Former Nintendo Employees Reveal What It Took to Launch the Nes
Posted2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Former Nintendo employees share their experiences launching the NES in America, sparking discussion about the article's quality and the strategies used to market the console.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://sharetext.io/42b482da
And the full transcript here:
https://sharetext.io/d675f945
Also, revealing they were doing illegal price fixing with Sega is not surprising.
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.
I mean, they kind of do. Before the NES rose to dominance, people who didn't care that much called everything an Atari. During and after the NES, people called everything a Nintendo. Now, people are likely to call everything a PlayStation.
If you're a toy store and you've just been clearancing all the systems for whatever they went for and have a barrel of games for $1 at the checkout that isn't selling and a couple more barrels in the back, you might be more interested in something that looks different than the others.
What’s always been missing from it for me is whether it actually mattered.
The NES wasn’t cheap. It didn’t do anything but play video games. Did its looking kinda (but not really) like some other piece of AV equipment (but having no other actual capabilities) contribute meaningfully to its success? Were a lot of its buyers, who weren’t exactly making an impulse purchase, swayed by the appearance?
I kinda doubt it. Meanwhile, the redesign did make it less-reliable than its Japanese counterpart.
Nintendo already had an answer to the problem of people being afraid of the low quality games that gave Atari a bad name, and that was their "Seal of Quality" which ultimately didn't end up meaning much since shovelware has always been an issue with Nintendo (especially when it came to their handhelds). Still, their first party games were good enough that Nintendo could keep selling consoles even when there were few other games worth buying for them.
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.