![]() The test market wasn't a complete sellout, but it was encouraging enough to eventually go national. He wouldn't necessarily run all the TVs up, but he might run one up, just to see what it was like. "He'd go out there and do a lot of this stuff with us. "He was just one of the guys," Howard Phillips, who worked for Nintendo at the time, told me. Even company president Minoru Arakawa himself could occasionally be seen running a TV set up a flight of stairs. A sort of "SWAT team" of Nintendo employees worked out of a rundown rented warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, delivering inventory and decorations by hand, setting up and tearing down displays, and showing off the games to any shoppers who would listen. This all culminated in a test market launch limited to the areas surrounding New York City lasting from October of 1985 through Christmas Eve. All a store would have to sacrifice would be shelf space. They would even come in and set up the displays and demonstrate the games. So instead of waiting for buyers to warm up to the idea, Nintendo risked everything by offering stores an unbelievably sweet deal: rather than being stuck with unsold inventory, Nintendo would buy back any unsold merchandise. "We had a pretty strong belief that if we could get the consumer to try the product or experience the product, they would believe it was a new form of entertainment that they wanted to participate in," Gail Tilden, who was in charge of the company's PR and marketing at the time, once told me. A common theme in talking to Nintendo employees of the time is that if players just got their hands on the system, they'd be sold. In the case of many of Nintendo's own games, the hardware was literally the same as what was powering their arcade counterparts, meaning they were truly arcade-perfect. The NES, meanwhile, actually offered something resembling the arcade experience at home, or at least a reasonable facsimile. The problem was that the home games paled in comparison to those in the arcade. It wasn't as if the crash caused kids to stop buying games - in fact, 1983 was a record year for cartridge sales, and quarters were still piling up in arcade machines around the country, too. Nintendo of America's strength was in recognizing that there was still a market to be claimed. People were fired over bum video game deals that resulted in shelves being crammed with five dollar clearance titles, and no matter how great these new Nintendo games may have looked, no one was about to take that risk again. Video games were dead and buried they were toy store poison. But American retail buyers, still burned by the video game industry crash of 1983, didn't care. The system was huge in its native Japan, where it was known as the Family Computer - it pushed 2.5 million units in 1984 alone, along with 15 million game cartridges. So when it showed off a prototype of what would become the Nintendo Entertainment System at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show that January, buyers scoffed. knew the name, they associated it with Donkey Kong), the licensing of its properties to other companies, and its handheld Game & Watch LCD games. Read on to see just how difficult this search turned out to be.īack in 1985, Nintendo of America was a pretty small venture, dealing primarily in arcade game distribution (if anyone in the U.S. I wanted to put this whole embarrassing mess behind us so that the history books of the future could be properly informed, and so that places like Wikipedia would have a definitive source to cite.ĭid I find the answer? Well, sort of. I wanted to prove, once and for all, exactly when Super Mario Bros. I decided recently to try to set this right. This isn't Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we're talking about here: this is one of the highest grossing consumer entertainment products in history, introduced less than 30 years ago, and we can't seem to get the date right. ![]() ![]() In fact, talk to enough people and you'll come to find out that we can't even agree on the year the game came out, at least in the United States (in Japan, we know exactly when it shipped: September 13, 1985). And at over 40 million copies sold worldwide (not counting the various ports and reimaginings over the last couple decades), this is arguably the game that brought business back to an American home video game industry that had plummeted to next to nothing in the early '80s, the victim of an oversaturated market that left stores full of excess inventory that was practically given away.Īnd yet, we don't know exactly when the game came out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |