I was in middle school in 1986 when my friends started getting new video game consoles. It’s possible that one or two of them got them right away in the fall. Since it’s been nearly 40 years, the timelines are a little fuzzy. But I do remember visiting a friend over winter break and he had his new Nintendo NES set up. He was always the first to get everything new, but he was especially excited about this.
First impressions of that Nintendo NES, 1986
The first thing I noticed about the console was that it was smaller than the second-generation consoles I was used to. And the cartridges loaded in the front. He also didn’t have to flip a switch behind the TV to switch it from the TV to the game. He just tuned the TV the channel 3, powered on the console, and the game appeared.
The controls were different too. Instead of a joystick, there was this little pad with a direction control on it and two fire buttons. It’s like the thing was deliberately trying to go out of its way to be different from Atari. I asked about that. He said it was different, but he liked them once he got used to them.
Then he started up a two-player game, handed me the second controller, and showed me how to run around on the screen smashing bricks, collecting coins, stomping enemies, kicking turtles, and looking down pipes for secret rooms.
He got through a couple of levels before he died, and then it was my turn. I didn’t make it through the first level.
He said he hadn’t beaten the game yet, but he could get four or five levels in. And a mutual friend who had just gotten his console could get about as far. He said the two of them had a marathon a day or two before to see who could play the longest.
Nintendo hits school
A week or so later, we bid farewell to 1986 and it was time for us to go back to school. And everyone knew who had gotten a Nintendo for Christmas. That’s because everyone who had one kept an instruction booklet from one of the games, or the poster that came with the console stashed in their desk and whipped it out to look at any time there was a free moment, flouting the risk of our very uptight teacher confiscating it.
In art class, all they wanted to draw were characters from their Nintendo games. When someone got a game of that no one else had yet, they would bring the instruction book to school so they could prove it. It wasn’t long before everyone had seen all of the NES launch titles and figured out which ones had staying power and which ones were filler.
And the girls were into it too. Not all of them at first. It started with one of the girls coming in one day and announcing proudly that her family got a Sega. And she insisted it was better.
I know now that Sega really did have a good console. It didn’t have the software library Nintendo had, especially in the United States. But it was a good console, and it had a good version of the arcade racing game Out Run. But in early 1987, insisting it was the better console didn’t result in the outcome she was looking for, sad to say. The battle for the third generation was more like a blitzkrieg, at least in this town.
An unexpected interest in… Commodore?
One weird thing that happened in the middle of this was everyone started asking me questions about my Commodore. Especially girls. They all knew I knew a fair bit about computers, and all of a sudden, some of them started pumping me for information. Could you get Mario for it? Only the original one-screen game, not super. Could you get Kung Fu for it? No. I was wrong about that one. Data East had published a version. Could you get Duck Hunt? No. Could you get a light gun for it? No.
Why were they suddenly asking me these questions? I think their parents were considering buying a computer, because there was no shortage of advertisements at the time saying to buy a Commodore to educate your children. I think they wanted a Nintendo, and they were trying to figure out how much of a fight to put up about it. In our blue-collar town, if your family bought a computer, it probably wasn’t going to get a game console.
It’s not as if girls didn’t play video games before. The girl I carpooled with in first grade had an Atari. But suddenly girls who previously had zero interest in anything electronic were interested in Nintendo.
The spell Nintendo cast on that town struck me as more than a little weird. Nintendo created mindshare where there previously had been none. I’d never seen anything quite like that before.
Third party Nintendo titles
As 1987 wore on, the focus shifted from the launch titles and Nintendo’s coming-soon titles in their initial catalog to third-party titles. Capcom’s 1942 was the game of the spring, and it proved so popular it reignited interest in the arcade game. Pantera’s, the local pizza joint, cashed in on the craze with a 1942 arcade cabinet in the back of the store next to the jukebox.
Tecmo’s Rygar was the game of the summer. A couple of times a week I would ride my bike a few blocks to a friend’s house and we’d trade baseball cards and play Rygar. Then Nintendo came back with a monster hit in the fall after releasing The Legend of Zelda on August 22, 1987, the weekend after school started again.
Christmas 1987 came and went, and a bunch of people who hadn’t received a Nintendo NES for Christmas previous year or for their birthday got one. I didn’t really want one, so I was kind of weird. I was up for playing Nintendo at a friend’s house, but I was happy with my Commodore.
Maybe it wasn’t everyone, but it seemed like it
Not everyone I knew had a Nintendo. And some didn’t get theirs until 1988 or even 1989. My wife’s family was in that category, getting theirs at Christmas 1989. She grew up in another small town about two hours south of me.
But more people my age that I knew had one than didn’t. I never met anyone else who said they had a Sega, at least not until the Genesis. I knew plenty of people who were excited about the Sega Genesis. And I only knew one person who had an Atari 7800. They also had a Nintendo. The 7800 was their secondary console they kept hooked up to their smaller TV.
Everyone’s experience with the third generation of game consoles was a little different. I was probably the target demographic Nintendo had in mind, and in Missouri, in the middle of the USA, Nintendo really won the battle for mind share. I wouldn’t necessarily say everyone in the town I lived in was burned out on Atari. If anything, they liked being able to go into St Louis and come home with a sack load of cartridges while spending what a single game used to cost. But Nintendo slammed the door on all that. While Nintendo generally gets credit for getting people interested in video games again, I think they did more than that. In the small town I lived in, they found a way to reach an audience that nobody else had previously. They grew the market.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
I like reading your work. The Nintendo Famicom was actually my second system (around ’88, ’89) after the Colecovision (favorite game, Cattrax). In fact, my system was one of the early bootlegs and it even had turbo buttons. First game was Macross, then Super Mario Brothers (also a bootleg from Taiwan). At the time (I was 12), I was actually the neighborhood tech support for installing their new Famicoms. My first failure was the actual NES as it had a large RF gray adapter I did not understand compared to the Famicom’s smaller silver one.