I'm rather bored, so I thought I'd give a few facts about the history of my personal favorite video game console. The NES.

Nintendo means something like "The heaven blesses hard work". Nintendo was
founded in Kyoto, Japan, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi.

Nintendo started in 1889. Yes, 1889. It started out as a playing card company.

In the early 80s it produced the FamiCom which was the video gaming system before it became Nintendo - which Japan wanted to sell in the states through Atari as the FamiCom but Atari didn't like the idea and so Nintendo decided to release it in the states anyway by themselves. Despite the small demand for video game systems in the US; Nintendo was brought into the US in 1985.

Because demand was so low, American marketers weren't keen on buying it so Nintendo transformed the FamiCom into the Nintendo Entertainment System; giving it more of VCR'ish approach than the gaming console.

After a year of trying to gain a marketplace, Nintendo was finally released to the US February 1986.

Nintendo released the NES in two different bundles: one at $249 with the R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) unit, two controllers, a lightgun, Gyromite (a R.O.B. game), Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros.

The other set at $199 with controllers and Super Mario Bros.

Ironically (if you're familiar with the Nintendo 64), Nintendo promised a disk drive add-on for the NES in time for Christmas 1986. It was never released in the States. The Famicom version of the drive did come out in Japan, but it never gained much of a following.

As the 1990s began, Nintendo found itself threatened by next-generation 16-bit consoles like the TurboGrafx-16 and the Genesis, but the NES was still the best selling system on the market. Regardless, the NES was beginning to show its age, so in 1991 Nintendo announced that the Super NES would be released that September. Unfortunately, the SNES would not be compatible with the NES and NES owners began to wonder how much support their system would receive after the SNES was released. Fortunately, Nintendo didn't drop support for the 8-bit system completely, which was a smart move considering the SNES's slow start.

The original NES came with a simple, rectangular "Control Pad" with A, B, Start and Select buttons. The NES control pad single-handedly popularized the four-directional "cross" that has been a mainstay of all subsequent systems' controllers. Nintendo released many other controllers, including the NES Max which was shaped like a small Genesis controller and used a round sliding disc for control. Another popular controller was the NES Advantage, which was a large arcade-style joystick with lots of special abilities such as slow motion and autofire.

Some of the stranger NES accessories include the Power Pad exercise mat (you had to step on buttons to control the game), the U-Force 3D controller which sensed the movement of a hand over its surface (sometimes even successfully!), the infamous VR-wannabe Power Glove, and the aforementioned Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.). R.O.B. was just a gimmick to sell the NES to stores that hated videogames, because they weren't "videogames," they were "robot games." Only two R.O.B. titles were made: Gyromite and Stack-up.



Well, I don't know if any of you ever wondered such stuff about this great system. But if you didn't, well... you know now.

Ofcourse, I didn't take the time to actually type all that out myself, I hopped on over to http://www.classicgaming.com Just so nobody gets mad that I used some of their information, I wanted to cite them.

I, myself, own an NES system, two control pads, two NES Advantage Pads and also the splitter that allowed you to use four control pads at once instead of just the standard two. I also own a bunch of games, but unfortunately for me I bought a good portion of them before I became familiar enough with them to tell whether or not they'd work by simply looking at them carefully and the "jaggoff" that I bought them from ripped me off. Still, they're nice to look at. I'd really love to own one of the Robotic Operating Buddies for nostalgic purposes. The Power Pad Excercise Mat would be cool to use as a welcome mat.