SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – 12 Days of Christmas Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever (December 12, 2025)

Main Theme

In this festive "12 Days of Christmas… Toys" episode, hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant take listeners on a nostalgic and deeply informative journey through the story of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). They explore how the NES arrived during the “dark ages” of the U.S. video game industry, revolutionized home gaming, drove pop culture, and laid the groundwork for everything from “gamer” culture to the basic design of modern controllers. The episode is a blend of personal reminiscence, fun facts, and keen historical insight—perfect for Gen Xers and anyone curious about why the NES changed everything.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Hosts' Personal Connections (03:07–06:43)

• Josh and Chuck open by comparing their childhood connections to gaming and to the NES:
  • Josh: "I was a little bit old for Nintendo… it really boomed in popularity right when I was sort of, like, 15, 16 and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world." (03:13)
  • Chuck: "Nintendo came out and I was 10, 11 years old, not driving yet, and I owned one too, so it was definitely in my wheelhouse." (04:05)
  • Both reminisce about moving on to other consoles (PlayStation, N64) and about the ‘addictive’ quality of games like Tetris: "I was thinking about how to play games while I was not playing games… I made a decision… that I was going to give up video games because I was too addicted to them." – Chuck (04:50)

The Video Game Crash & Nintendo’s Timing (07:40–13:39)

• The North American Video Game Crash of 1983:
  • “Nintendo came along at a time when the video game market in North America had so totally bottomed out… People looked at it, it crashed so hard that it was a fad that was never coming back.” – Chuck (07:40)
  • Atari’s swift rise and fall: revenue at $2 billion (1982) to a loss of $536 million (1983).
  • PCs started eating into home gaming, reinforcing the belief that consoles were obsolete.
  • Japan’s market did not crash; arcades thrived, and Nintendo saw opportunity abroad.

The Birth of Famicom and Controller Innovation (13:39–15:58)

• Nintendo's Japanese Launch:

  • "They released what’s called the Famicom or the Family Computer, which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System." – Chuck (13:33)
  • Key innovation: The D-pad (directional pad). “No one knew at the time, but that would kind of revolutionize the gaming world… that’s still the bones of what a controller is.” – Josh (14:16)

• Controller design: “It was like they invented the airplane and got it right fully out of the gate, like tray tables and everything… what they did with that controller design.” – Chuck (14:52)

Nintendo’s Entry into North America & the Trojan Horse (20:38–27:33)

• The First Attempt:

  • “Their first crack at that was something called the AVS, the Advanced Video System… they tried to make it look like a computer.” – Josh (20:44)
  • CES 1985: “No one cared at all about it. They didn’t even get people coming over to play…” – Chuck (22:32)

• Genius Pivot – The ROB (Robotic Operating Buddy):

  • “What they invented was the ROB. The Robotic Operating Buddy, which is a very sweet name… it was all part of the same system. And that's how it worked. They managed to get the little Trojan Horse robot through the door…” – Josh (24:23)
  • The robot was slow and only had a couple of games, but it got the NES into toy stores and homes by marketing it as a toy rather than a video game console.

The Crucial North American Launch & Early Days (27:33–34:09)

• Designing for American Taste:

  • Lance Barr re-designed the system in an hour after the CES flop to resemble a VCR—less like a “game console”; this design became the NES as we know it.

• The New York Test Launch:

  • “They decided, all right, let's go to New York City… New York retailers said, ‘I got a warehouse full of Ataris over here that I can't even give away…’” – Josh (29:35)
  • Nintendo took all the risk, offering to take back unsold inventory, set up displays, and staff demo kiosks.

• Results:

  • They sold about half of their NY test shipment (“50,000 units”), enough to convince Nintendo to roll out nationwide for the holidays.

Super Mario Bros. and Cultural Domination (34:09–39:33)

• The NES Control Deck & Mario Magic:

  • Nintendo started bundling the more affordable NES Control Deck with Super Mario Bros.: “That was $99… And they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year.” – Chuck (33:42)
  • “You really can’t overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along… It was the first game that you could play and have fun playing forever.” – Josh (34:09)

• Game design revolution:

  • “There were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario… they created sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark? Put your cigarette down. How would you like to play a video game, the same one, for the next seven hours?” – Josh (34:41)

• Smart Marketing:

  • $20 million in advertising, a call center for stuck gamers, Nintendo Power Magazine, and even the first gaming championships (later known as eSports).

Controlling Quality—And the Market (37:42–41:32)

• Nintendo’s lockout chip:

  • To avoid "the Atari mistake" of a flood of bad games, Nintendo created a proprietary “lock chip” so only licensed, vetted games could run.
  • “Even to third parties, they said, you can only make two of these games a year. Like, don’t come at us with 200 games—make something really, really good…” – Josh (38:58)

• Heavy-handed licensing:

  • Game developers had to send detailed ideas for Nintendo’s approval; Nintendo could be nitpicky, but maintaining quality built trust.
  • The FTC investigated Nintendo for anti-competitive practices due to their market dominance.

Peripheral Oddities: Zapper, ROB, Power Glove, Power Pad (41:33–48:21)

• Zapper Gun (for Duck Hunt): Ingeniously a light sensor, not a real “laser gun” as kids believed.
  • “No kid who picked up the Zapper didn’t go, ‘pew, pew, pew.’” – Chuck (43:10)
• Power Pad & Power Glove: Attempts at innovation that were ahead of their time but clunky in practice; both ended up “in the closet with Rob.”
• Controller legacy: NES-style controllers set the template for all modern console design.
  • “What Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming…” – Josh (49:13)

Cheat Codes and Gaming Culture (51:11–52:39)

• Konami Code: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start.
  • “That’s called the Konami code… it worked for Gradius, but became much more famous with the game Contra.” – Chuck (51:51)

Blockbuster Games & Enduring Legacies (52:52–59:46)

• Total games: almost 700 for NES.
• Punch-Out!!! and pop culture: From “Vodka Drunkinsky” to “Soda Popinsky,” and gameplay secrets that “changed my life.” – Chuck (54:04)
• Metroid: Noted as the first truly “exploratory,” nonlinear game.
• Tetris: “I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today.” – Chuck (54:40)
• Zelda: First massive “open-world” console game, which some gamers devoted their lives to. Chuck’s take: “I never liked Zelda. It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable.” (58:19)

Universal Ritual: Blowing Into Cartridges (59:51–62:03)

• “If your Nintendo cartridge didn’t work, you would… blow on it. Everyone blew on it and you put it back in and it would work. The thing is, it wasn’t doing anything when you blew on it… but you being a dumb 10-year-old, thought, well, I blew on it. So that fixed it." – Chuck (60:15)
• This ritual was debunked in 2012—blowing actually risks corroding the cartridge.

The NES’s Lasting Impact

• The hosts repeatedly emphasize: without Nintendo’s resurrection of the console market, gaming as we know it would not exist.
  • “Nintendo… if they hadn’t been successful, games as we know them today would definitely not exist.” – Chuck (32:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Nintendo walked into this burning city that was the video game industry and said, let’s give this another shot.” – Chuck (07:40)
• “They figured out what everyone thought the future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and they gave it to everybody. It was a really exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought to the present.” – Chuck (14:52)
• “What they invented was the ROB… it was a sneaky way to get these consoles in the door…” – Josh (24:23)
• “You really can’t overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers…” – Josh (34:09)
• “Hot dog. That’s what I would have said.” – Chuck (35:09)
• "There is no kid who picked up the Zapper and didn’t go, 'pew, pew, pew.'" – Chuck (43:10)
• “That controller… laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come.” – Chuck (49:40)
• “If your Nintendo cartridge didn’t work, you would take it out… and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it and you put it back in and it would work.” – Chuck (60:15)
• On Tetris: “I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today.” – Chuck (54:40)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-------------|---------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:07–06:43 | Hosts' personal NES histories and early gaming culture | | 07:40–15:58 | Video game market crash and NES’s controller revolution | | 20:38–27:33 | Nintendo’s "Trojan Horse" marketing with ROB and Zapper | | 29:35–34:09 | NES’s New York debut, expansion, and crucial Christmas sales | | 34:09–39:33 | Super Mario Bros.’s cultural and gameplay revolution | | 37:42–41:32 | Nintendo's lockout chip and quality control | | 41:33–48:21 | NES peripherals: Zapper, Power Glove, Power Pad | | 49:40–52:39 | Controller legacy & cheat codes: The Konami Code | | 52:52–59:46 | Legacy games (Punch-Out, Tetris, Metroid, Zelda) | | 59:51–62:03 | The myth of blowing in cartridges |

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Conclusion & Tone

Josh and Chuck infuse the episode with easygoing banter, humor, and nostalgia, balancing personal recollections with smart research and historical context. The NES is celebrated not only as a machine but as a touchstone of American youth, a marketing masterclass, and the platform that redefined an entire industry. The episode closes on the ritual universal to all NES kids: blowing in cartridges—a fitting symbol for the “shared language” the NES gave a generation.

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For anyone who ever picked up a controller (or still does), this episode offers a rich, funny, and insightful look at why the NES wasn’t just a toy—it was a revolution.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everyone, I want.

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[Josh Clark]

Entertainment System changed gaming forever. Because, boy, oh, boy, did it.

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Please enjoy.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And we are 10 years old right now, and this is stuff you should know.

[Josh Clark]

Can I go ahead and admit something?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yes. I'm nervous, though, but yes, go ahead.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo, the NES system. And that's not to say that kids my age weren't playing it, but, like, it really boomed in popularity right. When I was sort of like 15, 16 and starting to sort of drive and get out in the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And I also did not own one. So, like, I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort of these classic games. Eventually in college, I remember it had to have been a Super Nintendo in like, 92. My roommate had one. So that's where I first started playing Super Mario World. And I played stuff like Tetris and Mario and the Game Boy that my brother had. But I've never owned a Nintendo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and I was 10, 11 years old, not driving yet, and I owned one too, so it was definitely in my wheelhouse.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, later in college, my good friend Clay got the first PlayStation, and that's where we started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And then I got on the PlayStation train. But it's just funny reading through this. I was like, I played some of these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo kid.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I have to say, I jumped from Nintendo. I never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I have friends who had those. Went off into the N64 world with GoldenEye.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you played that, right? My friend John had one of those. And I played a lot of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was so great. And then I got the first PlayStation 2. The first PlayStation. I mean, not to be confusing. And at that point I realized that I was thinking about how to play games while I was not playing games. Like when I was just walking around living life and I made a decision, a very fateful decision that I've never regretted, that I was going to give up video games because I was too addicted to them.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

This was college. And I never looked back.

[Josh Clark]

Wow. So you were into them, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

I was big time into Them. Yeah, I was like, this is. If it's reaching out from beyond the time I'm playing it, then yes, I was a little too into him if you ask me. I was never a gamer or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe a little too much in your favor. In your defense, rather, I would say that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has Tetris dreams and sees the world as like Tetris boards occasionally, if you're into it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep.

[Josh Clark]

And you know, my deal, as you know, I've said before is I was heavy Atari kid, big time arcade kid, and then played this kind of stuff with friends here and there. And then now every year I'll usually or every couple years I'll get two or three PlayStation games, play them obsessively for a couple of months and then it sits for nine months to a year.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm with you. I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to play video games, you know. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I still enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun. But yeah, my buddy Doug Dillard growing up had one rich friend and he had a Intellivision. And so I had kind of some fun today watching the old. Cause I remember thinking the Intellivision football was really great. And when I looked at it today, I mean it's very, very basic, but it was pretty good still. Like you're calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back. It was a big rush of nostalgia.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's somehow two bit graphics, I think. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And this, to be clear, what we're going to talk about today is the original nes. This could have been a two parter if we would have gone down the road of the 64. Like we're not even talking about the music today at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no.

[Josh Clark]

So there was plenty more material here, but this is just a bit of an homage for the Christmas season.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because I mean it's the holidays. So one of the greatest things you can do during the holidays is reminisce nostalgically about holidays. I definitely associate the NES or other. I didn't realize this until I started researching it. Some people call it the nes. Did you know that?

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really? Nes? Yeah, Some actual like legit gamers call it nes, other people call it nes and apparently there's some big disagreement. I've always called it nes, but I always associate the NES with a pretty significant portion of my life. But it always is tied to Christmas as well.

[Josh Clark]

All right, well, you're gonna wax Nostalgic a bit more. Even though I did play a little bit of these here and there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, so one of the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment System has an amazingly great story to it. Like, it's just so fun to tell because Nintendo came along at a time when the video game market in North America had so totally bottomed out that people looked at video games like, imagine, think about how big Atari was. People looked at it, it crashed so hard that it was a fad that was never coming back. Like it had already lived its life. And Nintendo walked into this burning city that was the video game industry and said, let's give this another shot. And they actually managed to succeed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, Atari was dead as disco. We talked a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode. And I did a full Atari guest 2 parter with Strickland back in the day on tech stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'll bet that was a fun one.

[Josh Clark]

It was a lot of fun. But yeah, ET Came along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this one game. It was sort of a flash in the pan for a few years. And parents were also weighing in and saying, you know, I don't like my kid playing this much garbage on the television. Like, I don't think it's good for their brains. I don't think it was a part of the satanic panic necessarily. It was pre satanic panic. It was more along the lines of, you're riding your brain.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So was that the thing that triggered it or was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered the. What's called the North American Video game crash of 1983? It was the games, wasn't it?

[Josh Clark]

Well, I mean, I think it was a two part thing. Kids got a little less interested because the game started to suck, quite frankly. And then I think you also had parents beating the drum of hey. And Atari wasn't really coming out with, you know, the new systems weren't that great. The 2600 and the 5200 came along. I mean, rather the 5200 followed up and it was just okay. So they needed something needed to happen. And that thing that needed to happen was Nintendo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And also at the same time, one of the other things that had ushered, helped usher out video games was the personal computer starting to come into the world.

[Josh Clark]

Absolutely.

[Chuck Bryant]

And with the personal computer, you could like do your taxes, your kid could like practice math. And they played games on floppy disk too, so.

[Josh Clark]

Castle Wolfenstein.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. Yes. I played Wolfenstein. Oh, I'm so glad you said that, because I was looking at Castlevania on floppy disk, and I'm like, it came out in 1990. Like, I was definitely playing it before that. It was Wolfenstein. Thank you, man. You just made a really great neural pathway circuit, like, connect completely in my brain.

[Josh Clark]

That feels good.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I saw it described by a guy named Chris Kohler who wrote an article on this in wired back in 2010. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future, and anything that just played games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. Yeah, that was kind of like the premise. So just to get across. I don't want to beat this jump too hard, but to get across how huge the crash was. The video game crash of North America in 1982, Atari raked in $2 billion. Atari alone in 1983, they lost $536 million.

[Josh Clark]

That's a swift fall.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, but that's how quickly that it happened. And so people basically. If it crashes that hard, people hate your product. And I think that's kind of where we were at in 1983.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but as you pointed out, this was. We need to keep pointing out, this was the North American crash.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, good point.

[Josh Clark]

It did not happen in Japan in 1983. They were just like, I don't know what you're talking about. Because we have arcades over here that are flourishing. We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr still a lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun to play.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

And in 1980, this was a few years before the United States crash. They said, hey, you know what? There's this gaming thing going on, home gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get together a team over here to just sort of poke around. Because we're Nintendo, we make a lot of toys, and we have for a long time, and we're big in the arcade world, but we don't have really a console system going. And that led to. I think actually there was a console called the Epoch cassette vision in 1981, and it was sort of the biggest thing in Japan at the time, but.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I think it was kind of the only thing in Japan at the time, too.

[Josh Clark]

Well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you could also say it was the smallest.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true.

[Josh Clark]

But it was not a Nintendo product, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was. It was. Nintendo came along as a rival to this Cassette Vision. Epoch Cassette Vision. So the head of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi, he apparently was this driving force. He had some really great people working for him in Japan and in North America. But he seems to have been this person who would be like, do this enormous undertaking and do it in an hour kind of thing. He kind of seems to have had a sense that there was a really narrow window that was open right now that could close at any time and that they needed to get this stuff done, but they also needed to do it really well and really right, basically out of the gate. And they actually managed to, because in 1983, after just a couple years of research and development, they released what's called the Famicom or the family computer, which was essentially the direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment System that they released a couple years later in North America.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, it's not very often that a head of a company or a boss comes along and says, I want to do something better and cheaper than what is currently out there. And it actually happened. And listeners at home, if you can look this stuff up as you go safely, please do. Because just seeing all these various units we're going to talk about is really a lot of fun.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're like at that age, they're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy, but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so, you know what I mean?

[Josh Clark]

I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on a shelf. As a collector these days.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think there's a lot of people who have that actually.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I'm sure. So look up the Epoch Cassette Vision, because that's kind of fun. But the Famicom was this red and white box. It top loaded, it had two wired controllers and it had very importantly on the control pad, it had the D pad. It had the directional pad on the left with the up and down, left and right arrows, and then an A and B button which no one knew at the time, but that would kind of revolutionize the gaming world. As you know, they got a little fancier over the years, but it's still sort of. That's still the bones of what a controller is absolutely.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like it was. I can never remember the full quote, but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane and got it right fully out of the gate, like tray tables and everything. Essentially. It was like that's what they did with that controller design. And now you think about it, you look at it like the Nintendo Brick and especially the famcom controllers. They look so old fashioned. But if you can put yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan in 1983, if you looked around at the other stuff available, it was just from the future. And that was one of the things that Nintendo did really, really well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought the future was, what it contained, what it looked like, and they gave it to everybody. It was a really like exuberant time. It was like the future had been brought to the present. And it was all thanks to Nintendo, basically.

[Josh Clark]

So it retailed for about 150 bucks back then, which is what, close to 500 today?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 400, something like that.

[Josh Clark]

All right, so I mean, kind of on par with, you know, the range of even modern gaming. I mean, what's the new PlayStation like? Five maybe? I don't know, I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there. Five or six hundred bucks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was like for PlayStation 7? It was just people running around the real world. It was all like VR and augmented reality.

[Josh Clark]

I don't remember that.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was pretty cool because it came out in like the 90s and you're like, oh, we're pretty close to that now already, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, for sure. They bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong junior games and the Popeye games, which were basically about the same quality as you would get at the arcade.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was huge.

[Josh Clark]

It was a huge deal. I mean, especially if you grew up playing Atari. I loved Atari, but Atari was Atari and it had a lot of limits. And this was, you know, you went to the arcade so you could play games better than Atari and now you could do it at home, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, so that was an enormous progression. But it wasn't just like the graphics, the quality of the look of it. It was also the gameplay too. Like it was way more than most of the games you were going to play on an Atari. It was just funner to play some of these Famcom games. And it took off like a rocket. It knocked the Epoch cassette vision right off of the top place into the history books, basically. Essentially, yeah. They sold half a million units in two months after its release. I think by the end of 1984, they'd sold two and a half million units. So in about a year or so. And they were like, okay, I think we're definitely onto something. And they had enough hubris, enough, I guess, at least self assurance that they set their sights on North America again, which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video games were concerned.

[Josh Clark]

It's a great spot for a break.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so too.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026 and eventually Canada will tell you year dates too.

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[Josh Clark]

We're going to do at least three.

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Legs and the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry, you can get all the info you need and buy tickets@stuffyou should know.com, click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right, we can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road. All right.

[Josh Clark]

I think where we left off, the United States, was a version of Cormac McCarthy's the Road.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And the Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said, we are going to save you and bring you into the future. And it was a tough sell at first in the US because like you said, the video game craze, for lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone. This was 1985. Parents were still not, you know, they were like, I'm glad that went away, basically. And now we have these PCs in our homes and my kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever, and they seem happy enough with that. And Nintendo knew all this was going on. They knew it was gonna be a tougher sell, so they knew they had to come up with something awesome. And their first crack at that was something called the avs, the Advanced Video System. And they said, we'll give it a keyboard so it looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disk drive, It'll be able to do some stuff. But they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It had a joystick, it had a keyboard, like a musical keyboard. And it had this wireless, which is. We'll explain how all this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool. But it had a little ray gun, a little zapper.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you really said a mouthful with the word wireless, man. This was 1985, and this advanced Video System came out with wireless controllers like it was. That's really impressive. And it was really slick looking, too. Like, really futuristic looking. But also. Yes, they put enough computer peripherals in it that it did. It didn't look like a video game system. Right. Yeah. So they took it to ces. The January version, I think even back then, was in Vegas. But it's. Sorry, it's the Consumer Electronics show, right?

[Public Ad]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I've never been to that. Have you?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Strickland has great stories from it, though.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he goes every year, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so. But at CES, in January of 1985, they're like, here you go, everybody. Here's the future, the Advanced Video System. And no one cared at all about it. They didn't even get people coming over to play, to mess around. No one could have cared less about that thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is a little bit surprising, looking back, because the games were good and they knew that. I guess they were just a little gun shy. But it seems like Atari made so much money, I'm surprised there wasn't Someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is gonna be a real thing. But it didn't work. They didn't get any response.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. And I think that really goes to just kind of underline just how bad a reputation video games had. Because, you know, Dave points out that the consoles that had been going for like 100, $150 the year before, these retailers were stuck with them. And they were selling them for like 40 bucks, which is how much the games used to go for. Now the games were like $4. So the retailers have been so badly burned, I think they all got caught potatoes when the crash happened that they were like, never again. And that's what Nintendo was working against, which is as Dave. Dave again, Dave helped us with this. As he points out, you were either a very foolish company to try this or a very smart one because again, it had a terrible reputation. But that also meant that there was no competition in this enormous market right now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, absolutely. So they knew they had to have almost like a trick to get their foot in the door, and they came up with one. And Dave found. This is Gaming Historian. Is it a. I know it had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a full website?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. All I know is that the YouTube channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that are really interesting, it's good stuff.

[Josh Clark]

But someone at Gaming Historian came up with this very apt metaphor about a Trojan horse. And that's kind of what they were looking for, was a way to get these things in the home by almost tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system. And it was more just sort of like a toy because kids still got and bought or, you know, received toys and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry. It was just home video games. So what they invented was the Rob. The Rob, the Robotic Operating Buddy, which is a very sweet name. You should totally go look at Rob online and especially YouTube videos of Rob in action and just be prepared for the speed of Rob.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. But the thing is, Rob was a robot. He moved and he functioned. He interacted with the games that they.

[Josh Clark]

Came up with very slowly, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Very slowly. But this was a time where, like, robots were kind of hard to come by. They were not, like, it was not an easy thing to get your hands on. And now all of a sudden there's this company saying, like, hey, we have this whole thing and it has a robot too. And it was one of the greatest strokes of marketing genius that any company's ever come up with, as we'll see.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I mean, what they ended up with was a robot that didn't. I mean, it functioned as it should, but like I said, it's super, super slow. They only ended up having a couple of games where you could use the robot, and it was just sort of a sneaky way to get these consoles in the door because it was all part of the same system. And. And that's how it worked. They managed to get the little Trojan Horse robot through the door, and thanks to a guy named Lance Barr, he helped design a lot of this stuff. He designed the Zapper Ray Gun, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a sec. But he designed it as a front loading system, which made sort of people think of VCRs. It was also a very. They call it Zero Force solution. So there wasn't a lot of wear on the. On the cartridges. And it, you know, just worked really well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Plus, it looked like. You said it looked like a vcr. Those were wildly popular at the time. And I don't think we said Chuck. So that January CES was just a complete, like, catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this time coming up with the Advanced Video System, and it went nowhere. So again, the head of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi, told a couple of people, like, hey, redesign this in an hour. And they did. And Lance Barr was the guy who did it, and he knocked it out of the park because the nes, as it debuted later on in North America, was essentially what he came up with in that one hour that he was given to do it. So they did all this and had it done in time for the July 1985 CES. Like six months after that huge colossal failure, they went back to the drawing board and came back and six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System fully fleshed out, including Robot and Zapper Gun.

[Josh Clark]

Well, notably Robot, because that's what all anyone cared about at first.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Like at ces, the. The NES system was sort of to the side, and everyone was just trying to get their hands on Rob and play Gyromite, which I'm telling you, you got to just spend five minutes watching Rob play this game because it shows a split screen of the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which really isn't much. And then Rob just very slowly picking up these spindle tops and making them spin.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And was it the game historian video that really kind of went into detail about how Rob played and setting up his accessories and everything?

[Josh Clark]

I watched a bunch of them? Yeah, I'm not sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I think it was that one. If not, it was another one I saw where they really kind of showed like, the idea of Rob was pretty ingenious. Sure, he was Player two, but you were actually playing together like you in Gyromite. You were kind of running through this maze and there were like pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get Rob to do it for you. And again, he would eat some lunch so slowly. Yeah. Get an eye exam and your glasses made in an hour or two. And then, yeah, he would have completed that and you could advance to the next column or whatever. It was a great idea. It was a cool concept, but it just. The execution was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on the Player 2 controller. So if you got tired and frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could just push the buttons on the Player 2 controller yourself and play Gyromite that way. But the point was, they don't seem, in retrospect, to have really thought Rob was going to take off. In fact, the games that he came with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't even bothered to make the North American version of these. They just put like, kind of this, like, like fix on it that made it compatible with the North American system. But when you loaded up Gyromite, the, the, the intro screen showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning of it.

[Josh Clark]

I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese writing and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's a memory. It may have just been like boot up screens or something. So they decide. It was such a eye grabber at CES that they decided, all right, let's go to New York City and let's test it out there in one city, roll it out, see what happens. The New York retailer said, hey, buddy, I got, look at this. I got a warehouse full of Ataris over here that I can't even give away. I don't know about a new gaming system. And they said, all right, here's what we'll do. We will ship them to your store from Japan for free. We will. You can just sell what you sell and pay us for those. Whatever you don't sell, you can return to us. We'll take them back. We'll send over a team in your store to set up these big marketing, interactive marketing displays and we'll take on all of the risk. And all you guys gotta do is try and sell some of these. And they went, yeah, all right, that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was a great Joe Pesci, by the way. I meant to say.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Oh, Joe Pesci.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, yeah, they did this in 500 stores. And normally when you did, like, kind of a soft test release of something like this, you might choose, like, Topeka, Kansas or somewhere that no one cares about. Right. But they went full bore and hit New York City. And I think I've seen it, you know, mentioned a few times that, like, it was based on that Frank Sinatra song. The idea that if you made it in New York, you could make it anywhere. And they did make it in New York. Oh, I can't remember. I want to rock.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

I want to rock.

[Chuck Bryant]

I want to hear that version, man. I've got that MP3. It's so good. It still holds up of I Want to Rock. Yeah. The Twisted Sister song.

[Josh Clark]

You got that MP3.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or MP4? I don't know what the case.

[Josh Clark]

Where'd you buy it?

[Chuck Bryant]

I bought it at Toys R Us.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome. Very cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

So they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily. They sold about half the units that they had produced for this test market in New York. I think, like 50,000. But it was enough for Yamauchi to say, let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the rest of the country. Another bold move, because normally after your first test, like, run your first test market, you do like four or five more. And he said, no, let's skip that. Let's just go right to the rest of the country. And he did.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that was the Christmas season too. So I get the feeling that they were. They weren't super disappointed, but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically, like, it was right in that zone where it was just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind of the sliding doors, pathways that the gaming world would have taken had it sold 30,000 units, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say, like, Nintendo. Had Nintendo not been successful, like, the games as we know them today would definitely not exist.

[Josh Clark]

We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And going outside.

[Josh Clark]

Who needs it?

[Chuck Bryant]

So that was 1985, holiday season. By 1986, they hit on something else. So, like, one of the things that they did was take a poll of that people in the test market who had bought the Nintendo. And I think, like, the vast majority of them said that Rob the Robot was the reason they had bought the whole system to get that robot. That's how well that marketing ploy worked. So Rob had kind of served his purpose, though everyone knew he was slow. They weren't releasing more games for them. So they came up with originally the. The way you bought Nintendo. It was the Nintendo Entertainment System console, two controllers, the Zapper gun, Rob the Robot, and all of Rob the Robot's accessories. And then two games, one of which was Gyromite. That game you play with Rob, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, that's a lot of stuff. And of course, it was pretty expensive at the time. So for the national rollout, they kept the deluxe set. But they also came up with something called the NES Control Deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and very, very importantly, Super Mario Brothers. And that was 99 bucks. And they sold those things as fast as they could make them for the holidays that year.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers. That was a game that came along actually with the Famicom in 1985. And it was just. It was the most advanced looking game and playing game that any kid had ever seen. It was, as Dave points out, it was the first game that you could play and have fun playing forever. Like, you could go on and on, finding the hidden worlds, finding the Easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections and other levels that you never even knew existed, banging away hidden bricks. There were so many discoveries and places to go in Super Mario, bro. They created sort of a new way of gaming, which was like, hey, how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How? Put your cigarette down. How would you like to play a video game? The same one for the next seven hours?

[Chuck Bryant]

Hot dog. That's what I would have said.

[Josh Clark]

And that really.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hot dog.

[Josh Clark]

It was a whole new deal, though, because even when I played Atari, like we played for hours at a time. But I don't know, you played a game for 30, 45 minutes and you'd pop in another one. That's why you had like 40 games in your controller box. Because none of them. You could play for hours and hours and hours in a row and not eventually be like, okay, this is getting a little bit old. Even as a kid.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So the gameplay was just light years ahead of anything. Almost every single source that I've seen on the Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers changed things uses the word light years ahead of everything else, because it really was. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto. He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a legend overnight because of it.

[Josh Clark]

They were also smart enough to do Some really savvy marketing moves which kind of rolled out in a few different ways. Well, they had a lot of advertising money. That was sort of a given. They had about 20 million bucks to spend off the bat, which is a ton of money for advertising now and then. But they created a call center. They trained these players and these gamers basically to master these games and sit on the phone and you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could, like, walk you through a level that you couldn't get through. Yeah, they had Nintendo Power magazine, which is a very big deal. And they created the first gaming championships where. And these are still just huge, where kids and adults alike now, adults from all over the world come together to battle each other out. And the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the grand championships at Universal Studios Hollywood.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, you can make the case that they created the esports phenomenon or they laid the groundwork for it to come, at least, right?

[Josh Clark]

I would think so, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's pretty cool. So there was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout that found that 95% of teens polled said that they recommended the NES to their friends. And I think 83% of adults and 85% of little kids. That is eye popping. And that means that they were successful. They used Rob to get their feet in the door. And they knew that if they just got their console in the hands of Americans, they would change their minds forever about video games. And that's exactly what happen.

[Josh Clark]

And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did their best to try and keep bad games from being able to play it on their system. And that's what happened with Atari with the. The games got so bad. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this in the ET Game episode. Like, ET Gets unfairly piled upon because it was just such a big release. But there were far worse games released on the Atari system. Hundreds and hundreds of really, really bad games that just no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen to them. So they designed a proprietary system where you could only play officially licensed NES games. He created a lock chip on their circuit board, and only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip to unlock it. And that really kept quality control, you know, under their wing. They said, even to third parties, they said, you can only make two of these games a year. Like, don't come at us with 200 games, like make something really, really good that we'll approve of and we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the COVID Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And like they were really nitpicky too. Like as you were developing the game you needed to send Nintendo explanations of gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff. And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff. And that's what you could do if you had 80% of the market as far as video games were because people had to come to you and it was really smart for them to just kind of protect their intellectual property like that because it was so good. But they were basically so heavy handed about it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point point for their licensing practices.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around. And there were other companies out there trying to bootleg games still. There was one called 10gen that had a few license games but they wanted more money and so they went to the patent office and said, hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and key chips? And they said sure, here it is. And so they, I guess illegally, because they ended up getting sued and Nintendo won. So I mean I don't know how all that patent law works. I wasn't, I'm surprised that you could just go get a patent and rip it off.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to have just ripped it off. But I think it's one of those things that was like gray, illegal gray area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay. Makes sense.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what I mean? Yeah. So they just, Tengen rolled the dice and they lost essentially.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, Tengen, tell them about.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Is that it?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so. I've seen, I've actually heard it both ways.

[Josh Clark]

I gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

I just wanted to fill it out by saying it the other way. So there's this YouTuber named Nintendrew and he has a video called 10 Weird NES Facts and he talks about that, that keychip thing where people were trying to get around it. And he said other companies didn't even bother to come up with a chip. They just used a low voltage spike to scramble the brains of the, the lock chip so that it wouldn't work anymore. And now the game could be played. And as an example he used a, he used a game from the developer tree and it was for Bible adventures. So if you put Bible. No, I've Never even heard of it. But if you put Bible Adventures in your nes, it would scramble its brain so that you could play Bible Adventures.

[Josh Clark]

I would think some of these might endanger the game console itself.

[Chuck Bryant]

You'd think so? Yeah. It's pretty reckless.

[Tour Announcer]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Jesus killed my Nintendo. So Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did its job and got its foot, the little robotic foot in the door. But kids were like, this is not so fun playing these games. These two games with Rob isn't where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these other games. And so Rob, you know, Dave kind of funnily points out, Rob inevitably ended up kind of in the closet of every kid that probably owned one. And it just became about that NES system. But that's not to say all those peripheries were not a success, because that Zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big deals that kids loved to play.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I did not realize this, but the laser gun, the. What was it called? The Zapper, it was not. It didn't shoot anything at your TV. Because if you stop and think about it, your TV's not set up to accept that kind of thing, or your TV screen certainly isn't. So what happened instead is it was a light detector. So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your screen, just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that, but still faster than you could register it, the screen went black. And whatever ducks were on the screen turned into white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would register that white flash of light. That was a duck, that square. And it would register it as a hit. That's how the Zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious.

[Josh Clark]

Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun because they don't know how that stuff works.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. There is no kid who picked up the Zapper and didn't go, pew, pew, pew.

[Josh Clark]

All right, I guess here at minute 40, we'll take our second break.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man.

[Josh Clark]

And we'll come back, really, and talk a little bit about what happened next.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Support for this show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, buys one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your that's public.comsysk paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures tired.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026, and eventually Canada will tell you year dates too.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

We're going to do at least three legs.

[Tour Announcer]

And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry, you can get all the info you need and buy tickets@stuffyou should know.com, click on the Tour button and thank us later.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, Chuck, so there were a couple of other peripherals that came along that were as meh as Rob was. Maybe even a little meh. One was the Power Pad, the other was the Power Glove. And again, these were things that were really cool and helped advance the the NES system and made a bunch of money for everybody, but when you played with them, they weren't very good.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the Power Pad was A pad. It had another use from another company. It was called a fun and fitness pad from Bandai. And Nintendo bought them out and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can do, like, track and field games by running on this dumb thing. And that technology is still very popular. Like, if you go to arcades, those dance games, and there's still, like, I played one not too long ago with my daughter Dave. And Busters, where you. You do, like, track and field stuff, is still around, but at home, a kid isn't going to do, like, they're inside kids because they don't want to be outside running around. They want to be on the couch. And so the Power Pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the closet with Rob. I almost called him Rod. And then that glove, though, the Power Glove, it was really cool. And it looks cool today. Like, if. Imagine people buy these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat. But punch out, which is a great boxing game. Power Glove was kind of the only game where you really maximized what you could get out of the glove.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage movie the wizard where this kid pulls out a Power glove and plays rad racer. So he's using it like he's steering. But it just. They didn't really develop any game split specifically for the Power Glove. So it was a heavy time. I think it was a little bit. Because Dave likens it to Wii. Eventually, Nintendo came out with the Wii system, which used essentially the same kind of technology. But, yeah, it was ahead of its time. So it ended up in the closet with the Power pad and Rob.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, man, closet's getting full.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. But as kind of clunky as those were, that controller we talked about, that was revolutionary.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There's a writer at GamePro named Taeke Kim who came up with this cool analogy that they found, which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming. And that really kind of locks it down as to what they did. Like, you know, we were talking earlier about that first NES brick. You know, it was all kind of there. Like, they grew and morphed. But that directional pad was revolutionary. Those buttons were revolutionary. And they landed on the idea of a kid holding something in their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it. Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because with the Atari joystick, you would use your thumb for the red button, but you used your whole hand to Move the joystick. This was just totally different. And it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything was laid out just right. And it was just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of the console controllers to come. Even today, still, it's based on those.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they had. It didn't start there. They had it initially on this handheld game called A Game and Watch, which, if you look this, it looks like it's sort of the predecessor to the Game Boy, and it's called A Game and Watch because it had a. A clock on it. So it told the time and it was a game. So they call it the Game and Watch. But that's where the D pad came from. And Donkey Kong is a game that really took great advantage of the D pad. And it just seemed like the natural. And now they make the little mini joysticks, which are great, but some. I think the. I think the Xbox, they have joysticks or do they still use that D pad?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. Remember, Addicted. So I gave it up.

[Josh Clark]

So you never played an Xbox?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no. I've seen ads for it, but I can't recall the controller.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend, John Pindell, who. You know John. He's backstage in New York. John. He had the N64. He was my Goldeneye partner, but he also got an Xbox. And we were both addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, that was a good game.

[Josh Clark]

And that was a game that carried with you in real life, because if you played enough Tony Hawk, you would just. Someone who'd never skateboarded, you would be walking around in the world and going, like, I could totally grind that gutter on top of that roof. It's pretty funny.

[Chuck Bryant]

So another thing that those controllers did was give us the cheat code I guess you could conceivably do on like an Atari joystick. But they really came along thanks to the. The nes, because there was a developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius into a Nintendo game. And it was really hard. So he created this cheat code to make it easier to kind of game test for him so he wouldn't have to start over every time. And is extraordinarily famous. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A start. And that's called the Konami code because the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius, but he became much more famous with the game Contra.

[Josh Clark]

I never, I guess you played a lot of Contra, probably, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

For sure.

[Josh Clark]

Now, what was Contra? I don't even know.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where I saw it described well as like a cross between Rambo and Aliens. Okay, so if I remember correctly, you're in some sort of weird other world, and you and your buddy are kind of like. Like buff and wear like headbands and you have, like spiky blonde hair. Oh, yeah, but. And you just shoot all sorts of stuff. And it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons that shoot in different ways. And now you're like, this is clunky and old. But at the time it was. There was just, again, nothing like it on the market. Like, a lot of the games that we understand today originated on the nes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. I think I've seen Contra. That sounds familiar.

[Chuck Bryant]

But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, ba. Start with Contra. If you did it at the intro screen right before the game started, you would get 30 extra lives, which you could use to great effect.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's great. They ended up. It's a staggering number still, considering that they were kept a sort of a heavy hand on the amount of games being produced. But they ended up with close to 700 games for the original NES. And I think in 95 is when they launched the 16 bit. No, no, Super Nintendo was 91. And that was the one that I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing a lot of Super Mario.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And then Super Mario 2 and 3, of course, came along. We already mentioned Punch Out. That was. I remember playing Punch Out. That was a great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the world at the time. But there is a little fun fact that Dave dug up. And I think I remember this, but the arcade Punch out had a boxer. The Russian boxer's name was Vodka Drunkinsky. So great.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he got changed to Sota Popinsky very famously. Anyone who played Punch out is very familiar with Sota Popinsky. And one of the big revelations of my childhood was that the great tiger who wore a turban with a gem on it, his gem flashed before he came at you to throw a punch.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Oh.

[Chuck Bryant]

When I realized that you could predict it. Yeah. It just changed my life.

[Josh Clark]

That's funny. It changed your life.

[Chuck Bryant]

It did.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, you might never become a podcaster.

[Tour Announcer]

You never know.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's possible that whole glass doors or the sliding doors thing. Glass doors.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the glass ceiling.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Different thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

So what else, Chuck? There's some other ones too. That we have to shout out.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I played a lot on the game. Boy, talk about addictive. Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris to my car packing skills today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

When we go on road trips and stuff, Emily always still jokes like, chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great. Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it, it's. Oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing, but it's a game where you stack to different shaped blocks, and when you got solid lines, a line would disappear. And the whole goal of this game is to keep those lines low. And as it built higher and higher and higher, there was less room for those blocks to drop, and it would seemingly go faster and faster.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man.

[Josh Clark]

It could even be very stressful.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Especially as they just kept building up and they're dropping and it drops right onto block. You're up that high. It's just like, you know, it's just. It is very stressful.

[Josh Clark]

It is, but.

[Chuck Bryant]

But it was fun.

[Josh Clark]

Well, and it's also, I think one of the more satisfying games ever invented in that when you would. Things would get a little hairy. And if you got like two in a row of the exact ones that you needed and made, I think it was a Tetris. When you got like, was it like five or was it four?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't remember. Probably four, because the tallest block was four high.

[Josh Clark]

Was it four high? But it would make all four disappear at once. And if you got a couple of those and you went from like 70% high down to like 20% in an instant, there's no feeling like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. No. Tetris was pretty great. I loved it, too.

[Josh Clark]

It was awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

I want to shout out some other ones. There was another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an entire weekend from Blockbuster and would spend the entire weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I remember correctly, I never beat Metroid, but it was really groundbreaking in that there wasn't, like, some path you had to stick to. Like, you were meant to explore these vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to the next level. That was pretty new, actually. So Metroid was groundbreaking, too. And then there were other ones that were just fun to play, like ice hockey. Did you play that one?

[Josh Clark]

I was always into sports games, so I was. I played hockey and golf.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about tennis?

[Josh Clark]

Tennis, I played all those.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was fun. Did you play the MLB baseball game?

[Josh Clark]

I'm not sure if I played that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

That one was very addictive. RC Pro Am, DuckTales was actually a lot of fun. And then there was an army one called Jackal. And then if you like skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skate or Die, which was pretty good. But my money was on Town and Country Designs. Skate and Surf, I think it was called. And you could skateboard, and then you would go surf. And it was. Was a lot of fun to play, too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I was so into the sports games, and I still play the PlayStation. What is it? PGA 2K for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun, but I played. I was addicted to the Atari beach volleyball game, wherein it was two players aside, and both players were connected to one another. They could not move independently. So when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running in the exact, exact same pattern.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds. It reminds me of another game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon, which was just about as bad as it got for Atari, where a dog chases the. The wagon from the Chuck Wagon commercials.

[Josh Clark]

It's a brand new game.

[Chuck Bryant]

Poop out. Yeah. Who would have thought? And then it would poop out like food, and the dog would eat the food. That was like, the point of the game.

[Josh Clark]

You should speak a little bit about Zelda, though. The Legend of Zelda. That's a game again, that by the time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing. And again, we couldn't afford an nes. So what was Zelda all about?

[Chuck Bryant]

So I never liked Zelda.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, interesting.

[Chuck Bryant]

It did something to my mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't know why. It's almost like, have you ever. What's your grocery store? Kroger or Publix? I can't remember.

[Josh Clark]

Both, but generally Publix.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, so there's a lot of people out there who are only Publix and only Kroger. And I think my theory is that they're laid out in a certain way, that they appeal to one type of person, and then the other one appeals to a different type of person. So if you are a Publix person and you go into a Kroger, it feels weird and out of place and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of Zelda made me feel. So I never got into it. But I know some people, like, have essentially dedicated their lives to that game, like. Like, beyond playing it. Like probably dress up as Link, the main character, and have like all sorts of toys and stuff like that. Like Legend of Zelda was really big too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And it was certainly not the first open world game, but. And I think there's not a solid agreement on what that was. There are some arguments for the great Atari game Adventure. That was the first open world game I played.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Your avatar was a square.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

But it was so much fun because you could go anywhere for the first time. It was really different and new, but I think Zelda is kind of regarded as. Or the Legend of Zelda as one of the first open world, like really good open world games, I guess, right? Yeah, an advanced one.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it was by the same guy who did Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising.

[Tour Announcer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

What else you got, Chuck?

[Josh Clark]

I mean, not a whole lot else. I guess we should definitely talk about blowing in those cartridges because I even made that joke before we recorded because my microphone wasn't working. And Dave, who's sitting in for Jerry, said, unplug the cable and just plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And you don't want to actually. So did you know about that? Right.

[Josh Clark]

I blew in a lot of cartridges, Atari cartridges too.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that was the thing. If your Nintendo cartridge didn't work, you would take it out of the VCR like entry point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it and you put it back in and it would work. The thing is, it wasn't doing anything when you blew on it. You weren't helping it. It just hadn't made the correct connection the first time. So when you took it out and put it back in, the chances were that you were making the correct connection then. And then the game would work. But you being a dumb 10 year old, thought, well, I blew on it. So that fixed it. But Nintendo Long said, do not blow on these things. It's actually bad for them. And no one listened until there was this guy who came along and actually ran a study, the world's first study, on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge does.

[Josh Clark]

And it didn't work. This is in 2012. His name was Frankie Vitruello. And you know, it's a very rudimentary study, but I mean, how else are you going to do it? You're going to have a control game you don't blow into and you're going to have a game you blow into. And after how long did he do this?

[Chuck Bryant]

30 days. Every day for 30 days.

[Josh Clark]

The guy spent a month blowing on this game, took this, the blown cartridge out at the end and showed that it was corroded and kind of gross. And it's funny, you don't know what kid. You always wonder who invented this, because every kid did it. Because every kid saw another kid do it who just got it from some other kid. But it was just sort of known, like you would take it out and it was always the same thing. You would do it really quick and just go and like run the cartridge back and forth in front of your mouth and then stick it back in.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, that sound just triggered a tidal wave of nostalgia in me. Chuck. That was amazing.

[Josh Clark]

I remember that.

[Chuck Bryant]

So don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges. People who still play Nintendo original nes.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe we should follow this up again.

[Chuck Bryant]

One day to do one on the music of Nintendo.

[Josh Clark]

Well, just sort of everything we didn't cover because the N64 was such a big deal. And.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know, this could be a two parter separated by time and space.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I like that idea, Chuck. Let's definitely do that. And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed out a second part to this episode, of course that means we've just unlocked listener mail.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe next Christmas it can be our. You know, because this is kind of every year we try to do a toy. A famous toy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, no, I had the same thought. I just didn't want to spill the beans.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, all right. Consider them spilled.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they're spilled all over.

[Josh Clark]

All right. Speaking of spilling all over, this is a correction that on something you said that. I. I don't know how I didn't catch this, but oh boy, it's the. We'll call it the great Nutter butter controversy of 2022. Hey, guys, at the end of the vaudeville episode, Josh said, it's weird how there were two types of Nutter Butters and they're totally different. The wafery kind and then the peanut shaped cookie and I don't remember what I said. I must have just been like, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that's exactly what you said.

[Josh Clark]

And he mentioned both had the same logo, same packaging, which is not true. Just two different types of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what you're talking about because we had a bunch of people write in, the peanut shaped cookies are the Nutter Butters, Josh, but the other wafery treats are Nutty Buddy bars. Did you look? Is this what you meant?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I think this person is from an alternate Berenstain Bears dimension because in our dimension, it's the same thing, same package, same name, same everything. Just different cookies. But is standing by.

[Josh Clark]

It is the Nutty Buddy. What you were thinking of though, is.

[Chuck Bryant]

What I want to know in that person's dimension. Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

It's easy to get them mixed up guys if you are not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick up on it, which was weird because I love both. I never buy these, of course, but boy, a Little Debbie Nutty Bar. So, so good.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think you would like the other version of Nut Nutter Butters. The kind of wafery one. I think you would really like it.

[Josh Clark]

That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, that's the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying.

[Josh Clark]

Oh man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who wrote this email?

[Josh Clark]

This is George. I think George is going to be more confused now than ever.

[Chuck Bryant]

So George says, P.S. gotta go. It's raining donuts again outside. Thanks a lot George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension. Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too. And if you want to be like George and reach out and say hello, you can do that in an email. Send it to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Josh Clark]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever.

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[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Foreign.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026 and eventually Canada will tell you year dates too.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

We're going to do at least three.

[Tour Announcer]

Legs, and the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. 7th we're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry, you can get all the info you need and buy tickets@stuffyou should know.com click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right, we can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

[Josh Clark]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.