Former Nintendo employees reveal what it took to launch the NES

[ilt]

Video on which this very small article is based on: https://youtu.be/f2WDfsiLiRA

[Jeremy1026]

The article itself is just explaining what the video contains, and then embeds the video.

[excalibur]

The article's mission was to summarize the most important and most interesting information in the video so I don't have to spend an hour and 45 minutes watching it. Since it failed to do so, it has no purpose.

[tobr]

Hardly. Its actual mission seems to be: ”A no-noise email roundup of all the must-read Nintendo news”. I’m sure it did exactly that for its reader. It might not the best article to submit to HN though.

[cwillu]

This should have [video] in the title

[charcircuit]

I can't stand localizers. The famicom didn't need to be completely redesigned in order for it to succeed. There was clear market success in Japan already, so they knew the software would be capable to sell systems. I feel like there are other strategies to get stores to stock the product that don't involve redesigning everything. For example they could give guarantees to purchase back unsold stock, and if the famicon failed in America they could ship the units back to Japan to sell them there.

Also, revealing they were doing illegal price fixing with Sega is not surprising.

[ghssds]

I'm glad they never released the Famicom Disk System in North America and instead retrofited those games in cartdrige format for our market. I was a kid and while my parents bought me a NES they would never have agreed to buy the FDS. They are probably not alone. Also, to a north-american eye, the Famicom was ugly as sin, looks like a Fisher Price piece of crap. Can't put that under the living room's tv set and most of the homes in the '80s had exactly one tv. A redesign was mandatory. The loading mechanism was an error but we know that only in hindsight.

[empressplay]

After the video game crash, retailers (particularly department stores, where most major purchases were made in the 80s, usually on payment plans) were extremely resistant to stocking another console (and consumers were resistant to buying one -- they had been buying home computers like the Commodore 64 since the video game crash to better justify the expense.)

The redesign was intended to position the NES more as a home video accessory and remove it from the tainted video game category, hence the front-loading (like a VCR) so that it could fit into an entertainment system / TV table. It may seem silly from a modern standpoint but it was all about perception, and it was what was needed to successfully 'reboot' the video game market in North America.

[gryson]

Sony of America essentially tried to do the same with the PlayStation.

SCE in Japan fought back and eventually positioned themselves within the company to be able to fire nearly all of the upper management in the US in order to promote their vision of the console.

It turned out no consumer in the US cared enough about the name, the size of the controller, or the color and look of the console to not buy it.

[ginko]

I can sort of understand the redesign of the Famicom/NES. What I can't understand is why they redesigned the Super Famicom. That just outright looked better than what the US ended up with.

[fuzzy_lumpkins]

original famicom was admittedly cheap-looking and tiny, im glad we got a redesign on that. super famicom shouldve been left alone though

[nlawalker]

If this is interesting to you, I recommend the book Game Over by David Sheff.

[philistine]

Unfortunately, the legacy of David Sheff's Game Over is tarnished. He took shortcuts and got some important details wrong. An historian should find additional sources for the statements made in the book.

[omosubi]

I hate to be that guy, but is there a transcript or even ai summary of the video?

[JDazzle]

Youtube has a built-in transcript feature. You can find it in the video description

[yoricm]

I copy/pasted an AI summary (using Recall) of the video here:

https://sharetext.io/42b482da

And the full transcript here:

https://sharetext.io/d675f945