Cover Story: 30 Years of NES, 30 Interesting NES Facts

Big historic developer interviews a little tl;dr for your caffeine-addled mind? Try these 30 easy, bite-sized tidbits about the NES instead.

Article by Jeremy Parish Contributor

Updated on Oct. 27, 2015

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

21. Super Mario Bros. didn't have a Minus World in Japan... it had hundreds.

Players somehow figured out that you could glitch through a certain wall in Super Mario Bros. and pass into what should have been a Warp Zone to Worlds 2, 3, and 4 but which instead would send Mario to a mysterious realm known as the Minus World. So named because the level display omits the world number and simply calls it "-1" instead of, say, "2-1," the Minus World is an infinitely looping level: Once you reach the end and pass through the warp pipe, you're sent back to the start to play it again, every single time. In the Japanese Famicom Disk System version of the game, however, the alternate arrangement of data means that the game has not one Minus World but rather a seemingly endless array of them. And they're all way, way weirder than the American version.

22. More than 30 NES games appeared in arcades through the PlayChoice-10 system.

Once the NES had proven its mettle, Nintendo phased out the VS. System in favor of a setup directly tied to the home market: The PlayChoice-10. As the name suggests, the PlayChoice-10 could host as many as 10 different NES titles, which players could swap between with the press of a button. A single quarter bought players three minutes of play time—not a lot, but definitely enough to whet your appetite for a hot, new, not-yet-released game like Ninja Gaiden or Super Mario Bros. Basically, they were pay-to-play demo kiosks, and gamers couldn't get enough of them.

23. "Chip shortages" defined the NES's life.

The NES's hardware design came about in large part as a result of the fact that manufacturer Ricoh was the only company that had the bandwidth to produce the chips required to power the system. Who knows how differently things might have turned out if Nintendo had partnered with another chipmaker? Later, chip shortages became a common problem for hot games; many top-selling titles would go out of print due to unavailability of materials. Most famously, Zelda II suffered about a year's worth of launch delays in the U.S. due to scarcity of the high-capacity battery-enabled ROMs the game required.

24. NES carts were deliberately shaped like VHS cassettes.

Nintendo redesigned the Famicom to look more like a front-loading VCR, and the carts followed suit. Those compact little Famicom cartridges wouldn't have worked in the NES—they'd have become lost in the slot. So NES carts become twice as tall as Famicom cassettes, making them easier to grip... and, not coincidentally, easier for Nintendo to sell to gun-shy retailers as "entertainment paks" rather than "video games."

25. The first-ever bootleg NES game was an erotic hack of Super Mario Bros.

Around the time that Nintendo cracked down on third parties and began exercising more control over what could appear on Famicom, a new form of software began to appear: Unlicensed games of questionable content and legality. Americans only saw the merest glimpse of this sordid world through the Panesian-published "trilogy" of soft-porn puzzle and gambling games (Hot Slots, Bubble Bath Babes, and Peek-A-Boo Poker) that sometimes showed up in rental shops, but such games were rather more common in Japan. By most accounts, the first of these was an illegally modified version of Super Mario Bros. called Super Maruo, which rewarded the player with badly drawn porn of the eponymous heroine when they beat the game. Naturally, it's become a valuable collector's item these days, because when it comes to game collecting "price" rarely maps to "quality."

26. The entirety of Super Mario Bros. 3 took up less memory than a single texture image file in many modern games.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is widely regarded as an all-time classic video game, one of the true greats. It took up less than 350KB of space for everything: Graphics, music, level designs, program code. By comparison, most PC and console games today contain massive photographic textures to decorate their worlds, and single image files can take up more memory than the entirety of SMB3's ROM. That's not a knock against the rising standards of visual quality—just a remarkable tribute to how much Nintendo was able to accomplish in very little space in NES games.

27. New games were appearing on NES and Famicom until after the Sony PlayStation's debut.

The final official NES release was Nintendo's 8-bit adaptation of Super NES puzzler Wario's Woods. It's official release date? December 10, 1994—exactly one week after the Sony PlayStation launched in Japan. In other words, the NES legitimately spanned three console generations.

28. The rarest unlicensed release? Probably Huge Insect.

It's hard to know exactly how many copies of most pirate or bootleg games have been produced, but it's safe to say that Sachen's Huge Insect is easily among the rarest. Retronauts guest Frank Cifaldi once told a story about he and some colleagues convinced the long-lived Asian bootleg publisher to create the game after its title appeared for years in the company's catalog despite never acutally having been created. Sachen produced a few dozen copies shortly before going under, resulting in one of the rarest games ever published. (Just to make it especially collectible, they even produced the cart in two different color variants, blue and orange.)

29. There's gold in them thar carts.

More than a dozen different NES titles have sold for $1000+ at auction in the past few months, with dozens more creeping toward that mark. A collector's boom has taken hold of the NES market like has never been seen before. Fueled by a combination of nostalgia, increased awareness through YouTube shows, and kids who grew up playing NES finally coming into disposable income, many NES games cost more for the carts alone than they sold for brand new back in the day... even accounting for inflation. Don't go assuming your bin of disused carts is going to pay your mortgage, though; the vast majority of games are still worth only a few bucks. That Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cart if yours is never going to be a rarity.

30. People are still making NES games.

Even after Nintendo stopped developing NES games, pirates and bootleggers kept going. That may have slowed down around the turn of the century, but it never ended entirely; Chinese and Taiwanese bootlegs continue to be a treasure trove of fascinating discoveries, from NES renditions of Final Fantasy VII to surprisingly competent games based on Harry Potter. In recent years, Western amateur developers have joined the throngs as well, beginning with 2010's excellent Battle Kid and the Fortress of Peril. The latest addition to the NES family: 8-Bit Xmas 2015, the most recent release in retroUSB's annual "blinkenlights" novelty cart series.