I realized just the other day that I didn’t know what the word Nintendo means. Nintendo has had a huge impact on my childhood and my life. I’ve said the word hundreds of thousands of times. But I don’t know what it means. Realizing that, I intended to look it up, then promptly forgot to. Fortunately, I started reading Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Jeff Ryan, and I came across this paragraph:
“Leave Luck to Heaven” or “We Do What We Can”. There are probably complicated nuances to those concepts that we English speakers miss. Nonetheless, I get a little bit of the idea in those two translations, and I think it’s an incredibly appropriate idea for a little gray box that gave me and still gives me so much joy.
I got $200 in Barnes and Nobles and Amazon.com gift cards this Christmas season, and I spent all of it on ebooks. Not all the ebooks were about video games, but a good many of them were. Here’s a few of them:
This one is more a scholarly examination of the early video game era than a memoir of early video games, but it is cool. It also mentions Retroist.com!
A history of Nintendo. I hope it doesn’t reveal any dark secrets about the company I love. At least any I don’t already know.
Ditto this one.
This one is a reference book. It has at least one companion volume, maybe two, and would have been better to have on hard copy because it is one I’d rather flip through than read start to finish.
Add to that this one I checked out from the library.
So I have a lot of reading to do. When I get done with these books, I’ll let you know what I thought about them.
I think I mentioned the first part of this idea in ANESthetized. The fact that old video games couldn’t be won and never ended was what made The Legend of Zelda such a surprise. But Atari’s recent Facebook post puts a much more pessimistic turn on this fact.
A few weeks ago I learned about Video Games by Daniel Cohen, and I just had to have it.
Video Games is a survey of the video game universe as it stood in the early 80s. Written for young adults, it covers arcade games, home systems, computer games, and even portable electronic games. It doesn’t give a world of information about any of these things, but it does give an okay overview. It also contains some information that was incredibly interesting, such as these screenshots of of Intellivision games that were in the works at the time of writing.
It also says that Pac-Man was also known as Packy. Really?
Now it would be easy to laugh at how simplistic as well as outdated this book is. But I have to admit that it was still a ton of fun to read. It didn’t tell me a lot, but it reminded me not only of the kind of books I used to read as a kid but also how I mined them for every bit of information I could. Books like these were my lifelines to my interests in the pre-Internet world, and for that they have a special place in my heart. I know an 8-year-old me would have loved this book, and a 38-year-old me liked it pretty well.
What? Arcadian isn’t on this list? Slight aside, the folks at TR picked some great books for this list, most of which I’d never heard of before. I’ve already bought Cohen’s Video Games, and I’m wanting to pick up the Pac-Mania books. How could I pass up humor like this?
If you want to see the rest of this list, or ask the TR folks why Arcadian isn’t on it, go here.
Amazon.com recommends lots of stuff. Some of it I am not at all interested in. Some of it I can’t believed they recommended at all. And some of it is right on the money. Brian Eddy’s Classic Video Games: The Golden Age 1971-1984 is one of those.
Amazon said, “You might like this,” and I said, “Yeah, I might.” So I downloaded the preview. Pretty soon I downloaded the whole book. It is very much like my Arcadian n that it gives a brief overview of the arcade games of this era. One exception is that Eddy gives more a sense of history than what I did/could. Another is that he has pictures. On my tablet Kindle app, those pictures look great.
Some have criticized the book as being short in length and on details, but in my opinion, Eddy gives me just what I’m looking for: portable nostalgia, the opportunity to open my tablet anytime I’m missing the neon lights and digitized sounds of the game of my youth and relived them for a moment. In reality, there is no way you can encapsulate the beauty and meaning of a golden age video game in a book. But you can evoke the feel. You can point to it. You can echo it. That’s what I wanted to do in Arcadian. I don’t know Eddy, and I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to do in Classic Video Games, but he did, and I thank him for it. I hope another volume is coming!
Pick up Classic Video Games: The Golden Age 1971-1984 here. It’s a little pricier than Arcadian, but it has pictures and there is a hard copy.
I searched Amazon’s Kindle store for “video games”. When I did, I found Classic Videogames Hardware 01.
This book has a kind of strange name, but it covers every classic video game system from the beginning of the home console era to the N64. In most cases, the authors cover the consoles themselves and then list ten of their “perfect” games. Most of the classics you know are here: Atari 2600, Intellivision, NES, Master System, etc. There are also some oddities I’d never heard of: Wonderswan, PC-FX, and various computers. The authors are from the UK, so they give a perspective on these consoles that I wasn’t used to. They also cover several consoles and computers that didn’t make it in the states. I was a little thrown off by some the consoles I didn’t know and the constant references to “pounds” instead of dollars, but I liked how indepth the reviews were. If you’re interested, you can Classic Videogames Hardware 01 on Amazon.com and Itunes.
Games weren’t just advertised on TV. They were advertised in comics as well. I was big into comes in the early days of the NES era. Spider-Man was taking on Firelord, then Hobgoblin, then the Sinister Synidicate, then X-Factor…mighty Marvel tradition indeed, and I couldn’t get enough!
Interspersed with all of the superhero antics were great ads for games, including this two-for-one which plugs both Contra and Jackal, two of my faves.
I spent quarter-hours if not hours studying this ad, noticing the difference between the Jackal guys and the Contra warriors, even trying to copy their facial expressions and poses (okay, not the one in the back). It is one of the best NES print ads of all time, and it is for two of the best NES games of all time.
In a part I cut out of the revised ANESthetized, I wondered why heroes in Nintendo games were always rescuing their girlfriends. Not every game followed this conceit, of course, even when the heroes were rescuing girls. Princess Toadstool was not Mario’s girlfriend as far as I know, nor was Zelda Link’s girlfriend. But lots of games did. Here are a few of the many games in which the heroes had to rescue their girlfriends:
Kung Fu – Thomas saves Sylvia
River City Ransom – Alex saves Cyndi
Double Dragon – Billy and Jimmy save Miriam
Adventures of Lolo – Lolo saves Lala
These are just a few of the hero-saves-girlfriend games that came to mind. And I really don’t have any problem with this conceit. I do have to wonder, though, why nobody in Nintendo-land was ever married. Why weren’t they ever saving their wives?
I barely mention the Sega Master System in ANESthetized, but the truth is that I spent a couple of months with the console in the waning days of 8-bit gaming. I hadn’t even heard of the SMS until after the Genesis was released, at which time it began appearing in the Toys R Us barbain bins. Since it was such a bargain, and since the Genesis had made a name for Sega, my friends and I picked it up. That makes the SMS just about the only example of backwards console awareness in my gaming history.
Those who know computers better than I say that the SMS was more powerful than the NES and that it’s colors were brighter. I don’t know about all that. I remember the SMS graphics (which was my only standard of measurement) being less than those on the NES. I also remember the SMS having a very ugly brand design. Where the NES had the black label/single game image design, the SMS had drawings over a grid.
Nice
Not so much
And where the NES had those beautiful gray square cartridges, the SMS had Atari 2600-like chunky, small cartridges which had just the game title and a red-and-black grid.
The console was pretty nice looking, though.
And the SMS had some good games. I could have done without Alex Kidd in Miracle World (which was built into my SMS, starting if the power was turned on when no game was inside. But there was also Phantasy Star (unbelievably aweseome), Trillion (pretty cool), and my favorite, Cloud Master.
The SMS also had a light gun, like the NES Zapper, and a few superfluous accessories, like the 3-D glasses.
Again, those in the know say the reason for the SMS’ failure in North America was the lack of third-party games (which Nintendo monopolized through their exclusive policies). That may well be true. To me, though, it just doesn’t seem as good as the NES. That’s not to say that it should be dismissed as all bad. It wasn’t. The couple months I spent with it were fun enough. It just wasn’t what the NES was, at least not to me.
