Transcript

SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 58 min · 11,269 words · 234 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published December 16, 2025 (58 min, about 11,269 words). It mentions 178 people, works and ideas, including Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Mario Brothers, Josh Malcolm Clark, Atari.

What this episode is about

The discussion explores how the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) revolutionized the gaming industry, particularly highlighting its impact on gaming culture and nostalgia for those growing up in the '80s and '90s. It contrasts the personal experiences of two hosts, one being a dedicated NES fan and the other who missed out on owning the console, while reflecting on the broader cultural significance of classic games like Mario and Zelda.

Key takeaways

  • NES revived gaming's heart; Atari's crash was the Great Video Game Depression.
  • Call it NES or NES: Tomato, tomahto; true gamers never agree on pronunciation!
  • A joystick away from addiction, as mind games double down outside game time.
  • Nintendo walk-in saved the day, resurrecting gaming from a pixelated grave.
  • Holiday nostalgia: NES vs. unexpected PlayStation ambush on one's leisure time!

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Nintendo Entertainment System, PlayStation, Josh Malcolm Clark, Nintendo Entertainment System
  2. – 10:00: Atari, Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Entertainment System, Donkey Kong
  3. – 15:00: Epic / Epoch Cassette Vision, Epoch Cassette Vision, Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Entertainment System
  4. – 20:00: Zapper, CES, Zapper, Consumer Electronics Show
  5. – 25:00: Gyroite, Nintendo Entertainment System, Lance Bar, Rob
  6. – 30:00: New York City, New York, Nintendo Entertainment System, Rob the Robot, Rob the Robot
  7. – 35:00: Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario, Super Mario Brothers
  8. – 40:00: Zapper, Zapper, Zapper, Nintendo Entertainment System
  9. – 45:00: Power Glove, Power Pad, Atari joystick, D-pad
  10. – 50:00: Tetris, Tetris, Tetris, Metroid
  11. – 55:00: Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo cartridge, The Legend of Zelda
  12. – 58:05: Nutter Butters, I Heart Radio, iHeart Radio, Little Debbie

Notable quotes from "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever"

  • Serving of nostalgia for anybody that's well probably Gen Xers would be my guess, but the episode is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever because boy oh boy did it. Please enjoy.
    about Nintendo Entertainment System · at
  • And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.
    about Tetris · at
  • Okay. So, one of the things like the Nintendo Entertainment System has a an amazingly great story to it.
    about Nintendo Entertainment System · at
  • Triggered it or was it the terrible games that really triggered the what's called the North American video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it?
    about Atari · at
  • Released what's called the Famcom or the Family Computer which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System that they released a couple years later in North America.
    about Family Computer · at
  • System and it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company, Hiroshi Yamuchi, told a couple of people Hey, redesign this in an hour. And they did. And Lance Bar was the guy…
    about Hiroshi Yamuchi · at
  • Control deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers.
    about Super Mario Brothers · at
  • So, they call it the gaming watch, but that's where the D-pad came from. And Donkey Kong is a game that really took great advantage of the D-pad. And it was it just seemed like…
    about Donkey Kong · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Josh Malcolm Clark — Person · Co-host · 3 mentions · first at
    Co-host who frames the episode, narrates much of the NES history, and references sources (e.g., Wired) while discussing Nintendo’s US strategy.
    Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we are 10 years old right now and this is stuff you should know.
  • Hiroshi Yamuchi — Person · Referenced executive / decision-maker · 2 mentions · first at
    Referred to as Nintendo's head (Hiroshi Yamauchi spelled in transcript as Yamuchi), who pushed rapid development and bold moves (Famicom -> NES, US rollout strategy).
  • Lance Bar — Person · Referenced designer · 2 mentions · first at
    Named as the designer responsible for redesigning the NES physical form (front-loading cartridge slot) and designing the Zapper; credited with quick redesign after the AVS flop.
    Yamuchi, told a couple of people Hey, redesign this in an hour. And they did. And Lance Bar was the guy who did it and he knocked it out of the park because the NES as it…
  • Shigeru Miyamoto — Person · Referenced creator / game designer · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the famed designer of Super Mario Bros. (and linked to Zelda), used to explain why Nintendo’s games were 'light years ahead.'
    And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.
  • Shagaru Miiamoto — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    The designer of Super Mario Brothers, credited with revolutionizing gameplay.
    Uses the word light years ahead of everything else. Cuz it really was. there was a guy named Shagaru Miiamoto.
  • Chris Kohler — Person · Referenced journalist / commentator · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a Wired writer whose framing underscores how 'dead' console games seemed versus PCs, reinforcing the uphill battle Nintendo faced.
    But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in Wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead.
  • Hiroshi Yamauchi — Person · 21 mentions
  • Verona Strickland — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    And I did a full Atari guest two-parter with Strickland.
  • Lance Barr — Person · 2 mentions
  • Soda Popinski — Person · 2 mentions
  • Doug Dillard — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah, I still enjoy it, though. It's a lot of fun. but yeah, my buddy Doug Dillard growing up had one rich friend and he had a Intellivision and so I had kind of some fun today…
  • Nintendrew — Person · 1 mention · first at
    I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendrew and he has a video called 10 weird NES facts and he talks about that keychip…
  • Fred Savage — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Could get out of the glove, right? I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a Power Glove and plays Rad Racer. So, he's using…
  • Taik Kim — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. There's a writer, a game pro named Taik Kim who came up with this cool analogy that Dave found which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming and that.
  • John Pendell — Person · 1 mention · first at
    I've seen ads for it but I can't recall the controller. Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend John Pendell, who you know John he's backstage in New York. John, he had the N64.…
  • Vodka Drunkinski — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Up and I think I remember this, but the arcade Punchout had a boxer, the Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkinski.
  • Great Tiger — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Very familiar with Soda Papinsky. And one of the one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a gem on it, his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch.
  • Frankie Bitruelloo — Person · 1 mention · first at
    His name was Frankie Bitruelloo. And it was a very rudimentary study, but how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into and you're going to.
  • Cormac McCarthy — Person · 1 mention
  • Joe Pesci — Person · 1 mention
  • Scott J. Link — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

  • The Road — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    Original NES. This could have been a two-parter if we would have gone down the road of the 64. we're not even talking about the music today at all.

Companies & orgs

  • Atari — Company · Historical competitor / context · 4 mentions · first at
    Used throughout as the dominant pre-crash company whose decline (1983 crash, poor games like ET) set the stage for Nintendo's entry and the North American crash context.
  • Nintendo of America — Company · Regional subsidiary / operator · 4 mentions
    Implied as the organizational arm responsible for the North American NES rollout and marketing efforts.
    Something. And they had enough hubris, enough I guess at least self asssurance that they set their sights on North America again, which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video games were concerned.
  • FTC — Company · Regulatory actor · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced because Nintendo's licensing practices (lockout chips, strict third-party controls) drew FTC scrutiny; the FTC is cited as the regulator that would 'sniff around'.
    Yeah. That they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.
  • Konami — Company · Competitor · 1 mention · first at
    A game developer known for creating Contra and the famous Konami code.
    Famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba, start. And that's called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra.
  • iHeart Radio — Company · Sponsor · 2 mentions · first at
    The production company behind the podcast, mentioned in the introduction.
    Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
  • Epoch — Company · 2 mentions
  • Gaming Historian — Company · 1 mention · first at
    And they came up with one and Dave found this is gaming historian. Is it a I know it had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a full website?
  • Twisted Sister — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Ten Gen — Company · 1 mention · first at
    And there were other companies out there trying to bootleled games. still there was one called Ten Gen that had a few licensed games, but they wanted more money. And so, they…
  • Bandai — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Was it had another use from another company. it was called a fun and fitness pad from Bandai and Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, Hey, now you can…
  • Konami — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba, start. And that's called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra.
  • Blockbuster — Company · 1 mention · first at
    There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if…
  • Little Debbie — Company · 1 mention · first at
    It, which was weird cuz I love both. I don't I never buy these, of course, but boy, a Little Debbie Nutty Bar.
  • Dave & Buster's — Company · 1 mention
  • United States Patent Office — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • Nintendo Entertainment System — Product · Case study / central product · 14 mentions · first at
    The episode centers on how the NES revived and reshaped the North American video game industry; hosts discuss its history, hardware design, marketing and cultural impact.
  • Nintendo Entertainment System — Product · Business focus · 8 mentions · first at
    Central topic of the episode, discussing its impact on the gaming industry and its revolutionary design.
  • Super Mario Brothers — Product · Key product / iconic game · 4 mentions · first at
    Cited as a pivotal bundled game that drove NES sales and changed gameplay design — extensive discussion about its lasting gameplay, design by Shigeru Miyamoto and its role in the NES's success.
  • Super Mario Brothers — Product · Case study · 4 mentions · first at
    Highlighted as a groundbreaking game that revolutionized gameplay and was bundled with the NES.
    Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. that was a game that came along in with actually with the Famicom in 1985 and it was just it was the most advanced.
  • Tetris — Product · Referenced work · 5 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as an addictive game that was popular on the Game Boy and had a significant cultural impact.
  • Donkey Kong — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a successful arcade game that transitioned to the NES.
  • Family Computer — Product · Predecessor · 1 mention · first at
    The Japanese version of the NES that preceded its North American release.
  • Robotic Operating Buddy — Product · Marketing tool · 1 mention · first at
    Used as a marketing ploy to introduce the NES to the North American market.
    Test market who had bought the Nintendo and I think like the vast majority of them said that Rob the robot was the reason they had bought the whole system to get that robot.…
  • Zapper — Product · Peripheral / marketing example · 7 mentions · first at
    Discussed as an NES peripheral (light gun) used with Duck Hunt; hosts explain how it worked (light detector) and its popularity among kids.
    Turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck that…
  • Rob — Product · Marketing tool · 3 mentions · first at
    Described as a marketing ploy to introduce the NES, though it was slow and eventually phased out.
    They shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob, the RO, the robotic operating buddy, which is a very sweet name. Yeah, you…
  • Rob the Robot — Product · Peripheral / marketing Trojan horse · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed as Nintendo's 'Robotic Operating Buddy' used as a marketing Trojan horse to get parents/kids to accept the system; hosts describe its slow functionality and limited game support (Gyromite) and its role in early CES demonstrations.
    They managed to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door and thanks to a guy named Lance Bar he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit more about.
  • Zapper Gun — Product · Accessory · 3 mentions · first at
    Highlighted as an innovative accessory for the NES, enhancing gameplay.
    And thanks to a guy named Lance Bar he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a sec, but he designed it as a front loading system, which made sort of people think.
  • Rob the Robot — Product · Marketing tool · 2 mentions · first at
    Described as a marketing ploy to introduce the NES to the North American market, though it was ultimately unsuccessful.
    Received toys and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob, the RO, the robotic operating buddy…
  • Nintendo Power — Product · Marketing / community tool · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as Nintendo's magazine used for community-building, strategy sharing and supporting the platform; cited among marketing tactics (call center, tournaments).
    They had Nintendo Power magazine which is a very big deal. And they created the first, gaming championships where and these are still just huge, where kids.
  • Duck Hunt — Product · Popular bundled game / zapper example · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as one of the successful games using the Zapper peripheral and as a title kids loved to play; part of early NES game lineup.
    Those peripheries were not a success, because that Zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids love to play.
  • Zapper — Product · Accessory · 7 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a light gun accessory for the NES, used in games like Duck Hunt.
    Turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck that…
  • Tetris — Product · Referenced game · 5 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as an addictive game that was popular on the Game Boy, contributing to Nintendo's success.
    And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.
  • Gyroite — Product · Game demonstrating Rob accessory · 5 mentions · first at
    Named as one of the limited games that worked with Rob (Gyromite / Gyroite referenced) and showcased at CES; used as an example of Rob's slow interaction.
    Didn't I mean it functioned as it should but like I said it's super slow. they only ended up having a couple of games where you could use the robot and it was just sort of a…
  • Game Boy — Product · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a platform where Tetris was played, contributing to its popularity.
    And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.
  • Epic / Epoch Cassette Vision — Product · Predecessor / competitor in Japan · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as the dominant Japanese console before the Famicom; used to explain the Japanese market context and what the Famicom displaced.
    And that led to a big I think actually there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in 1981. And it was sort of the biggest thing in Japan at the time, but Well, I think it was kind of the only.
  • Zapper Gun — Product · Accessory · 3 mentions · first at
    An innovative accessory for the NES that enhanced gameplay, particularly with the game Duck Hunt.
    Turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck that…
  • Legend of Zelda — Product · Referenced game · 3 mentions · first at
    Highlighted as an innovative open-world game that was a significant part of Nintendo's game library.
    You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda.
  • Metroid — Product · Notable game / exploration example · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as an influential NES-era title encouraging exploration and non-linear progression; host describes renting it repeatedly and not beating it.
    There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly,.
  • PlayStation — Product · Competitor · 5 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a later gaming console that some transitioned to after the NES.
    Yeah. later in college, my good friend Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and then I got on the PlayStation train. But I It's just funny reading through this,.
  • Game Boy — Product · Portable example / host's experience · 3 mentions · first at
    Hosts mention playing Tetris and Mario on Game Boy as part of personal nostalgia and broader context of Nintendo's product lineup.
    And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.
  • Donkey Kong — Product · Referenced game · 3 mentions · first at
    An early arcade game by Nintendo that was part of the company's success before the NES.
    You're talking about cuz we have arcades over here that are flourishing. we invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.
  • Power Pad — Product · Accessory · 3 mentions · first at
    A peripheral for the NES that allowed for physical interaction with games, though it was not widely adopted.
    Of other peripherals that came along that were as meh as Rob was, maybe even a little me. One was the power pad. The other was the power glove. And again, these were things…
  • Power Glove — Product · Accessory · 3 mentions · first at
    An innovative but ultimately unsuccessful accessory for the NES that was ahead of its time.
    That were as meh as Rob was, maybe even a little me. One was the power pad. The other was the power glove. And again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance…
  • Punch Out — Product · Referenced game · 3 mentions · first at
    A popular boxing game for the NES that was enhanced by the Power Glove accessory.
    Imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, Power Glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove,.
  • Contra — Product · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a game that popularized the Konami code, a famous cheat code.
    But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you.
  • Contra — Product · Referenced game · 2 mentions · first at
    A popular shooter game for the NES that was known for its difficulty and the famous Konami code.
    But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you.
  • Duck Hunt — Product · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as a popular game that utilized the NES Zapper gun.
    Those peripheries were not a success, because that Zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids love to play.
  • NES — Product · 12 mentions
  • Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) — Product · 10 mentions
  • Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) — Product · 8 mentions
  • Super Mario — Product · 7 mentions · first at
    My roommate had one, so that's where I first started playing Super Mario World.
  • Zapper — Product · 7 mentions · first at
    We'll explain how all this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it had a little ray gun, a little zapper.
  • Directional pad (D-pad) — Product · 6 mentions
  • Nintendo Entertainment System — Product · 5 mentions · first at
    Well probably Gen Xers would be my guess, but the episode is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever because boy oh boy did it. Please enjoy.
  • Super Mario Brothers — Product · 4 mentions · first at
    Control deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers.

Concepts & topics

  • Konami Code — Concept · Game culture / cheat-code example · 2 mentions · first at
    Used as an example of an important cultural/gameplay mechanic that originated in NES-era development (Up, Up, Down, Down...). Hosts explain its origin with Konami games (Gradius/Contra) and its effect (extra lives).
    Him so he wouldn't have to start over every time. and is extraordinarily famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba, start. And that's called the Konami code…
  • Super Mario Bros. — Concept · 7 mentions
  • Tetris — Concept · 5 mentions · first at
    And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.
  • Gyromite — Concept · 5 mentions
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — Concept · 4 mentions
  • Lockout chip (lock-and-key chip system) — Concept · 4 mentions
  • Donkey Kong — Concept · 3 mentions · first at
    You're talking about cuz we have arcades over here that are flourishing. we invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.
  • Punch-Out!! — Concept · 3 mentions · first at
    Imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, Power Glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove,.
  • E.T. (Atari game) — Concept · 3 mentions
  • Video game crash of 1983 (North American video game crash) — Concept · 3 mentions
  • Donkey Kong Jr. — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    You're talking about cuz we have arcades over here that are flourishing. we invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.
  • The Legend of Zelda — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda.
  • FTC investigation — Concept · 2 mentions
  • Trojan horse (marketing metaphor) — Concept · 2 mentions
  • Mario Kart — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    And I also did not own one. So, like I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these classic games. eventually in college, I remember it had to have been a Super Nintendo in like Sure.
  • Super Mario World — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    My roommate had one, so that's where I first started playing Super Mario World.
  • Mortal Kombat — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Good friend Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and then I got on the PlayStation train. But I It's just funny reading through this, I was I played some of these games.
  • Street Fighter — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Good friend Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and then I got on the PlayStation train. But I It's just funny reading through this, I was I played some of these games.
  • Satanic panic — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Like I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily.
  • Castlevania — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Exactly. Yes. I played Wolf. Oh, I'm so glad you said that cuz I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disc and I'm it came out in 1990. I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man.
  • Wolfenstein — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    It came out in 1990. I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man.
  • The Walking Dead — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    And The Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said, We are going to save you and bring you into the future. And it was a tough sell at first in the US because like you said the video game.
  • Oregon Trail — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Were I'm glad that went away, basically. And now we have these PCs in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever. And they seem happy enough with that.
  • I Want to Rock — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Can make it anywhere. And they did make it in New York. Oh, I can't remember. I want to rock.
  • Nintendo Power — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    They had Nintendo Power magazine which is a very big deal. And they created the first, gaming championships where and these are still just huge, where kids.
  • Esports — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can make the case that they created the esports phenomena. They laid the groundwork for it to come at least, right?
  • Duck Hunt — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Those peripheries were not a success, because that Zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids love to play.
  • The Wizard — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Could get out of the glove, right? I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a Power Glove and plays Rad Racer. So, he's using…
  • Rad Racer — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    The Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a Power Glove and plays Rad Racer. So, he's using it like he's he's steering, but it just they didn't really develop any game specifically for the Power Glove. So, I think.
  • Console gaming — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    What Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming and that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like you…
  • Language of console gaming — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    What Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming and that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like you…
  • Cheat code — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    It's pretty funny. So, the another thing that those controllers did was give us the cheat code, which I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick, but they…
  • Open world game — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. And it was certainly not the first open world game, but and I think there's not a solid agreement on what that was. there are some arguments for the great Atari game Adventure. that was the first open.
  • GoldenEye — Concept · 1 mention
  • Patent law / legal gray area — Concept · 1 mention
  • Popeye (game) — Concept · 1 mention
  • Quality control via licensing/lockout system — Concept · 1 mention
  • Wii — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

  • NES — Place · Abbreviation / alternate name · 5 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as the commonly used abbreviation for the Nintendo Entertainment System; hosts discuss that some people call it NES.
    Definitely associate the NES or other I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the NES. Did you know that?
  • New York City, New York — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at
    The initial test market for the NES, where its success led to a national rollout.
    So, they decide it was such a, eye grabber at CES that they decided, All right, let's go to New York City and let's test it out there in one city, roll it out, see what…
  • CES — Event · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    The Consumer Electronics Show where Nintendo initially failed to generate interest in the NES before redesigning it.
    So they took it to CES, the January version. I think even back then was in Vegas. but it's Sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right?
  • Consumer Electronics Show — Event · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the venue where Nintendo introduced the NES to the North American market.
    So they took it to CES, the January version. I think even back then was in Vegas. but it's Sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right?
  • Universal Studios Hollywood — Place · Event venue / marketing site · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced as the venue for Nintendo's early gaming championships and promotional events (grand championships), part of Nintendo's marketing push.
    Battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood.
  • Topeka, Kansas — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Kind of a soft test release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas or somewhere that no one cares about, right? But they went full bore and hit New York…

Media & podcasts

  • The Legend of Zelda — Character · Mentioned as a game title referenced in context of NES-era Nintendo games · 2 mentions · first at
    Represents a key NES-era title cited in the transcript to illustrate classic Nintendo games and nostalgia
    And that's not to say that kids my age weren't playing it, but like it really boomed in popularity right when I was sort of like 15, 16 and starting to sort of drive and get.
  • Contra — Media · Example game / cultural touchstone · 2 mentions · first at
    Referenced as a seminal NES-era shooter that popularized use of the Konami code (30 lives) and as an example of NES-era influential games.
    Called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra.
  • Nintendo Power — Media · Marketing tool · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as a magazine that was part of Nintendo's marketing strategy.
    They had Nintendo Power magazine which is a very big deal. And they created the first, gaming championships where and these are still just huge, where kids.
  • Wired — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the source of an article describing the video game industry's state before the NES.
    But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in Wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead.
  • I Want to Rock — Media · Referenced song / cultural aside · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in passing as a song the hosts reference (Twisted Sister 'I Want to Rock' appears linked to personal anecdotes), part of episode banter.
    I Want to Rock. I want to hear that version.

Sponsors

  • I Heart Radio — Sponsor · Production / distribution · 2 mentions · first at
    Identified as the production network for the podcast (Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio), mentioned in opening/closing sponsor context.
    Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Full transcript with timestamps

Hey everybody, Chuck here again continuing on with our 12 days of Christmas toys playlist. Uh right now I'm going to serve up a delicious serving of nostalgia for anybody that's well probably Gen Xers would be my guess, but uh the episode is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever because boy oh boy did it. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we are 10 years old right now and this is stuff you should know.

Can I go ahead and admit something? Oh, yes. I'm nervous though. But yes, go ahead. Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo, the NES system.

Uh, and that's not to say that kids my age weren't playing it, but like it really boomed in popularity right when I was sort of like 15, 16

and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world, right? Uh, and I also did not own one. So, like I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Uh eventually in college, I remember it had to have been a Super Nintendo in like

Sure. '92. Yeah. Uh my roommate had one, so that's where I first started playing uh Super Mario World.

Mhm. And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario on the Game Boy that my brother had. But I was I've never owned a Nintendo.

Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and I was 10 11 years old, not driving yet. And it was and I owned one, too.

So, it was definitely in my wheelhouse. Yeah. I mean, later in college, my um my good friend Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and

then I got on the PlayStation train. But I It's just funny reading through this, I was like, I played some of these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo kid.

Yeah, I have to say I jumped from Nintendo. Oh, I never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I have friends who had those. Um, went off into the N64 world with the Golden Eye. Yeah, you played that, right?

My friend John had one of those and I played a lot of that. That was so great. And then I I got the first PlayStation 2, the first PlayStation. I mean, not to be confusing.

Um, and at that point, I realized that I was thinking about how to play games while I was not playing games, like when I was just walking around living life. And I made a decision, a very fateful decision that I've never regretted, that I was going to give up video games because I was too addicted to them. Oh, wow. And this is this was college and I it was I never looked back.

Wow. So, you were into them, huh? I was big time into them. Yeah. It was It was like this is if if it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it, then yes, I was a little too into them. If you ask me, I was never a gamer or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games. Maybe a little too much. In your favor, uh, in your defense, rather, I would say that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world

as like Tetris boards occasionally if you're into it. Yeah. Uh, and you know, my deal is, you know, I've said before is I I was heavy Atari kid, big- time arcade kid,

and then played this kind of stuff with friends here and there, and then now every year I'll usually, or every couple years, I'll get two or three PlayStation games, play them obsessively for a couple of months, and then it sits for nine months to a year.

Yeah, I'm with you. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to play video games, you know.

Yeah, I I still enjoy it, though. It's a lot of fun. Uh but yeah, my my buddy Doug Dillard growing up had one rich friend and he had a Intellivision and so I had kind of some fun today watching the old cuz I remember thinking the Intellivision football was really great and when I looked at it today I mean it's very very basic but it was pretty good still like you're calling plays and uh all the sounds came flooding back. It was a big rush of nostalgia.

Yeah. Um it's somehow two-bit graphics I think. Yeah. And this, to be clear, what we're going to talk about today is the the original NES. This could have been a two-parter if we would have gone down the road of the 64. Like, we're not even talking about the music today at all.

No. No. Huh. Uh, so there was plenty more material here, but this is just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season.

Yeah. Because I mean, it's the holidays, so one of the greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisce nostalgically about holidays past. And I definitely associate the NES or other I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the NES. Did you know that?

No. Really? Yeah. Some actual like legit gamers call it NES. Other people call it NES. And apparently there's some big disagreement. I've always called it NES.

Yeah. But I always associate the NES with a pretty significant portion of my life. But it like it always is tied to Christmas as well.

All right. Well, you're going to wax nostalgic a bit more, even though I I did play a little bit of these here and there.

Okay. So, um, one of the things like the the Nintendo Entertainment System has a an amazingly great story to it.

Like, it's it's just so fun to tell because Nintendo came along at a time when uh the video game market in North America had so totally bottomed out

that people looked at video games. Like imagine, think about how big Atari was. People looked at it, it crashed so hard that they it was a fad that was never coming back. Like it had already lived its life.

Yeah. And Nintendo walked into this burning um city that was the video game industry and said,

"Let's give this another shot." And they actually managed to succeed. Yeah. I mean, Atari was dead as disco. Uh we talked a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode.

Mhm. And I did a full Atari guest two-parter with uh Strickland. Yeah. Back in the day on uh on tech stuff.

I'll bet that was a fun one. It was a lot of fun. But yeah, uh ET came along and and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this one game. It was uh sort of a flash in the pan for a few years. And parents were also weighing in and saying, M

you know um I don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television. Like I I I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily. It was pre-satanic panic that it was more along the lines of you're rotting your brain.

Right. So um I I was that the thing that triggered it or was it the terrible terrible games that really triggered the what's called the North American video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it?

Well, I mean, I think it was a two-part thing. Like, kids got a little less interested because the games started to suck, quite frankly.

Uh, and then I think you also had parents beating the drum of Okay. Hey, and and Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The the 2600 and the 5200 came along.

I mean, rather the 5200 followed up and it was just okay. So, they needed something needed to happen and that thing that needed to happen was Nintendo.

Yeah. And also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered helped usher out video games was um the personal computer starting to come into the world.

Absolutely. And with the personal computer, you could like do your taxes, your kid could like practice math and they play games on floppy disc, too. So

Exactly. Yes. I played Wolf. Oh, I'm so glad you said that cuz I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disc and I'm like, it came out in 1990. Like, I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man.

You just made a a really great neural pathway circuit like connect completely in my brain.

That feels good. But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in Wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future. and anything that just played games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward.

Yeah, that was kind of like the the premise. So, just to get across, I don't want to like beat this drum too hard, but to get across how huge the crash was, the video game crash of North America. Um, in 1982, Atari rad in $2 billion, Atari alone. In 1983, they lost $536 million.

That's a swift fall. Yes. But that's how quickly that it happened. And so people basically if if it crashes that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's kind of where we were at in 1983.

Yeah. But as you pointed out, this was we need to keep pointing out this was the North American crash.

Yeah, good point. It did not happen in Japan. Um in 1983, they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about cuz we have arcades over here that are flourishing. Uh, we invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. still a lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun to play.

Yeah, for sure. And in 1980, this was a few years before the United States crash.

They said, "Hey, you know what? There's this gaming thing going on, uh, home gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get together a team over here to just sort of poke around because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys and we have for a long time and we're big in the arcade world, but we don't have a really a console system going, right?

And that led to uh a big I think actually there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in 1981. And it it was sort of the biggest thing in Japan at the time, but

Well, I think it was kind of the only thing in Japan at the time, too. Well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you could also say it was the smallest.

That's true. Uh but it was not a Nintendo product, right? No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was it was Nintendo came along as a rival to to this um cassette vision, Epoch Cassette Vision.

Um so, the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamuchi, um he apparently was this driving force. He had some really great people working for him in Japan and in North America, but he seems to have been this person who would be like, um, do this enormous undertaking and do it in an hour kind of thing. He kind of seems to have had a sense that there was a really narrow window that was open right now that could close at any time and that they needed to get this stuff done, but they also needed to do it really well and really right basically out of the gate. And they actually managed to because in 1983 after just a couple years of research and development they released what's called the Famcom or the Family Computer which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System that they released a couple years later in North America.

Yeah. I mean it's not very often that a head of a company or a boss comes along and says, "I want to do something better and cheaper than it what is currently out there." And it actually happened. Uh, and listeners at home, if you can look this stuff up as you go safely, please do because just seeing these all these various units we're going to talk about is really a lot of fun.

Yeah, they teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're like at that age. They're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy, but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on a shelf as a collector these days.

I think there's a lot of people who have that actually. Oh, I'm sure. Um, so look up the Epoch Cassette Vision cuz that's kind of fun. Uh, but the Famicom was this red and white box. Uh, it toploaded. It had two wired controllers and it had very importantly on the control pad. It had a it had the D-pad. It had the directional pad on on the left with the up and down, left and right arrows

and then an A and B button, which no one knew at the time, but that would kind of revolutionize the gaming world as, you know, they got a little fancier over the years, but it's still sort of that's still the bones of what a controller is.

Absolutely. like it was I I can never remember the full quote, but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane uh and got it right fully out of the gate, like tray tables and everything essentially.

It was like that's what they did with that that controller design. Uh and now you think about it, you look at it like the Nintendo brick and especially the um Famcom controllers, they look so old-fashioned.

Yeah. But if you can put yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan in 1983, if you looked around at the other stuff available, it was it was just from the future. And that was one of the things that Nintendo did really really well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought the future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and they gave it to everybody. It was a really like exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought to the present and it was all thanks to Nintendo basically.

So it retailed for about 150 bucks back then which is what close to 500 today? Yeah, 400 something like that.

All right. So I mean kind of on par with you know the range of even modern gaming. I mean what's the new PlayStation like? Five maybe.

I don't know. I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there. Five or six hundred bucks. Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was like for PlayStation 7? It was just people running around the real world. It was all like VR and augmented reality.

I don't remember that. It was pretty cool because it came out in like the '9s and you're like, "Oh, and we're pretty close to that now already, you know."

Oh, for sure. Uh they they bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. games and the Popeye games, which uh were basically about the same quality as you would get at the arcade.

Yeah, it was huge. It was a huge deal. I mean, especially if you grew up playing Atari. Uh, I loved Atari, but Atari was Atari and it had a lot of limits. And this was, you know, you went to the arcade so you could play games better than Atari. Now you could do it at home,

right? Yeah. So, that was an enormous progression. But it wasn't just like the graphics, the quality of the the look of it. It was also the game play, too. Like, it was way more fun than most of the games you were going to play on an Atari. It was just funner to play some of these um Famcom games. Um and it it took off like a rocket. Uh it knocked the Epoch um cassette vision right off of the top place

into the history books basically essentially. Yeah. They sold half a million units uh in two months after its release. Uh I think by the end of 1984 they'd sold 2 and a half million units. So in about a year or so and they were like okay I think we're definitely on to something. And they had enough hubris, enough I guess at least self asssurance that they set their sights on North America again, which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video games were concerned.

It's a great spot for a break. I think so, too. All right. I think where we left off uh the United States was a version of Corormack McCarthy's The Road.

Yeah. And The Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said, "We are going to save you and bring you into the future." And it was a tough sell at first in the US because like you said the video game uh craze, for lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone. This was 1985. Parents were still not, you know, they were like, "I'm glad that went away," basically. And now we have these PCs in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever. And they seem happy enough with that.

And uh Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew it was going to be a tougher cell. They knew so they knew they had to come up with something awesome. And their first crack at that was something called the the AVS, the advanced video system. And they said, "We'll give it a keyboard, so it looks like a computer.

It'll have a little cassette disc drive. It'll be able to do some stuff. It'll But it, you know, they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick. It had a keyboard, like a musical keyboard,

and it had this uh wireless, which is We'll explain how all this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it had a little ray gun, a little zapper.

Yeah. And you really said a mouthful with the word wireless, man. This was 1985 and this advanced video system came out with wireless controllers.

Like it was that's really impressive and it was really slick looking too. Like really futuristic looking, but also yes, they put enough computer um peripherals in it that it did it didn't look like a video game system, right? Yeah.

So they they took it to CES, the the January um version. I think even back then was in Vegas. Um, but it's Sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right?

Yeah. I never been to that. Have you? No. Huh. Strickland has great stories from it, though.

Yeah. He goes every year, I think. I think so. But at CES in January of 1985, they're like, "Here you go, everybody. Here's the future, the advanced video system." And no one cared at all about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play, to mess around. No one could have cared less about that thing.

Yeah. Which is a little bit surprising looking back. Uh because the games were good and they knew that I I guess they were just a little gunshy. Uh but it seems like Atari made so much money.

I'm surprised there wasn't someone that was like, "Hey, maybe round two uh is going to be a real thing." But it, you know, it didn't work. They didn't get any response.

No. And I think that really goes to just kind of underline just how bad a reputation video games had because you know Dave points out that um the the consoles that have been going for like $1 $150 the year before these retailers were stuck with them and they were selling them for like 40 bucks which is how much the the games used to go for. Now the games were like $4. So the the retailers have been so badly burned. I think they all got caught with these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they were like never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against, which is as Dave Dave again Dave helped us with this as he points out you were either a very foolish company to try this or a very smart one because again it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant that there was no competition in this enormous market right now.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh so they knew they had to have almost like a trick to get their foot in the door. Mhm.

And they came up with one and um Dave found this uh is gaming historian. Is it a I know it had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a full website?

I don't know. All I know is that the the YouTube channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that are really interesting.

It's good stuff. But someone at Gaming Historian came up with this very apt metaphor about a Trojan horse. And that's kind of what they were looking for was a way to get these things in the home by almost tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system and it was more just sort of like a toy cuz kids still got and bought or uh you know received toys and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob, the RO, the robotic operating buddy, which is a very sweet name. Yeah,

you should go look at Rob online and especially YouTube videos of Rob in action

and just be prepared for the speed of Rob, right? But the thing is Rob was a robot. He moved and he functioned. He interacted with the games that they came up with

very slowly, right? Very slowly. But this was a time where like robots were kind of hard to come by. They were not all of a sudden there's like a robot and it was one of the greatest strokes of of marketing genius that any company's ever come up with as we'll see.

Yeah. I mean what they ended up with was a robot that didn't uh I mean it functioned as it should but like I said it's super super slow. they only ended up having a couple of games where you could use the robot

and it was just sort of a sneaky way to get these uh consoles in the door and because it was all part of the same system and and that's how it worked. They they managed to get the little Trojan horse robot through the door

and uh thanks to a guy named uh Lance Bar uh he he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a sec,

but he designed it as a front loading system, which made sort of people think of VCRs. It was also a very um they call a zero force solution, so there wasn't a lot of wear on the on the uh cartridges, and it, you know, just worked really well.

Plus, it it looked, like you said, it looked like a VCR. Those were wildly popular at the time. And um I don't think we said Chuck, so that January CES was um just a complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time coming up with the advanced um video system and it it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company, Hiroshi Yamuchi, told a couple of people like, "Hey, redesign this in an hour." And they did. And Lance Bar was the guy who did it and he knocked it out of the park because the NES as it debuted later on in in North America was essentially what he came up with in that one hour that he was given to do it. Um, so they had they did all this and had it done in time for the July 1985 CES, like 6 months after that huge colossal failure. They went back to the drawing board and came back in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System fully fleshed out, including Robot and Zapper Gun.

Well, notably Robot because that's what all anyone cared about at first. Yeah, for sure.

Like at CES, the the NES system was sort of to the side and everyone was just trying to get their hands on Rob

and play Gyroite, right? Which I'm telling you, you got to just spend 5 minutes watching Rob play this game because it shows a split screen of the the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which really isn't much, and then Rob just very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin.

Yeah. And was it the um the um game historian video that that really kind of went into detail about how Rob played and setting up his accessories and everything?

I watched a bunch of them. Yeah. I'm not sure. Okay. I think it was that one. If not, it was another one I saw where they they really kind of showed like the the idea of Rob was pretty ingenious. Like he he was player two, but you were actually playing together. Like you in Gyroite, you were kind of running through this maze. And there were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get Rob to do it for you. And again, he would so slowly. Yeah. Get get an eye exam and your glasses made in an hour or two. Um and then Yeah. he would have completed that and you could advance to the next column or whatever. It was a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it just the execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on the player two controller. So if you got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you you could just push the buttons on the player two controller yourself

and play Gyroite that way. But the point was they they don't seem in retrospect to have really thought Rob was going to take off. Um, in fact, the games that that they he came with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the North American version of these. They just put like kind of this like um like fix on it that made it compatible with the North American system. But when you loaded up Gyroite, the the um the intro screen showed the Japanese name for it

at the very beginning of it. I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah,

I don't know. Maybe it's a memory. Um, it may have just been like bootup screens or something.

So, they decide uh it was such a, you know, eye grabber at CES that they decided, "All right, let's go to New York City and let's test it out there in one city, roll it out, see what happens." The New York retailer said, "Hey, buddy, I got, look at this. I got a warehouse full of Ataris over here that I can't even give away. Like, I don't know about a new gaming system." And they said, "All right, here's what we'll do. We will ship them to your store from Japan for free. We will you can just sell what you sell and pay us for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us. We'll take them back.

We'll send over a team in your store to set up these big marketing interactive marketing displays and we'll we'll take on all of the risk and all you guys got to do is try and sell some of these." And they went, "Yeah, all right. That was a great Joe Peshy, by the way. I meant to say

Oh, Joe Peshi. So, yeah, they did this in 500 stores. And normally when you when you did like kind of a a soft test release of something like this, you might choose like Topeka, Kansas or somewhere that no one cares about, right? But they went full bore and hit New York City. And I think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times that like it was based on that that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that you if you made it in New York, you can make it anywhere. And they they did make it in New York. Um Oh, I can't remember. I I want to rock.

Oh, okay. Um I Want to Rock. I want to hear that version. Man, I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up

of I Want to Rock. Yeah, the Twisted Sister song. You got that MP3 or MP4? I don't know what the kids these days.

Uh I bought it at Toys R Us. Awesome. Very cool. So, um, they they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York.

Yeah. Um, I think like 50,000, but it was enough for Yamuchi to say, "Let's give this a try. Let's let's roll out to the rest of the country." Another bold move because normally after your first test um uh like run, your first test market, you do like four or five more. And he said, "No, let's skip that. let's just go right to the rest of the country. And he did.

Yeah. And that was the the Christmas season, too. So, uh it I get the feeling that they were um they weren't super disappointed, but they weren't super pumped either. It it felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically, like it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going. Right.

And you wonder kind of the the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30,000 units, you know?

Yeah, for sure. I I saw somebody say like that Nintendo had Nintendo not been successful. Like the games as we know them today would definitely not exist.

We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes. Yeah. And going outside. Who needs it?

So that was 1985 holiday season. um n by 1986 they uh they hit on something else. So like one of the things that they did was take a poll of that people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo and I think like the vast majority of them said that um Rob the robot was the reason they had bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how that's how well that marketing ploy worked. So um Rob had kind of served his purpose though. Everyone knew he was slow. So, they weren't releasing more games for them. So, they came up with um originally the the the way you bought Nintendo, it was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers, the Zapper Gun.

Nice. Rob the robot, and all of Rob the robot's accessories, and then two games, one of which was Gyroite, that game you play with Rob, right?

Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of stuff. And of course, it was pretty expensive at the time. So, for the national roll out, they kept the deluxe set, but they also came up with something called the NES control deck, which was just the console, two um controllers, and very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers. And that was 99 bucks, and they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year.

Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. Uh that was a game that came along in uh with actually with the Famicom in 1985

and it was just it was the most advanced looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen. Uh it was uh as Dave points out it was the first game that you could play and and have fun playing for forever. Like you could go on and on finding the hidden worlds, finding the Easter eggs,

dropping down pipes into other sections that you and other levels that you never even knew existed. Uh banging away hidden bricks. Like there were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario Brothers. They created um sort of a new way of gaming which was like, "Hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How? Put Put your cigarette down. How would you like to play a video game, the same one for the next seven hours?

Hot dog. That's what I would have said. Hot dog. It was a whole new deal though cuz even when I played Atari, like we played for hours at a time, but I don't know, you played a game for 30 45 minutes and you'd pop in another one. That's why you had like 40 games in your in your controller box

because none of them you could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, "Okay, this is getting a little bit old." Even as a kid.

Yeah. So, the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything. Uh I I I've almost every single uh source that I've seen on the internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things uses the word light years ahead of everything else. Cuz it really was. Um, there was a guy named Shagaru Miiamoto. He designed the game very famously. He's he obviously became a legend overnight because of it.

They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves which uh kind of rolled out in a few different ways. They well they had a lot of advertising money that was sort of a given. They had about 20 million bucks

uh to spend off the bat which is a ton of money for advertising uh now and then. But they created a call center. uh they trained these uh players and these gamers basically to master these games and sit on the phone and you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could like walk you through a level that you couldn't get through.

Yeah. Uh they had Nintendo Power magazine which is a very big deal. And they created the first, you know, gaming championships where uh and these are still just huge, you know, where kids and adults alike, you know, now adults from all over the world come together to battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo uh with the the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood.

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can make the case that they created the esports phenomena. They laid the groundwork for it to come at least, right?

I would think so. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, um there was a poll of Nintendo players after the national roll out um that found that 95% of teens pled said that they recommended the NES to their friends. And I think 83% of adults and 85% of little kids. That is eyepopping. And that means that they were successful. They used Rob to get their feet in the door. And they knew that if they just got their console in the hands of Americans, they would change their minds forever about video games. And that's exactly what happened.

And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was uh they did their best to try and keep bad games uh from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari. The games got so bad. Uh, I mean there hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this in the ET uh game episode. Like ET gets unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release,

but there were far worse games released uh on the Atari system. Hundreds and hundreds of really, really bad games that just no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen to them. So they designed a a proprietary system where you could only play officially licensed NES games. They created a lock chip on their circuit board. And only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip uh to unlock it. And that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing.

They said even to third parties, they said you can only make uh two of these games a year. Like don't come at us with 200 games. Like make something really really good that we'll approve of and we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the cover.

Yeah. And then like they were really nitpicky too. Like as you were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo like um explanations of the game play, uh the characters, the design, all that stuff. And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff. Um, and that that's what you could do if you had 80% of the market uh as far as video games were because people had to come to you and they it was really smart for them to just kind of pro protect their intellectual property like that because it was so good. But um they were basically so um heavyhanded about it.

Yeah. That they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.

Yeah. I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around.

Yeah. Uh, and there were other companies out there trying to bootleled games. Uh, still there was one called Ten Gen that had a few licensed games, but they wanted more money. And so, they went to the patent office and said, "Hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and key chips?" They said, "Sure, here it is." And so they uh I I guess illegally because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won. So I I mean I don't know how all that patent law works. I wasn't I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off.

Uh well I you you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to have just ripped it off, but I think it's one of those things that it was like gray a legal gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court.

Oh, okay. Makes sense. You know what I mean? Yeah. So they just ten ten rolled the dice and they lost essentially.

Okay. Ten about is that it? I think so. I've seen I've actually heard it both ways. I got

I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this um YouTuber named Nintendrew and he has a video called 10 weird NES facts and he talks about that that um keychip thing where people were trying to get around it. And he said other companies um didn't even bother to come up with a chip. They just used a low voltage spike to to scramble the brains of the the lock chip um so that it wouldn't work anymore and now the game could be played. And as an example, he used a um he used a game from the developer Tree and it was for Bible adventures.

So if you put Bible No, I've never even heard of it. But if you put Bible Adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brain so that you could play Bible Adventures. I would think some of these might endanger the game console itself.

You'd think so. Yeah, it's pretty pretty reckless. Yeah. Jesus killed my Nintendo,

right? Uh so Rob uh did not work out. Poor Rob um did its job and got its foot the little robotic foot in the door,

but kids uh were like, "This is not so fun playing these games, these two games with Rob isn't where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games." Um, and so Rob, you know, Dave kind of funnily points out, Rob, uh, inevitably ended up kind of in the closet of every kid that probably owned one,

and it just became about that NES system. U, but that's not to say all those peripheries uh, were not a success, because that Zapper uh, and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids love to play.

Yeah. And um, I did not realize this, but the the laser gun, the what was it called? the zapper.

Mhm. It was not It didn't shoot anything at your TV because if you stop and think about it, your TV is not set up to accept that kind of thing or your TV screen certainly isn't. So, what happened instead is it was a light detector. So, when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your screen at in just a nancond, maybe a little slower than that, but still faster than you could register it, the screen went black and whatever ducks were on the screen turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light that was a duck that square and it would register it as a hit. That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious.

Very ingenious. Uh, and the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works.

Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the zapper and didn't go pew pew. Uh, all right. All right, I guess here at minute 40 we'll take our second break.

Oh man. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened next. Okay, Chuck. So, um, there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were as meh as Rob was, maybe even a little me. One was the power pad. The other was the power glove. And again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance the the NES system and made a bunch of money for everybody, but when you played with them, they weren't very good.

Yeah. The power pad is uh was a pad. It was it had another use from another company. Uh, it was called a fun and fitness pad from Bandai and Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, "Hey, now you can do like track and field games by running on this dumb thing." And that technology is still very popular. Like if you go to arcades, those dance games.

Mhm. Uh, and they're still like, uh, I played one not too long ago with my daughter, Dave and Busters, where you do like track and field stuff

is still around. But at home, a kid isn't going to do like they're inside kids cuz they don't want to be outside running around.

Yeah. They want to be on the couch. And so the power pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with uh Rob. Almost called him Rod. Uh uh and then that glove though, the power glove, it was really cool and it looks cool today. Like if I imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes

because it looks kind of neat. But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, uh, Power Glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove,

right? I also saw there's a a scene in the um Fred Savage movie, The Wizard, where this kid pulls out a Power Glove and plays Rad Racer. So, he's using it like he's he's steering, but it just they didn't really develop any game specifically for the Power Glove. So, I think

it was a little bit because um they Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually Nintendo came out with the Wii system which used

essentially the same kind of technology. Uh but yeah, it was ahead of its time. So, it ended up in the closet with the power pad and Rob.

Oh, man. Closet's getting full. Exactly. But as as kind of clunky as those were, that that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary.

Yeah. There's a writer, a game pro named Taik Kim who came up with this uh cool analogy that Dave found which is that uh what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what uh Kim referenced as the language of console gaming and that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like you know we were talking earlier about that first NES brick. You know it was all kind of there like they grew and morphed but that directional pad was revolutionary. Yeah.

Uh those buttons were revolutionary and they landed on the idea of a kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Uh thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess, now, but mainly thumbs.

Yeah, because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the the red button, but you used your whole hand to to move the joystick. This was just totally different. Um and it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything was laid out just right and it was it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that like you're saying it it just laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come. Even today still it's based on those.

Yeah, they had um it didn't start there. They had it initially on this uh handheld game called a game and watch which if you look this it looks like it's sort of the predecessor to the game boy.

Uh and it's called a game and watch because it had a a clock on it. So, it told told the time and it was a game. So, they call it the gaming watch, but that's where the D-pad came from. And uh Donkey Kong is a game that really took uh great advantage of of the D-pad. And um it was it just seemed like the natural and now they make the little mini joysticks which are which are great but uh some I think the uh I think the Xbox Do they have joysticks or do they still use that D-pad?

I I don't know remember Addicted so I gave it up. So you never played an Xbox? No.

I've seen ads for it but I can't recall the controller. Yeah, I played a lot of uh my same friend John Pendell, who you know John

he's backstage in New York. John, he had the N64. He was my Golden Eye partner, but he also got an Xbox and we were both addicted to uh the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.

Oh, yeah. That was a good game. And that was a game that carried with you in real life because if you played enough Tony Hawk,

you would just someone who'd never skateboarded, you would be walking around in the world and going like, I could totally grind that gutter on top of that that roof,

right? It's pretty funny. So, the um the another thing that those controllers did was um give us the cheat code, which I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick, but they really came along thanks to the uh the NES because there was a developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into a Nintendo game and it was really hard. So, he created this cheat code to make it uh easier to kind of game test for him so he wouldn't have to start over every time. and is extraordinarily famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba, start. And that's called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra.

I never I guess you played a lot of Contra probably, huh? For sure. Now, what was Contra? I don't even know.

It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where um I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and Aliens. Ah, okay.

Um, so you I if I remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world and you and your buddy are kind of like buff and wear like um headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair.

Oh yeah. Um but and you just shoot all sorts of stuff and it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons that shoot in different ways and at now you're like this is clunky and old but at the time it was there was just again nothing like it on the market.

Like a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the NES. Yeah, for sure. I I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar.

But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba start with Contra, if you did it at the intro screen um right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect.

Oh, that's great. uh they ended up it's a staggering number still considering that they were uh kept a sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced but

uh they ended up with close to 700 games for the original NES and I think in 95 is when they launched the 16bit No, no, no. Uh Super Nintendo was 91.

Mhm. And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario,

right? Uh, and then Super Mario 2 and 3 of course came along. Uh, we already mentioned Punch Out. That was I remember playing Punch Out. That was a great game. Uh, Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the world at the time. Uh, but there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up and I think I remember this, but the arcade Punchout uh, had a boxer, the Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkinski.

So great. And he got changed to Soda Papinsky very famously. Anyone who played Punch Out is very familiar with Soda Papinsky. And one of the one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a a gem on it,

his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch. Oh, and when I realized that you could predict it. Yeah. Uh, it just changed my life.

That's funny. It changed your life. And it did. Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know.

It's possible that whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. glass doors. Yeah, the glass ceiling. Yeah, different thing.

So, um, what else, Chuck? There's some other ones, too, that we have to shout out.

Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I played a lot on the Game Boy.

Mhm. Uh, talk about addictive. Tet Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today.

Yeah. Uh, when we go on road trips and stuff, Emily always still jokes like, "Chuck is going to Tetris this thing." Uh, it was great. Tetris is a very simple game. Uh if you've never played it, it's uh

oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing, but it's um it's a game where you stack different shaped blocks, right?

Uh and when you got solid lines, a line would disappear. And the whole goal of this game is to to keep those lines low. And as it built higher and higher and higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop and it would go seemingly go faster and faster.

Oh man, it like it could panic. Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up and they're dropping and it's like it drops right onto another block. You're up that high. It's just like, you know, it's just it is very stressful. It is. But it was fun.

Well, and it's also I think one of the more satisfying games ever invented uh in that when you would things would get a little hairy and if you got like two in a row of the exact ones that you needed

and made I think it was the Tetris when you got like was it like five or was it four?

I don't remember. probably four because the tallest block was four high. Was it four high? But it would make all four disappear at once. And if you got a couple of those and you went from like 70% high to down to like 20% in an instant,

there's no feeling like that. No. No. Tetris was pretty great. I loved it too. It was awesome.

I want to shout out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid, but it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't like some path you had to stick to. Like, you were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to the next level. That was pretty new, actually. So, Metroid was groundbreaking, too. And then there were other ones that were just fun to play like ice hockey. Did you play that one?

I I was always into sports games. So I was I played hockey and golf. Uh and what about tennis?

Tennis. I played all those. That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game? I'm not sure if I played that one.

That one was very addictive. RC ProAm Ducktales was actually a lot of fun. And then there was an Army one called Jackal. And then if you like skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was skate or die, which was pretty good. But my money was on Town and Country Designs, Skate and Surf, I think it was called, and you could skateboard and then you would go surf. And it was a lot of fun to play, too.

Yeah. I was so uh into the sports games, and I still play the PlayStation uh uh what is it? PGA 2K for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun. But uh I played I was addicted to the Atari beach volleyball game wherein it was two players aside and both players were connected to one another. They could not move independently. So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact same pattern.

Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds It reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog chases the the wagon from the Chuck Wagon commercials.

It's a branded game. Poop out. Yeah, who who would have thought? And then it would poop out like food and the dog would eat the food. That was like the point of the game.

Uh you should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda. That's a game again that by the time that came out, it it felt like a kids thing. Uh, and again, we couldn't afford a an NES. So, what was Zelda all about?

So, I never liked Zelda. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. It's almost like, have you ever um what's your grocery store? Kroger or Publix? I can't remember.

Uh, both, but generally Publix. Okay. So, there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and only Kroger. And I think my theory is is that they're laid out in a certain way that they appeal to one type of person and then the other one appeals to a different type of person. So if you are a Publix person and you go into a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place and reality is just slightly a skew. That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it, but I know some people like have essentially dedicated their lives to that game. like beyond playing it, like probably dress up as Link, the main character, and have like all sorts of toys and stuff like that.

Like Legend of Zelda was really big, too. Yeah. And it was um certainly not the first open world game, but uh and I think there's not a a solid agreement on what that was. Um there are some arguments for the great Atari game Adventure. Uh that was the first open world game I played where your avatar was a square.

Okay. But it was so much fun because you could go anywhere for the first time. It was really different and new.

But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as or The Legend of Zelda as one of the first open world like really good open world games, I guess,

right? Yeah. An advanced one. And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.

Yeah. What else you got, Chuck? I mean, not a whole lot else. So, I guess we should we should definitely talk about blowing in those cartridges cuz I even made that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working and

uh Dave who's sitting in for Jerry said, "Unplug the cable and just plug it back in." I said, "Should I blow in it?"

Right. And you don't want to actually. So, did you knew about that, right? I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges too.

So, that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, um you would take it out of the VCR like um entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it and you put it back in and it would work.

The thing is it it wasn't doing anything when you blew on it. You weren't helping it. It just hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when you took it out and put it back in, the chances were that you were making the correct connection then and then the game would work. But you being a dumb 10-year-old thought, "Well, I blew on it, so that fixed it." But there Nintendo long said, "Do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them." And no one listened until there was this guy who came along and actually ran a study, the first the world's first study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does.

And it didn't work. Uh this is in 2012. His name was Frankie Bitruelloo. And you know, it was a very rudimentary study, but I mean, how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into and you're going to have a game game you blow into.

And uh after how long did he do this? 30 days. Every day for 30 days. The guy spent a month blowing on this game.

Uh took this the blown cartridge out at the end and showed that it was it was corroded and kind of gross. And uh it's it's funny like you don't know what kid you always wonder who invented this cuz every kid did it because every kid saw another kid do it

who just got it from some other kid. But it was just sort of known like you would take it out and it was always the same thing. You would do it really quick and just go

and like run the cartridge back and forth in front of your mouth and then stick it back in.

Yeah. I mean that sound just triggered a a tidal wave of nostalgia in mech. That was amazing. I'll remember that.

So, don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges, people who still play Nintendo original NES.

Maybe we should follow this up again one day to to do one on the music of Nintendo.

No. Well, just sort of everything we didn't cover because the N64 was such a big deal. And

Sure. Uh I don't know. This could be a a two-parter separated by time and space.

Okay. I like that idea, Chuck. Let's definitely do that. Um, and in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed out a second part to this episode, of course, that means we've just unlocked listener mail.

Maybe next Christmas it can be our, you know, cuz this is kind of Every year we try to do a a toy, a famous toy.

Mhm. Yeah. No, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans. Oh, all right. Didn't consider them spilled.

Yeah, they're spilled all over. All right. Speaking of spilling all over, uh this is a correction that on something you said that I I don't know how I didn't catch this, but

oh boy, it's the uh we'll call it the great uh nutter butter controversy of 2022.

Uh hey guys, at the end of the vaudeville episode, Josh said it's weird how there were two types of nutter butters and they're totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shaped cookie. And I'm I don't remember what I said. I must have just been like, "Huh?" I think that's exactly what you said.

And he mentioned both have the same logo, same packaging. Uh, which is not true. Uh, just two different types of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what you're talking about cuz we had a bunch of people write in. Uh, the peanut shaped cookies are the Nutter Butters. Uh, Josh, but the other wafery treats are Nutty Buddy bars.

Mhm. Did you look Is this what you meant? No, I think this person is from an alternate bear and same bears dimension. Cuz in in our dimension that there it's the same thing. Same package, same name, same everything, just different cookies. I'm standing by it.

Is the Nutty Buddy what you were thinking of, though, is what I want to know. In that person's dimension, yes.

Okay. Okay. Uh it's easy to get them mixed up, guys, if you're not a true nut specialist. Uh and Chuck didn't pick uh pick up on it, which was weird cuz I love both. I don't I never buy these, of course, but boy, a Little Debbie Nutty Bar. So so good.

I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters, the kind of wafery one. I think you would really like it.

That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy. No, that's the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying.

Okay. Oh man. Who who wrote this email? Uh this is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever.

So George says, "PS, got to go. It's raining donuts again outside." Thanks a lot, George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension. Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too. And if you want to be like George and reach out and say hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to stuffodcast@ iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iMheart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever"?

Josh Malcolm Clark (Host), Chris Kohler (Referenced journalist / commentator).

What is "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever" about?

The discussion explores how the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) revolutionized the gaming industry, particularly highlighting its impact on gaming culture and nostalgia for those growing up in the '80s and '90s. It contrasts the personal experiences of two hosts, one being a dedicated NES fan and the other who missed out on owning the console, while reflecting on the broader cultural…

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

178 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Mario Brothers, Josh Malcolm Clark, Atari, Super Mario Brothers. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever"?

The episode runs 58 min; the transcript is about 11,269 words in 234 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated February 24, 2026.