A Personal History Of the NES

Next month, Nintendo will ship a miniature retro console called the NES Classic Edition, a release that will take generations of gamers down memory lane. Perhaps not surprisingly, this throwback device has also triggered some memories of my own from the late 1980s.

In 1985, I graduated from Dedham High School, and unlike many of my fellow students, my future was clear: I was heading to art school. As a kid, I was the most decorated artist to come out of Dedham. I had won some prestigious awards, had sold paintings and drawings to individuals, and was given the opportunity to choose between “Most Artistic” and “Most Creative” at graduation, the idea being it wasn’t fair for one person to get both, though I had in fact received the most votes for both. You get the idea: Art was my future.

Except of course that it wasn’t. I attended the Art Institute of Boston for the 1985-1986 school year, but I ended up basically flunking out on purpose after I quickly realized that a Fine Arts degree didn’t have much of a future. This left a bit of a hole, of course. And after an abortive attempt to switch over to the University of Massachusetts in Boston, I ended up taking a year off. (And later attended the University of New Mexico in late 1987.)

So. What did I do during that year off? I worked at Toys R Us. Of course.

Before heading off to the Art Institute of Boston, I had spent the previous year or so working part-time for The Daily Transcript, a local newspaper that was at the time headquartered in Dedham, where they had a printing press. But my school schedule that fall made continuing at the paper difficult to impossible. And after driving by a giant “NOW HIRING” sign at the Dedham Toys R Us on my way into Boston each day, I semi-randomly veered off into the parking lot, went inside, and applied for a job. They needed help on nights and weekends, go figure, and that’s when I had free time (go figure). Done.

I can’t recall exactly what I did the first week or so there, but when calls went out over the intercom for help in the computer aisle—at the time dominated by the Commodore 64 and 128, and the Atari 8-bit PCs of the day—I would head over to answer questions. No surprise, I knew my stuff. Would I like to run this section of the store for the night shift? Of course I would.

And so it went for the school year. I had a great time working with what passed for personal technology in that day, and helping customers find what they needed. But when summer 1986 arrived, and my future was unclear, I just moved to full time and lost the orange striped smock.

I recall a number of events from my time at Toys R Us. For example, we very briefly received Atari ST equipment—the 520 ST computers themselves, plus the disk drives and displays, each with their cool, angular styling. And then had to send them back, just days later, with no explanation. I remember turning a new type of displays into interactive displays where each PC was running some demo in a loop—the Commodore 64 would play simulated baseball games all day, for example—a use that went over so big with the regional director that he implemented it in Toys R Us stores all over New England.

And I remember the NES.

In late 1985, I received a phone call at the store. (50 percent of these calls were “do you know the number for Child World?”, which was at the time a local competitor to Toys R Us.) The caller had just come back from New York City, where he had seen the future, which he excitedly described to me: A Nintendo video game console that came with a laser gun and a robot that you could play games against.

I had never heard of such a thing, sorry, I told the caller. It sounded fantastical.

Then, sometime in early 1986, we received a shipment of new video game consoles, accessories, and cartridges … from Nintendo.

A couple of points of context. At that point in 1985-1986, the home video game market was dead. Atari, Mattel Electronics, Coleco, and others had all imploded during the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, and only a limping Atari, basically just shipping leftover inventory, remained in the market. At that time, it seemed that cheap home PCs, mostly from Commodore, were the future of home video games. (One of my other memories from this era: Jack Tramiel’s Atari shipped 65XE and 130XE computers, but also an XE game system of some kind, briefly. Moving on.)

And then there was Nintendo.

At the moment I received that phone call in late 1985, Nintendo was to me—and to America—an also-ran in the video game world. They were responsible for a handful of early 80’s arcade hits like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, but that was about it. So the notion of a Nintendo video game console was quirky and unexpected.

At Toys R Us, expensive and easily stolen merchandise arrived in cages that were literally vertical metal boxes with locks. The shipping guys would move these cages from the loading dock area through the back warehouse-like part of the store towards the appropriate departments. And then we would move the computer merchandise to a cage-like room at the front of the store, behind the registers, where customers would pick up items they had purchased. We’d take a few boxes out to display as well.

The night crew was generally responsible for moving merchandise from cages into the store, and in early 1986, I was still on the night crew. So I was the one who opened the first Nintendo cages in the Dedham Toys R Us. This is what I recall seeing.

Nintendo offered three versions of the console, which was called the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. The first was just the console itself and two wired controllers, and Super Mario Bros. There was a package with the NES Zapper light gun, which came with two games, one of which was Duck Hunt. (Duck Hunt became like Adventure on the Atari 2600; it seemed like there were twice as many copies of the game as there were consoles.) And then there was a strange, larger box that contained the console, the controllers, the light gun … and a little robot. Called R.O.B.

Obviously, I thought of the person who had called months earlier after a trip to New York. But looking at the little robot, I was unimpressed. And as I later learned, it could only play a very limited set of games in which it could stack little blocks. It was a gimmick.

Look, I grew up on video games, was part of the first generation of humans who can’t really remember a time before video games. Many of my friends had Atari 2600 consoles, but my parents went with the Mattel Intellivision because it was superior, graphically, at the time. But a close friend got a Colecovision, which of course raised the bar yet again. And while the Atari 5200 was short-lived, it, too, offered superior graphics, which in that case were very arcade-like for the day.

Point being, I had a frame of reference for the NES. And boy, did it not meet my expectations. The console that would later go on to fuel a video game resurgence that we are still experiencing today, fully 30 years later, was … not that impressive to me.

My initial gut reaction to Super Mario Bros.—today, correctly considered iconic—was that Nintendo had achieved ColecoVision-quality graphics. Which was not impressive in 1986, given that ColecoVision first shipped, and wowed the world, in 1982. Are you kidding me? I thought.

Not helping matters, that robot was pretty lame—and was quickly discontinued—and even the laser gun’s appeal wore off quickly. This thing seemed like a non-starter.

In other words, that was the moment I kicked off 30 years of being wrong about just about everything when it comes to personal technology and the future. The NES was a smash success, and instantly. (My next steps: Waste thousands of dollars on an Apple IIGS and then choose the Amiga.)

To be fair to young Paul, I was right about the graphics. What I didn’t know at the time is that Nintendo’s console was first released in Japan in 1983, which explains the graphics quality. That date also explains two other things: The timing of the US launch—the 1983 video game crash pushed things back a few years—and why Nintendo had so many games right off the bat: Developers had been figuring out the console in Japan for a few years already.

The NES was so successful that employees started stealing the consoles and especially the cartridges. And in one spectacular instance, two of the managers actually caught an employee selling boxes of cartridges out of the trunk of his car in the store parking lot. I can only imagine how that went down.

Unimpressed with the NES, and a bit more morally centered, I never engaged in any of that activity—in fact, I was the one who tipped off management about the supply discrepancies—and I never bought a NES. Until years later.

If we flash forward to the early 1990s, I’m married and working at Bank of Boston, and I’m quietly plotting some move into technology by studying computer programming on my own. By that time, the NES had basically run its course and Nintendo was set to release its successor, Super Nintendo, in late 1993. So sometime in 1992, I headed back to Toys R Us, and picked up a console, plus the first three Super Mario games, on the cheap. And I spent the next several weeks playing and finishing each.

By the time that was over, I better understood the appeal of the console, and that it was more about the overall experience, which was simple and reliable. And about the games, which were in fact quite fun. Nintendo had succeeded where others had failed because they understood that this nebulous thing—“the experience”—mattered. It was eye-opening.

My NES ownership was short-lived. That Christmas, a coworker was talking about buying her kids a NES, and I ended up selling to her—everything was in mint condition, and when I repackaged it, it was as-new—for next to nothing. I was just happy to see some kids benefit from something I knew to be special.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about the NES. It was special. And even though rival consoles of the day, like the SEGA Master System we also stocked at Toys R Us, or future generation devices like Super NES or SEGA Genesis, had their advantages, none really captured the magic of that first NES. Those ColecoVision-quality graphics not withstanding.

Two more things.

I met my wife at Toys R Us in late 1986 when she got a job for the holidays while in college. So I guess that year off worked out just fine.

And I can’t wait to get a NES Classic.