Today we’ll be going back in time to 1988 – a time when Nintendo was booming and the NES was becoming the most successful home video gaming console of its time.
It’s no secret that I love Nintendo. When I was born in 1986 my parents had already purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System and had owned an Atari for many years. My mother gave me her favorite NES game – The Legend of Zelda – when I was four years old, and I was immediately hooked. And although my parents stopped playing video games around when the N64 came out (it was 3D and had moved beyond what my parents loved in classic gaming), they still bought us Nintendo games every year at Christmas. (Something for which I am truly grateful. I still have every cartridge and they all work beautifully.)
So when a friend sent me this VHS upload of an old 20/20 segment about Nintendo in 1988, I found it to be the perfect opportunity to discuss Nintendo ‘then and now’ – chip shortages, video games as a relatively new form of home entertainment, the fear of violence in video games, and the wild suspicions once held that video games could possibly make children go “brain-dead!”
NUTS FOR NINTENDO special on ABC news 20/20 from 1988 from Steven Hertz on Vimeo.
In 1988, America was wrapped up in the “chip shortages” that caused NES games to be extremely hard to get around the holidays. This was due to the fact that Nintendo could not produce enough memory chips required for use in each cartridge. Rumor has it that Nintendo didn’t want to pay higher prices for other companies to provide them with additional memory chip supply, so they continued to have shortages through each holiday season.
Although Nintendo has always had a history of shortages (like the chip shortage that caused the Wii to be in such high demand the first few years after its release), these shortages have almost always been in response to the consumer wildly buying up Nintendo’s product from Thanksgiving to January each year. It’s pretty amazing to see some of the parents in this 1988 segment who drove hundreds of miles just to line up at a store that might get them a copy of Super Mario Brothers 2 (Super Mario USA in Japan).
Famicom games like Super Mario USA can still be bought in Tokyo at stores like "Super Potato" in the Akihabara district.
Dragon Quest III prompted similar overnight lines in 1988 in Japan, and I can tell you that nothing has changed since then. You can still see expansive lines for popular game releases in Tokyo today, even with the wildly successful pre-order policies at major retailers. (I personally sat in of these huge lines last year during the Japanese release of Dragon Quest IX. No surprise considering Dragon Quest has been one of the most popular Nintendo franchises in Japan since the release of the first Dragon Warrior in 1986.)
Dragon Quest in Japan - 1986
More recently in America, the Wii Fit has been the real in-demand item around the holidays, and it’s possible that we may see shortages of other new games in 2011 due to the Great Tohoku Quake and Tsunami. Nintendo has assured the world that shipments will be largely unaffected by the quake (especially since the 3Ds is assembled in China), but time will tell when holiday shopping kicks into high gear later this year.
Another concern of the video game buying parents of 1988 was the fear that playing video games could possibly promote violent behavior in children. This fear was certainly nowhere near what it is today (or what it came to be in the early 90’s after the release of the wildly successful Midway game Mortal Kombat) but it’s interesting to hear the concern that was voiced about shooting a cartoon duck. I couldn’t help but laugh when the host of this segment admitted that he and his wife played Duck Hunt until midnight and were fully supportive of their four year old playing the game as well. (Here’s to awesome parents!)
Duck Hunt Box Art in America
What’s really most interesting about watching this segment today is that it was during a time that was the beginning of a huge cultural phenomenon around the world. Think about how many millions of people worldwide play video games every day, and how so many of us have forged at least some part of our identities around a passion for gaming and video games in general. With the advent of the internet and multiplayer online gaming, we’ve inter-connected these cultures even more and allowed for social and cross-cultural exchange over both cooperation and conflict in all the various gaming universes. (Certainly I’m chatting a lot more with someone helping me to look for treasure than I am with the avatar I’m trying to snipe from across the virtual desert, but you get my point.)
I can’t wait to see what Nintendo is going to bring us with the release of the Wii U next year, and I’ll be reserving my system long before it releases in hopes that I might avoid some of those holiday shortages! What’s been your favorite Nintendo product of all time? Sound off in the comments below!