Now there will be an age test, are you ready?
Read these game titles: Contra, Battle City, Chip & Dale, Darkwing Duck, and Battletoads. If you half felt the 20-year-old reflexes of pressing the buttons on the joystick and remembered the pain of hundreds of attempts to pass the level — congratulations, you are a real old-school player.
Remember how many times you threw offense at a friend who lifted you above your head and threw you into the abyss? How hated were the enemy tanks that bombed their own bunker? And these battle toads? Oh, these toads …
Just think, children’s underpants withstood an incredible amount of butthurt in those days.
And all these thanks to the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Echoes of the past NES and Famicom
Traces of that era are visible today, especially against the backdrop of the fight between Microsoft and Sony for the most solid console budget. Microsoft even tried to add the NESBox emulator to its XBOX live!
However, this did not happen due to company policy, and the miserable pre-alpha browser version squeezed out a few bricks of indignation and a cart of misunderstanding from the author without ever starting work.
Looking at this demonic circus, the NES progenitor, Nintendo, decided to resurrect her old hit for normal modern 300 bucks. Well, even if the Chinese make replicas of any old consoles with built-in games and do not feel any regrets, original NES Classic can be bought for $139 on Amazon.
Of course, you can always do even easier and download the NES emulator for PC, but the impressions will be a little different. Such is the reality and it is unlikely that for the foreseeable future classic consoles like the Dandy will disappear from the everyday life of people. But how did it all start?
We dig deeper in the early days of the appearance of the Dandy.
The consoles are considered to be the birthday of July 15, 1983, when Nintendo Corporation, a real monster in the gaming industry, sold the first copy of the Famicom family computer, which they called NES in their homeland, in Nipponia.
However, the Fam was not the first game console, it became the “Color TV-Game”, but it quickly faded since a couple of disabled games could not bring children joy in the right quantities.
NES was a real revelation — it used replaceable cartridges. Then it was shocking content for the buyer because competitors could only boast a rough system for launching games.
Note that in Chinese copies, only Famicom design is used, and not the third generation of NES. It’s easy to define: the controllers can be placed in the side slots of the set-top box.
In North America, Famicom was greeted coolly and the US market was never captured. Video game historians in unison say that it’s all a matter of illiterate promotion, but we know that the Atari reptilians are to blame.
As expected, the Japanese lurked and in 1985 issued a new version, which all schoolchildren of America already paid attention to — the Nintendo Advanced Video System, which became the grandfather of these «blocks» and «boxes» with two controllers and a gun for the great Duck Hunt in the kit.
But here a slip came out — a lousy promo and a high price did not allow the console to gain a foothold in the market. Not one samurai sprinkled a dojo with his blood that day. But the Asians were strong guys, they learned a lesson and started again building insidious plans to conquer the world ^^.
The lesson has been learned: Nintendo launched the third generation, which became the legendary NES. The design has become austere and concise, and cartridges with games — a variety. It is noteworthy that NES Classic, released in 2016, completely copies the design of the original set-top box.
An interesting fact is that the Asian version of cartridges is common in the Easter Europe countries, while American cartridges are more like carriers for Super Nintendo.
And sharply, the whole world, coupled with Atari reptilians, shearing coupons from their Atari 2600 console, drew attention to the console — offers to create games for the new system fell one after another, the exclusives went in full swing.
Does it resemble anything?
In honor of the release, the company redesigned and improved the Mario brothers by making a tube game with a turu-turu-tudu, which still stuck in my head. And all the Cartmans whispered overnight with a longing in their voices — “I am coming to you, Nin-ten-dooooh.”
NES was the leader of the American market for several years until Sega Genesis sent it on indefinite leave, and at that time the Iron Curtain finally collapsed and a new unknown market appeared at the console — the countries of the former socialist camp, which could not be obtained.
Birth of Dendy
By this time, the collection of games on NES contained more than two hundred games, including Sonic, Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Battletoads and TMNT, Metal Gear, Castlevania, Galaga, Robocop, DuckTales and so on.
However, Nintendo did not venture into the wild market of the newly-minted democracies. Cunning IT specialists from the Russian company Steepler took advantage of this, armed with the Taiwanese hardware and created our NES, only without whistles, but with obvious fakes.
The appearance of the “new” Dendy console was boiled over from the “Famicom”, and the cartridges from the Japanese version of NES. Console occupied its own niche, which it itself had created — before the “Dandy” in the USSR there was no bandicooting or consoles.
The original dandy is charged with pain. Notice how much the design has changed compared to the original?
And away we go — every child dreamed of spending forty thousand rubles for this miracle of foreign engineering, advertisements with the mantle elephant “Dandy” were broadcast on the central channels, and in his memory (thanks to Wikipedia) the slogan popped up: “Dandy, Dandy, we all love Dandy! Dandy, Dandy — everyone is playing! ”
The fall of the Steepler and the rebirth of Dendy
Initially, the Steepler pirate office lasted from 1992 to 1996 and during that time sold millions of copies of the console of various modifications and earned money for the rest of its managerial life.
We cannot know for sure how much Steepler earned from the Nintendo brainchild since tax returns from the 90s are simply impossible to verify. However, there are allegations that at the peak of its popularity, the prefix turnover was in the region of 45–50 million dollars a year.
Moreover, a little later, Dendy manufacturers even went up to the official Nintendo representative office and received exclusive rights to distribute the Super Nintendo set-top box in the CIS. Something like Captain Barbossa from the third Pirates of the Caribbean.
In each courtyard of our immense homeland, there was at least one lucky man with a Dandy, while all the rest fought for the right to be a friend of the august person and get a VIP pass to the console. Or boost speechcraft.
Later, the market became oversaturated with consoles: in 1994–95, Sega Mega Drive 1–2, a pocket Game Gear and the industry’s flagship Super Nintendo hit the shelves. Then the interest in the clone began to subside and Dendy migrated to the category of “beggarly hobbies.”
Everything changed in the era of indie games when the graphics became not as important as the gameplay. And here Dendy came back to life and became a fashionable gadget, without losing the charm of childhood.
In addition, starting from the middle of the “zero”, Nintendo is trying to resurrect NES using updated versions of its classic consoles, so it’s not far off when you again have to run around the neighbors and exchange cartridges.
Long live the classic and the “turu-turu-tudu”!
