Nintendo Ruined Video Games

[Tanooki]

It never ends, and I have to wonder if he's using proxies to get in at this rate otherwise he's being handled very very generously hoping he may get a clue yet. The arguing is beyond old, eventually something has to sink in.

[youxia]

Ouch. But the "TigerSuperman - good cop / Bubsy3000 - bad cop" act was going on pretty well. Seems a Jaguar(Vision) truly can't change its spots

[mr_me]

I'm going to do a little fact checking on that. Not taking your word as gospel.

 

But yet market and industry go hand in hand. No market, your industry suffers.

 

A good litmus- look at the Sears 1985 Christmas Catalog. Only Atari mention were the computers. No Coleco, no 2600, no Intellivision. The biggest retailer at the time with a honken 650+ page catalog and NOTHING for consoles. If that's not an indicator that something was up, I don't know what woukd have been.

 

 

 

So what were the hot titles that flew off shelves and made retailers happy for video game consoles? What stores got these carts into hands of game players? Where were those carts advertised? How did people know about them?

 

 

Commercials were and are the way people found out about products. They are also a cultural snap shot on how business was pushed to the masses. Did you not pay attention to the "ad wars" between Atari, Intellivision, etc.?

 

 

Did you ever WATCH the commercial? They compare the two side by side. If there was no intention of competition, why even mention or even compare the NES to the XEGS...which was marketed as a game console.

 

I didn't, you're reading what you want to read. The market push, with the "fun is back" ad campaign kicked in AFTER the NES was established. They targeted the budget minded ("And one more thing, it's got a special low price: under 50 bucks ["50 bucks?!"] Now isn't that nice?"). The NES popularity made video games a retail taboo no longer.

 

 

Yes, I saw it back in the day and when I wrote about the Ad Wars in Video Game Trader magazine. If it was released during the reign on the 2600, it would never have been "back" as it would have never left. Advertising is specific in its approach, so why waste the cash to give the impression that the "fun" left?

It's true that GCC controlled the Atari 7800. In 1984 Tramiel bought Atari's assets for their home computers and got warehouse stock of 2600/5200/7800 systems and cartridges for free. Tramiel dumped this stuff at rock bottom prices but didn't have the rights to the 7800. At the prices he wanted to sell them there would be little royalties for GCC. GCC refused. They eventually came to an agreement in 1986, the nes probably helped push them. The Atari 7800 shouldn't be taken seriously in the late 1980s, there was little marketing support, you would have barely known it existed. Intellivisions and 2600s, dumped by Mattel and Warner, continued to be sold and manufactured throughout the 1980s but they were budget systems at this time and not significant. The next generation systems expected from these video game giants never happened as expected. The Atari 5200 was discontinued in 1984. That year the commodore 64 actually led sales for video game consoles taking over from colecovision. Colecovision had strong support in 1984 with over 65 cartridge releases that year; more than half from third parties. Colecovision consoles sold okay in 1984 but not as well as their peak in 1983. Coleco focused on their Adam computer that year but lossed millions; colecovision and adam were discontinued by new years. So that left only the commodore 64 for the 1985 season which sold millions in the mid to late 1980s.

 

The retail problem started in 1983. That's when the large department stores started dropping video games. At that time you wouldn't find video games in the toy section. They were in electronics departments. That year it became difficult for quality manufacturers to get their new titles out to their customers. Store shelves were full of stock that nobody wanted, until it all disappeared. There was a pacman fad that came and went in 1982 but the underlying demand for quality video games increased every year. Further, Warner and Mattel were the largest video game developers in the world at the time and suddenly closed in 1984. Games that were in development were abandoned. Piracy was another problem the industry was facing as the c64 was taking over in 1984.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Piracy was another problem the industry was facing as the c64 was taking over in 1984.

The real reason why most vintage pc games sucked. Quality games on floppies got copied and made essentially zero dollars for the developer. So quality developers rarely made more $$$ per release than cheap shovelware.

[youxia]

most vintage pc games sucked

 

Come again?

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

Come again?

Most vintage pc games sucked.

 

Happy now?

 

PC games were more capable cpus and graphics than consoles, but everything tat moved onsreen had to be updated every frame. NES had action sidescrollers. PC may have had higher clocks and resolution, but the lacking tile engine means it takes longer to draw. So they mostly focused on point &cliv advenntues.

[youxia]

I'm sorry, but this is so far-out that I'had to double check. Yep, NES had good action sidescrollers, for sure. PC on the other hand was a hotbed of innovative, complex games that laid the foundations for decades to come. And no, it wasn't just point'n click adventures, but also landmark RPGs, sims, strategy games and that whole 3D lark you might've heard about. The 1985-1995 DOS era is simply put one of the most important in gaming history.

 

Saying that these games earned devs/publishers "zero dollars" because of piracy is another wild claim, but I'd rather not dwell on that well-worn angle. Suffice to say that many of these entities have thrived for years and later on became parts of modern corporate powerhouses.

[Tanooki]

Sorry Kosmic, normally I agree with you, but not this time, you're having a true Rick James moment here if I've ever saw one dumping on PC gaming like that.

 

Oh and given the NES era, I think both iD Software and Apogee would like to smile and give you the 2 finger salute. I'm guessing you have no time experiencing things like Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit, Halloween Harry (aka Alien Carnage), Commander Keen, Bio Menace, Duke Nukem 1 and 2, Cosmos Cosmic Adventure, Major Stryker, Shadow Knights, Dangerous Dave, and that's basically just side scrollers. Plenty of shooters from things like Raptor and Tyrian, Galactix and Solar Winds, and others in those very late 80s early 90s era. I could go into other genres that aren't point a click,pretty sure the Wolfenstein and before them titles didn't have problems drawing to the screen as they like the other genres aren't point and click by any means. Not all PC gaming was point and click stuff like Dune 2, Sim City, Mahjong, Casino games, and click to go adventure games or RPGs. But hey, sure, please continue enlightening us how the PC games weren't capable because they weren't the slow little NES console that used a tile based engine to display things nicely.

[Andromeda Stardust]

sForget I mentioned it.

 

I guess I should explain my upbringing. It doesn't help that the vast majority of my exposure to early PCs happened at school with edutainment-ware. We didn't get a home computer until 1997 when I was 16. Nearly everything I ever played at school (on PCs that predated Windows) sucked donkey ass. But all my friends had these amazing game consoles, primarily NES and later SNES/Genesis.

 

Though I did somewhat enjoy a bunch of the later Windows games Microsoft put out for Win 3.x and 95. Solitare, Minesweeper, Klotski, that Ski slalom game, and a few others I remember fondly. Also I was hardcore into to Maxis Sim City 2000 as a teen. Oh yeah, MS Qbasic came with 2-player Gorillas (throw bananas at specific angle and trajectory to KO opponent) and that Snake game as demos.

 

I miss Klotski. I wish there was a way to play 16-bit Win 3.1 apps on 64-bit windows without using a virtual machine. DOSbox won't run Win EXEs.

[Flojomojo]

It's okay, most everything sucked and still does. Stuff picked up after DOOM and X-Wing, but console platformers pissed on those early idsoftware games from a great height, as they say in the British isles.

[youxia]

I like how this went from the original argument - "all PC games sucked coz pirates made the devs poor" - to "console platformers were better than PC ones". Cute

 

I'd say something but that would probably require going into pcmasterrace mode, and I cured myself of that tunnel-vision long time ago.

[JBerel]

I was all about PC gaming in the day. Being a control freak, they appeal to me for tweaking controls and stuff. Unfortunately, nowadays, you can't get a decent PC game that let's you customize your controls properly. They keep trying to force control schemes on you or they simply port the Xbox version of the game to the PC. Stupid.

[mr_me]

The popularization of the side scrolling platformer genre is another knock against nintendo.

[digdugnate]

when i picked an NES Classic back up, I was surprised looking at the games the SHEER NUMBER of side-scrolling platformers.

 

Some are real turkeys (in my opinion games like Athena), some are weird (Quantum Kabuki Fighter), some i thought were pretty awesome (Shatterhand).

[Tanooki]

sForget I mentioned it.

 

I guess I should explain my upbringing. It doesn't help that the vast majority of my exposure to early PCs happened at school with edutainment-ware. We didn't get a home computer until 1997 when I was 16. Nearly everything I ever played at school (on PCs that predated Windows) sucked donkey ass. But all my friends had these amazing game consoles, primarily NES and later SNES/Genesis.

 

Though I did somewhat enjoy a bunch of the later Windows games Microsoft put out for Win 3.x and 95. Solitare, Minesweeper, Klotski, that Ski slalom game, and a few others I remember fondly. Also I was hardcore into to Maxis Sim City 2000 as a teen. Oh yeah, MS Qbasic came with 2-player Gorillas (throw bananas at specific angle and trajectory to KO opponent) and that Snake game as demos.

 

I miss Klotski. I wish there was a way to play 16-bit Win 3.1 apps on 64-bit windows without using a virtual machine. DOSbox won't run Win EXEs.

Ok now, thinking Mr T said it best in your situation -- I pity da fool.

 

I had a rich grandparent who was big into education, so I got a beast of a setup back in Christmas of 1990, so that 386 I ended up with introduced me to a lot of things and it came with a game CD too with dozens of 1987-1990 DOS titles too so variety was very much there. A lot of it was either more PC centric feel stuff, but there were also arcade ports, and other NES style type games and it handled them pretty much as nicely if the port wasn't shoddy. Road Runner was on there, it was a bit better on that than the NES game, once using a gravis pad or something as keyboards are hit and miss. Before that I had little interest like you, crappy school edutainment stuff from like the Apple game with the dog and learning, or there was Carmen and Oregon Trail, so while nice to see and hear it wasn't better than what my NES did by any means. But having got that computer and within a year finding shareware/games locally, and maybe that year or the next BBS dialups and getting freeware, shareware, and even erm 'old' warez things got interesting through high school. Suddenly you had things like Wing Commander or X-Wing popping up, Dune 2, the stuff I listed already, Star Control 2, and quite a few others that made even the SNES which was the highpoint until the PS1 really came along, look like crap in various cases. The PC did lack for more console level stuff for the common things, but they had their ideas in the genre just not always as well executed under the singular controlled format you get of a console vs a million computer part/Os variations you have to account for. But in the same vein the PC to SNES stuff wasn't up to par really if you snap a look at Test Drive, Hardball, Wing Commander, DOOM(SNES), and some others (though Genesis Dune and Star Control 1 were shockingly well done.)

 

Trust me you got in late and missed out, your comment really had little basis in reality other than the shoddy ports that jumpe between PC <-> Console/Arcade type stuff but sometimes they did hit it pretty well but not mostly. They both did much the same well, but PC due to keyboards and mice could have more strong points in some spaces.

[Andromeda Stardust]

The popularization of the side scrolling platformer genre is another knock against nintendo.

Agree to disagree here. Some of the best games ever made were sidescrolling platformers.

[Gentlegamer]

sForget I mentioned it.

 

I guess I should explain my upbringing. It doesn't help that the vast majority of my exposure to early PCs happened at school with edutainment-ware. We didn't get a home computer until 1997 when I was 16. Nearly everything I ever played at school (on PCs that predated Windows) sucked donkey ass. But all my friends had these amazing game consoles, primarily NES and later SNES/Genesis.

 

Though I did somewhat enjoy a bunch of the later Windows games Microsoft put out for Win 3.x and 95. Solitare, Minesweeper, Klotski, that Ski slalom game, and a few others I remember fondly. Also I was hardcore into to Maxis Sim City 2000 as a teen. Oh yeah, MS Qbasic came with 2-player Gorillas (throw bananas at specific angle and trajectory to KO opponent) and that Snake game as demos.

 

I miss Klotski. I wish there was a way to play 16-bit Win 3.1 apps on 64-bit windows without using a virtual machine. DOSbox won't run Win EXEs.

 

At school in the 80s we had Apple ][ with Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.

 

At home, we had C=64 with rad games like The Last Ninja and G.I. Joe

 

In high school in the mid 90s, the computer lab had PCs that some kid installed Doom on in a hidden directory.

Edited October 8, 2018 by Gentlegamer

[Torr]

I miss Klotski. I wish there was a way to play 16-bit Win 3.1 apps on 64-bit windows without using a virtual machine. DOSbox won't run Win EXEs.

 

But you CAN install Windows 3.1 within DOSBox, and use Windows 3.1 programs that way.

I've done it.

 

Ahhh... Castle of the Winds

 

Dare to Dream was a classic too!

Edited October 8, 2018 by Torr

[+wongojack]

Man, this thread . . . I want to reply, but the same discussion has already been hashed out here. Maybe a quote will be best

 

 

 

I certainly didn't "hate" the NES, but these statements do resonate with me. I had a few great experiences with NES games, but there was so much repetition and sooo many crappy experiences that were very expensive to boot. I gave the NES its shot and still have my NES console, but I never really was interested in Super Mario (too old I guess), and I always appreciated the diversity of gaming experiences that I could have on my C64 or PC. Just the ability to save my game seemed like an almost laughable advantage for a home computer.

 

There were also high profile games that had such promise but ended up being sooo disappointing. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one. I also remember reading about Wizard's and Warriors hoping it would be something deeper for the NES. Of course, it was just another side scroller when I finally blew $50 on it. How about Zelda 2? Finally there was a sequel to a fantastic game that wasn't a side scroller - except they had to go and make it just some other side-scrolling, barely understandable, Engrish fest. And when Nintendo did get around to making Dragon Warrior it was sooo terrible compared to computer RPGs that I gave up.

 

The thing that I think really was damaging was that the 16bit generation of consoles was ALSO dominated by side scrolling games. I played Street Fighter on the SNES with friends and loved it, but when the Genesis really took off with Sonic, I could've have cared less. The side scrolling clones just kept coming on both consoles after that (and the Nintendo flavors got more and more childish). Want a game based on a Disney movie? Cool - maybe it will be an interesting hybrid genre where Simba from the Lion king will need to re-conquer territories like a board game, but switch to action sequences. Nope - its a side-scroller. And that just repeated on consoles over and over again until the Playstation came out.

 

 

 

 

I think you make some good points, but I MUST point out that your willful ignorance of gaming that came before the NES is exactly the point of the article linked in the first post.

I've never played a C64, but all games before Mario had bad scrolling and just made beepy sounds with 4 colors.

 

The only thing you left out would be a statement like I really want to get into game design to add some variety into gaming.

The variety of games on the various 8 bit computer platforms was vast and there were plenty of colors and advanced sounds coming from the SID and POKEY. Nintendo ended this by stomping on everything with Mario's side-scrolling boot.

 

 

[more complaining]

Side scrolling was not new. When I first saw Super Mario Bros, I wasn't surprised or even impressed that it could "scroll." Defender scrolled, and that (and its clones) got put everywhere. Want a non-Defender example? Forbidden Forrest is a C64 game from 1983 that I personally can't stand to look at, but the internet loves it for its excellent soundtrack and horizontal scrolling. There was also plenty of vertical scrolling everywhere. I believe that pointing to scrolling as an advantage is just a revisionist view done by those looking back after the side-scrolling genre took over.

 

Nintendo, with their strict licensing, can also be blamed. By limiting the number of games a developer can release, Nintendo forced developers to leave the more risky and interesting projects behind. I did mention this before as how Nintendo hurt video games.

--------
I don't know if anyone is arguing that Nintendo didn't make quality products. But they also did some bad things.

 

[+wongojack]

I'm hacking around a bit to pull these. Most of them are from pages 3-6

 

 

I've always felt that Nintendo ruined gaming.

After the console crash, gaming moved to home computers, and there was a lot of innovative stuff happening there, they were making the jump to 16-bit, with amazing graphics / sound especially on the Amiga, and amazing gameplay possibilities...

Then into that world drops the NES with it's cartoony 8-bit graphics, annoying sound and almost everything is a side-scrolling platformer. It was a huge step backwards for me.

I get it, many of those NES kids never made the jump to computers and didn't know any different.

In retrospect, I think consoles would have rebounded regardless. Why? The Atari 8-bit and C-64 did not cost much more than a console, so it was a no-brainer to buy them instead. But the 16-bit computer systems were significantly more expensive, and they never fell in price to the console range that I'm aware of. This meant demand for console-like devices would have resurfaced after the crash fallout. Atari could have maintained dominance if they didn't go all-in to computers. Or Sega could have lead.

 

 

 

 

Every big licensed game became a side-scroller, and they even had to give Zelda the side-scrolling treament. As Lost Dragon points out, it only got worse on the SNES and Genesis.

 

The funny thing is that there are even examples of what I would call side-scrolling platformers that did things differently, but they weren't cloned as often as the SMB format. Bionic Commando was great, but it sorta froze in place for 30 years. I would have loved to see a few people try to rip-off the Metroid forumula, but there are precious few games (Euphoria) that even attempted it on 8-bits. Kirby is another one, but by the time we finally got to Kirby, it was so late and the character was so childish that I couldn't recognize it as something different.

 

 

Another thing to consider, and this is just me hating the Nintendo revisionism that has happened over the last few years, is that the biggest and best developers were making games for the PC, Amiga and Atari St (throw in C64 and spectrum etc) and pretty much ignoring the Nes or doing very late ports to it.

 

Besides the japanese developers like Konami and Capcom, you had alot of third rate (LJN) type developers making shovelware for the Nes. The quickie movie licensed stuff like Back to the Future or even Fester's Quest.

 

Whats even more interesting is that you have youtube channels that look at the shovelware games on the Nes as serious games that need to be considered simply because they are part of the Nes library. Most of those games were very quickly made and done to turn a quick buck and don't deserve 30 minute retrospective videos.

 

 

 

I don't think they had that impact on purpose or anything, but because of the standards they imposed, they sort of cultivated a mix of interest and talent that (I believe) diminished the variety of games on the NES.

 

There are of course many examples, but to fall in line with the movie example that Lost Dragon mentions

 

Ghostbusters 1984 - a unique multi-stage game that tried to capture several different elements of the movie

Ghostbusters 1990 - a side-scrolling platformer that has almost nothing to do with the elements of the movie

 

 

Is this really Nintendo's fault? Not directly of course, but I think their often maligned entrance barriers to create games for the NES resulted in more side-scrollers and less variety. That trend just continued in the 16-bit era.

 

 

 

Going back to the article, the author claims Nintendo Ruined Gaming. One of the ways the author says they did this was by reducing the variety of games. I believe this to be true from my own observations and experiences. I was used to getting what I considered to be creative and different games on computers, but after the popularity of the NES rose, the creativity slowed, and instead, I saw different settings and licenses all adapted to become side-scrolling platformers. In my opinion this was bad because I preferred the varied experiences I had been getting on computers. Variety was "lacking" and this continued to be the case through the 16 bit era.

 

The way I understand it is that developers were often asked to sign exclusivity deals with Nintendo or pay up front to release a game on the system. So filling in some gaps . . . there were a few developers who were prolific at platformers that were responsible for a lot of the games on the system. If it had been easier and less costly for other developers to release games for the NES then there would have been more variety.

I don't really think that viewing this discussion from a "console standpoint" is relevant to the author's point or to my own experiences. I also don't really care about the popularity of Ghostbusters. Instead, the examples you give about how movie-to-game adaptations had little to do with the films adds to what I think is bad about the trend. I thought Ghostbusters and Goonies* were fun movie adaptations in different genres that felt like they were trying to re-tell the story of the movie. When I played Batman or Star Wars for NES, I was just confronted with another side-scroller that had the license slapped on to it. It may still have been a good game, but it made it feel to me like more of a cash grab and that was bad in my opinion.

 

 

 

*[Games with variety]

There are other non-movie examples in this same category like Accolade's Comics, Archon I & II, Aztec Challenge, Beach Head I & II, Defender of the Crown, Impossible Mission, Pirates!, Raid Over Moscow, and all the Summer Games related games. I'm sure others can think of more. I liked these games and the variety they presented to the player from within the same game. There were of course many genres represented on the computer platforms along with these genre defying games.

 

 

I've been keeping a list of games I've beaten since I first got a NES in 1988/1989 (not sure which). Just for the heck of it, I decided to look at the first 100 games I beat and see how many of them could be called side-scrollers. I used the term in a loose sense, with beat-'em-ups like Double Dragon included, but not horizontally-scrolling shooters like Gradius or free-roaming overhead games like Guerrilla War. In most cases platforming was involved, though there were a few exceptions (e.g. Kung Fu).

 

Anyway, it turns out that 50 -- exactly half -- of the first 100 NES games I beat were side-scrollers. The next largest category was shooters/shmups, with about 12 entries.

 

So, touché, the NES was indeed full of them -- but I also made time for games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Lolo series, the Ultima ports, etc...