
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: that they recommended the nes to their friends, and I
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: think eighty three percent of adults and eighty five percent
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: of little kids. That is eye popping, and that that
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: means that they were successful. They used rob to get
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: their feet in the door, and they knew that if
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: they just got their console in the hands of Americans,
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: they would change their minds forever about video games. And
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: that's exactly what happened.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: their best to try and keep bad games from being
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: able to play it on their system. And that's what
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: happened with Atari. With the games got so bad. I
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: mean there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: in the ET game episode, like ET gets unfairly piled
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: upon because it was just such a big release, but
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: there were far worst games released on the Atari system,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of really really bad games that just
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: to them, So they designed a proprietary system where you
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: could only play officially licensed Anys games. It created a
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: lock chip on their circuit board and only Nintendo officially
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: the key chip to unlock it. And that really kept
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: quality control, you know, under their wing. They said even
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: to third parties, they said, you can only make two
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: of these games a year, Like, don't come at us
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: with two hundred games, Like make something really really good
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: that will approve of and we will put the Nintendo
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: Celo of Quality on the front of the cover.
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Like they were really nitpicky too, Like as you
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo like
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff,
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: and Nintendo would make notes and send it back and
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: make you change stuff. And that's what you could do
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: if you had eighty percent of the market as far
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: as video games were, because people had to come to you.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: And it was really smart for them to just kind
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: of protect their intellectual property like that because it was
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: so good. But they were basically so heavy handed about it. Yeah,
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: point for their licensing practices.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, anytime you control that much of a market,
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: the FTC is gonna sniff around.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: And there were other companies out there trying to boo
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: led games still. There was one called ten Gen that
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: had a few license games, but they wanted more money,
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: and so they went to the patent office and said, hey,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: can we take a look at that patent for these
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: lock and key chips, and they said, sure, here it is,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: and so they I guess illegally because they ended up
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: getting sued and Nintendo won. So, I mean, I don't
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: know how that patent law works. I wasn't. I'm surprised
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: that you could just go get a patent and rip
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: it off.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: have just ripped it off. But I think it's one
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: of those things that I was like, gray illegal, gray
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: Okay, makes it, you know what I mean.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So they just tangan rolled the dice and they
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: lost essentially, Okay, I think. So, I see, I've actually
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: heard it both ways. I just wanted to fill it
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: out by saying the other. So there's this YouTuber named
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: Ninten Drew and he has a called ten Weird nes
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: Facts and he talks about that that key chip thing
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: where people were trying to get around it, and he
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: said other companies didn't even bother to come up with
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: a chip. They just used a low voltage spike to
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: scramble the brains of the lock chip so that it
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: wouldn't work anymore, and now the game could be played.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: And as an example, he used he used a game
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: from the developer tree and it was for Bible Adventures. No,
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: I've never even heard of it, but if you put
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: Bible Adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brain
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: so that you could play Bible Adventures.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: I would think some of these might endanger the game
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: console itself.
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: You'd think, so, yeah, it's pretty pretty reckless.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Jesus killed by Nintendo.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: Uh so Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: its job and got its foot, the little robotic foot
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: in the door. But kids were like, this is not
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: so playing these games, these two games with Rob isn't
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: other games, and so Rob, you know, Dave kind of
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: funnily points out Rob inevitably ended up kind of in
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: the closet of every kid that probably owned one, and
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: it just became about that NES system. But that's not
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: to say all those peripheries were not a success, because
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: that zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: deals that kids loved to play.
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I did not realize this, but the laser gone,
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: what was it? Called the zapper. It was not. It
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: didn't shoot anything at your TV because if you stop
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: and think about it, your TV's not set up to
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: accept that kind of thing, or your TV screen certainly is.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: So what happened instead is it was a light detector.
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: screen in just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that,
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: but still faster than you could register it, the screen
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: went and whatever ducks are on the screen turned into
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: register that white flash of light that was a duck
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: that square, and it would register it as a hit.
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: because they don't know how that stuff works exactly.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: There is no kid who picked up the zapper and
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: didn't go beep beep.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: All right, I guess here a minute forty, we'll take
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: our second break, and we'll come back and talk a
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: little bit about what happened next.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: Okay, Chuck. So there were a couple of other peripherals
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: that came along that were as man as Rob was,
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: maybe even a little Mayor. One was the power Pad,
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: the other was the power Glove. And again these were
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: things that were really cool and helped advance the any
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: system and made a bunch of money for everybody, but
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: when you played with them, they weren't very good.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the power pad is was a pad. It had
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: another use from another company. It was called a fun
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: and Fitness pad from Bandai, and Nintendo bought them out
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: do like track and field games by running on this
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: dumb thing. And that technology is still very popular, like
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: if you go to arcades, those dance games, and there's
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: still like I played one not too long ago with
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: my daughter, daved Busters, where you do like track and
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: field stuff is still around. But at home a kid
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: isn't going to do like they're inside kids because they
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: don't want to be outside running around. Yeah, they want
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: to be on the ca ouch. And so the power
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: closet with Rob almost called him a rod. And then
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: that glove though, the power glove, it was really cool
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: and it looks cool today like if imagine people buy
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, Power
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Glove was kind of the only game where you really
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: maximized what you could get out of the glove, right.
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: movie The Wizard where this kid pulls out a power
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: Glove and plays rad Racer. So he's using it like
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: he's he's steering. But it just they didn't really develop
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: any game specifically for the power Glove, so it ended
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: up it was a little bit because they da've likens
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: it to WE. Eventually Nintendo came out with the WE system,
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: which used essentially the same kind of technology, but yeah,
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: it was ahead of its time, so it ended up
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: in the closet with the power pad and.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: Rob no Man clause.
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: It's kind full exactly, but as kind of clunky as
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: those were. That controller we talked about that was revolutionary.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a writer, a game pro named ty K
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Kim who came up with this cool analogy that they found,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: and that really kind of locks it down as to
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: what they did. Like you know, we were talking earlier
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: about that first nes brick. You know, it was all
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: kind of there, like they grew and morphed, but that
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: directional pad was revolutionary. Those buttons were revolutionary, and they
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: landed on the idea of a kid holding something in
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs.
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because with the Atari joystick you would use your
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: thumb for the red but but you used your whole
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: hand to move the joystick. This was just totally different,
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: and it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: was laid out just right, and it was it was
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: the console controllers to come even today still it's based
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: on those.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had. It didn't start there. They had it
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: initially on this handheld game called a Game and Watch,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: which if you look this it looks like it's sort
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: of the predecessor to the game Boy, and it's called
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: a Game and Watch because it had a clock on it,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: so it told told the time in it was a game,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: so they call it the game and Watch. But that's
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: where the dpad came from. And Donkey Kong is a
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: game that really took great advantage of the D pad,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: and it was it just seemed like the natural. And
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: now they make the little mini joysticks which are which
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: are great, but some I think the I think the Xbox.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Do they have joy stix or do they still use
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: that depad?
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: I don't know, remember addicted, so I gave it up.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: So you never played an Xbox?
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: No, No, I've seen ads for it, but I can't
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: recall the controller.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend John Pindell,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: who you know. John's backstage in New York. John, he
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: had the N sixty four. He was my Golden Eye partner.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: But he also got an Xbox and we were both
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was a good game.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: And that was a game that carried with you in
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: real life because if you played enough Tony Hawk, you
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: would just someone who'd never skateboarded. You would be walking
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: around in the world and going like I could totally
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: grind that gutter on top of that that roof. It's
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: pretty funny.
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: So the another thing that those controllers did was give
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: us the cheat code. Yeah, I guess you could conceivably
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: do it on like an Atari joystick. But they really
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: came along thanks to the NES because there was a
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: into a Nintendo game, and it was really hard, so
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: he created this cheat code to make it easier to
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: kind of game test for him so he wouldn't have
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: to start over every time, and is extraordinarily famous. Up up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: be a start. And that's called the Konami code because
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius,
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: but he became much more famous with the game Contra.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: I never I guess you played a lot of Contra probably,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: huh for sure? Now what was Contra? I don't even know.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: I saw it described well as like a cross between
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: Rambo and Aliens. Ah. Okay, so if I remember correctly,
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: you're into some sort of weird other world and you
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: and your buddy are kind of like buff and where
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: like headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair. Oh yeah,
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: but and you just shoot all sorts of stuff and
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: that shoot in different ways. And now you're like, this
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: is clunky and old, But at the time it was,
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: there was just again, nothing like it on the market,
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: Like a lot of the games that we understand today
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: originated on the NES.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I think I've seen Contra that sounds familiar.
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: BA start with Contra, if you did it at the
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: intro screen right before the game started, you would get
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: thirty extra lives which you could use to great effect.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: Oh that's great. They ended up it's a staggering number,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: still considering that they were kept a sort of a
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: heavy hand on the amount of games being produced, but
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: they ended up with close to seven hundred games for
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: the original NES. And I think in ninety five is
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: when they launched the sixteen bit No No No Super
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: Niningenda was ninety one, and that was the one that
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: a lot of Super Mario and then Super Mario two
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: and three of course came along. We already mentioned punch Out.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: That was I remember playing punch Out. That was a
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: world at the time. But there is a little fun
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: fact that Dave dug up and I think I remember this,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: but the arcade punch Out had a boxer. The Russian
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: boxer's name was Vodka drunken Ski, so great.
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: And he got changed to Soda Popinski very famously. Anyone
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: who played punch Out is very familiar with Soda Popinski.
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: And one of the big revelations of my childhood was
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: that the great tiger who wore a turban with a
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: gem on it. His gem flashed before he came at
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: you to throw a punch. When I realized that you
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: could pretict it, yeah, it just changed my life.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: That's funny. It changed your line.
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: It did.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know.
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: It's possible. That whole glass or the sliding doors, glass.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Doors, yeah, the glass ceiling, yeah, different thing.
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: So what else, Chuck, There's some other ones too that
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: we have to shout out.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: played a lot on the game Boy talk about addictive,
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: to my car packing skills today when we go on
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: road trips and stuff, Emily, I always still jokes like,
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: Chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: it's uh oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: but it's It's a game where you stacked different shaped
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: blocks right, and when you got solid lines, a line
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: would disappear, and the whole goal of this game is
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: to to keep those lines low. And as it built
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: higher and higher and higher, there was less room for
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: those blocks to drop, and it would go seemingly go
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: faster and faster.
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: Very yeah, especially as they just kept building up and
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: they're dropping then it's like it drops right onto another block.
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: You're up that high. It's just like you know, it's
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: just it is very stressful, it is, but it was
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: fun well.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: And it's also I think one of the more satisfying
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: games ever invented in that when you would things would
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: get a little hairy, and if you got like two
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: in a row of the exact ones that you needed
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: and made I think it was a Tetris when you
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: got like was it like five or was it four?
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: I don't remember, blobably four because the tallest block was
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: four high?
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: Was it four high? But it would make all four
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: disappear at once, And if you got a couple of
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: those and you went from like seventy percent high to
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: down to like twenty percent in an instant, there's no
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: feeling like that.
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: No, No, Tetris was pretty good. I loved it too.
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: It was awesome.
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: I want to shout out some other ones. There was
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: entire weekend from Blockbuster, and it would spend the entire
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: remember correctly, I never beat Metroid. But it was really
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: groundbreaking in that there wasn't like some path you had
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: to stick to, like you were meant to explore these
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: the next level. That was pretty new actually, So Metroid
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: was groundbreaking too. And then there are other ones that
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: were just fun to play, like ice hockey. Did you
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: play that one.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: I was always into sports games, so I was. I
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: played hockey and golf and what about tennis? Tennis? I
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: played all those.
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: It was fun. Did you play the MLB Baseball game.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I played that one.
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: That one was very addictive. RC pro Am Ductails was
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: actually a lot of fun. And then there was an
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: army one called jack Hole. And then if you liked
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skate
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: or Die, which was pretty good, but my money was
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: on Town and Country Designs Skate and Surf I think
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: it was called, and you could skateboard and then you
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: would go surf and it was a lot of fun
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: to play too.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I was so into the sports games, and I
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: still play the PlayStation what is it, PGA two K
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: But I played. I was addicted to the Atari Beach
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: volleyball game, wherein it was two players aside and both
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: players were connected to one another. They could not move independently,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: so when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: in the exact same pattern.
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds. It reminds me of another
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon,
• 50:30
  Speaker 3: which was just about as bad as it got for
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: atari where a dog chases the wagon from the chuck
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: Wagon commercials.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: It's a branded game.
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: Poop out, Yeah, who would have thought? And then it
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: would poop out like food and the dog would eat
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: the food. That was like the point of the game.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: You should speak a little bit about Zelda though, the
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: legend of Zelda. That's a game again that by the
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing,
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: and again we couldn't afford an nes So what was
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: Zelda all about?
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: So I never liked Zeldah. It did something to my
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: know why. Wow, It's almost like have you ever what's
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: your grocery store? Kroger, Republics?
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: I can't remember both, but generally publics.
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: Okay. So there's a lot of people out there who
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: are only publics and only Kroger. And I think my
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: theory is is that they're laid out in a certain
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: way that they appeal to one type of person and
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: then the other one appeals to a different type of person.
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: So if you are a public's person and you go
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: into a Kroger. It feels weird and out of place
• 51:32
  Speaker 3: and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: Zelda Baby feels. So I never got into it, but
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: I know some people like have essentially dedicated their lives
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: to that game, like beyond playing, it's like probably dress
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: up as link the main character, have like all sorts
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: of toys and stuff like that. Like, Legend of Zelda
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: was really big too.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was certainly not the first open role game,
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: but and I think there's not a solid agreement on
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: what that was. There are some arguments for the Great
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: Atari Game Adventure that was the first open world game
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: I played, right, Really, your avatar was a square, but
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: it was so much fun because you could go anywhere
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: for the first time. It was really different and new.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as the
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: Legend of Zelda as one of the first open world
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: like really good open world games. I guess right, Yeah,
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: it advanced.
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: Ones and it was by the same guy who did
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising. Yeah, what else
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: you got, Chuck, I mean, not a whole lot else.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: I guess we should. We should definitely talk about blowing
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: in those cartridges, because I even made that joke before
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: we recorded because my microphone wasn't working and Dave, who's
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: sitting in for Jerry, said, unplug the cable and just
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it?
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: Right? And you don't want to? Actually? So did you
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: know about that? Right?
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: I blew in a lot of cartridges Atari cartridges too.
• 52:57
  Speaker 3: So that was the thing. If you're Nintendo cartridge didn't work,
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: you would take it out of the VCR like entry
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it,
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: and you put it back in and it would work.
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: The thing is, it wasn't doing anything when you blew
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: on it. You weren't helping it. It just hadn't made
• 53:17
  Speaker 3: the correct connection the first time. So when you took
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: it out and put it back in, the chances were
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: that you were making the correct connection then and then
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: the game would work. But you, being a dumb ten
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: year old, thought, well, I blew on it, so that
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: fixed it. But the Nintendo long said do not blow
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: on these things. It's actually bad for them, and no
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: one listened until there was this guy who came along
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: and actually ran a study, the first, the world's first
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: Does, and it didn't work. This is in twenty twelve.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: His name was Frankie Bitruelo. And you know it's a
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: very rudimentary study, but I mean, how else you gonna
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: do it. You're gonna have a control game you don't
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: blow into, and you're gonna have a game you blow into.
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: And after how long did he do this?
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: Thirty days? Every day for thirty days.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: The guy spent a month blown on this game. Took
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: this the blown cartridge out at the end and showed
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: that it was. It was corroded and kind of gross.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: And it's funny, like you don't know what kid. You
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: always wonder who invented this, because every kid did it,
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: because every kid saw another kid do it, who just
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: got it from some other kid. But it was just
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: sort of known, like you would take it out and
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: it was always the same thing. You would do it
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: really quick and just go and like run the cartridge
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: back and forth in front of your mouth and then
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: stick it back in.
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that sound just triggered a tidal wave
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: of nostalgia and Chuck, that was amazing. I don't remember that,
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: so don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges people who still
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: play Nintendo Original nes.
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: Maybe should follow this up again one day.
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: To do one on the music of Nintendo.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: Well, it just sort of everything we didn't cover because
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: the n sixty four was such a big deal. And sure,
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: I don't know, this could be a two part a
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: separated by time and space.
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: Okay, I like that idea, Chuck, Let's definitely do that.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: out a second part to this episode, of course, that
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: means we've just unlocked listener mail.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: Maybe next Christmas it can be our you know, because
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: this is kind of every year we try to do
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: a toy, a famous toy.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I have the same thought. I just didn't
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: want to spill the beans.
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: Oh all right, consider them spilled.
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're spilled all over.
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: All right, speaking of spilling all over, this is a
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: correction that on something you said that I don't know
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: how I didn't catch this, but it's the we'll call
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: it the Great nutter butter Controversy of twenty two. Hey, guys,
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: At the end of the Vaudeville episode. Josh said, it's
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: weird how there were two types of Nutter butters and
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: they're totally different, the wafery kind and then the peanut
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: shaped cook And I don't remember what I said. It
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: must have just been like, huh, I think that's exactly
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: what you said. And you mentioned both of the same logo,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: same packaging, which is not true, just two different types
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: you're talking about beause we had a bunch of people
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: right in. The peanut shaped cookies are the Nutter butters, Josh,
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: but the other wafery treats are nutty buddy bars. Did
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: you look? Is this what you meant?
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: Now?
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: I think this person is from an alternate Bear and
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: Saine Bear's dimension, because in in our dimension that there
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: it's the same thing, same package, same names, everything, just
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: different cookies.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: But is the is the nutty buddy what you were
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: thinking of?
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: Though?
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: Is what I want to know.
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: In that person's dimension? Yes, okay, okay.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: It's easy to get a mixed up guys if you
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: are not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: up on it, which was weird. Because I love both.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: I don't never buy these, of course, but boy, a
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: little Debbie Nutty bar who so good.
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters,
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: the kind of wayfer you one. I think you would
• 57:06
  Speaker 3: really like it.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy.
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: No, that's the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying.
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: Oh man, who wrote this email?
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: This is George. I think George is going to be
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: more confused now than ever.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: So George says, PS, gotta go, it's raining donuts again outside.
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension.
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: And if you want to be like George and reach
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: out and say hello, you can do that in an email.
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: Send it to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.