35 Years of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

[Nz17]

The NES has been bringing us wonderful memories for 35 years now! Brought to North America during October 18th, 1985, the NES is home to hundreds of official and unofficial games and hardware. What are your cherished memories of the NES from back during its heyday (1985 - 1994) or during your own personal days with it? What are the most important unofficial or homebrew software and hardware releases for the Nintendo Entertainment System in your opinion?

[jeffstark]

Got my NES for my 4th birthday. Still works to this day. I can't really say that about anything else I've had that long. Built like a tank and never stops being fun.

[gbpxl]

first saw an NES maybe in 1993 or so. 4 years old. remember playing a lot of different games. Beetlejuice, Bart vs the World, Mega Man 3, 4 and 5

[Tron 2.0]

I'm trying to remember if i got the nes in 86 or 87 the most i remember is playing smb vs in arcades.Which sold me on the nes since i wanted to play the game at home.I don't remember if i got it as a birthday gift or for christmas.Other then,it was console itself with smb as a pack in and i had to buy the lightgun itself separately later on.So many memories of the console and it's library of games.The nes,sure was a step up for me since my last console before that was the atari 2600.Still by the early 90's i sold off the nes i originally had plus it's games so i could buy a turbografx 16.Though in the last decade i miss having a nes so it didn't take me long to buy a famicom av and build up a collection for it again.Though currently i'm thinking about buying a "avs by retrousb" so i have another way to play nes/famicom on a hd tv.

Btw a list of games that take me back for the nes.
Arkanoid
Jackal
Mega Man 1,2,3
Contra
Legend of Zelda
Guardian Legend
Goonies II
Castlevania
Metroid
Ninja Gaiden

[mailman187666]

I think I got mine around 1988. It was a birthday present and I remember it vividly. My aunt sent me a HUGE box for my birthday. Being only 4 or 5 at the time, I was so excited and ripped the box open and bam....FILLED WITH CLOTHES. I'm pretty sure I cried with disappointment. Then my parents came in with their present, and there it was, the NES with Mario as well as a copy of Ghosts and Goblins. Over 30 years later and I still remember that day.

[YoshiM]

35....dayom.

I got mine I want to say around 1988 when I was in middle school. I think I talked about it a lot after I played "Mike Tyson's Punch Out" and "The Legend of Zelda" on it at a friend's place. I rented a LOT of games for it in that time dpan, much to the chagrin of my mother. It is the one game console I still have from my youth with SMB/Duck Hunt (in the aftermarket plastic clam shell I got that still has the shelf label I put on it with the title in my chicken scratch!), the original controllers and light gun. I also still have my original "Kid Icarus" pak my Dad bought me for Christmas.

Memories....

My half-brother rolling the score on SMB after many hours.

Beating Super Mario 2 before going to see the movie "Batman" in '89 (I wrote a Digital Press Lore story about it)

Fixing the controllers for the first time

Bending the pins on the cartridge port to refurbish it and writing a document on it which got published on Good Deal Games website

Playing "Golf" with my Dad, who found a game he could play.

Showing off the Contra code to my friends

Lending a game of mine to a couple hot girls in my class. Note at that time where I lived, openly confessing you played video games made you "nerdy", so any game talk or swapping was on the sly. So it was at a off to the side place as I WAS nerdy, so who knows why they met up with me other than I liked one of the girls. That's another story.

[Greg2600]

Like most of you guys and probably most of the country, I got one in summer 1988. I knew people who got it the previous fall/winter of 1987, and was enthralled with it. It was so depressing to go home, and have to go back to playing the 2600 or Atari 400 we had. Ha ha ha! Let's see, so most of my older cousins had kind of grown out of games, and stopped with Atari or Intellivision. My next door neighbor had one, and we would pile into his bedroom to watch Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, or one of the ROB games. Yes for some reason he bought the ROB set. My best friend got one, and for us, we played the archaic Nintendo Baseball all day. The graphics, sounds, and music on these games totally mesmerized us, having been used to the inferior Atari.

By fall/winter 1988, it seemed like everyone in my age group had one. In grade school we would thrash over the Fun Club and then Nintendo Power magazines, while later it was those NES trading cards. Before long, the Super Mario Super Show was on the air. We were all in. Renting games at the local video stores or supermarkets. Every month a new mag came out and somebody had one, we would crowd around the "future game" pages to see what was due out. We didn't care about what movies were coming out, only Nintendo games!

Had so many great memories of playing stuff like Zelda/Zelda II, Metroid, SMB/SMB2/SMB3, RC Pro-Am, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Most were 1 player but we would watch intently or trade off what levels, bosses each of us were better at. All in the quest to beat the game, and see the endings. Then came games like Blades of Steel, Baseball Stars, Tecmo Bowl, Jackal, Contra, Life Force, and many of the game show games, that were often 2-player. I just cannot recall another system, for me at least, that I or my friends would play seemingly every genre there was on it. Literally, besides the true-blue RPG's like Final Fantasy, we played everything. There was nothing like it, before or after.

There was definitely a generation-gap, in that our parents would get too frustrated to play most of the games. My father played Punch-Out and RC Pro-Am, and was pretty good at it, but had no patience for the aggravating way you'd lose in those games. My older cousins as I said, never quite got into it, which was funny because years later I recall them having a Genesis and later Playstation. But I suppose that was Nintendo's aim all along, kids aged 8-14 mainly.

[jb143]

I first played the NES at the house of the kid who lived down the street...probably around '87. I mostly remember playing Kung Fu and Mario, and later Contra. I didn't get one for some time later. I remember it was Christmas and that it seemed like every other kid in school had one at the time. I'm guessing it was 1990 since I know I watched Super Mario Bros Super Show and Captain N before having an NES, and I know I got Zelda for my birthday in 91.

Other memories would be...
My dad playing Mario the first and only time that Christmas morning and giving up very quickly when he fell down the first hole.
My brother getting a non working game to work by putting lotion in the slot.
When I got Zelda my dad had been building something out of wood, which left all these triangle shaped blocks. So I took 8 of them, numbered them, and hid them around the house and yard and made a little mini Zelda adventure for my brothers and cousins.
Renting games each weekend at the local video store(which was in a house). We bought a bunch on them when the store closed down years later.