The NES and the UK - What really happened?

[Rogue Trooper]

Been thinking a lot about the NES and what i call 'The UK years'-There seems to be a version of history that's popular these days on forums and in various magazines, that the NES was a huge hit over here, now whilst i was'nt a NES owner at the time, i 'grew up' during those years and was very aware of the system and my memory of events seems at complete contrast to those that are brought up by others, so thought it might create an interesting topic to discuss.

My inital introduction to the news was via the gaming press, likes of C+VG ran previews and reviews of it's games, Crash+Zzap 64 had a feature on the hardware and both seemed to suggest that the hardware was fine, but did'nt really offer that much over the C64/Speccy and besides expensive games.

My friends and i were more than happy with our 8 Bit micro's and besides had you seen those ST/Amiga games? OMG!!!!! fast 3D, samples, 'arcade Perfect' games etc etc, so NES never really raised an ounce of interest.


I also seem to recal Mattel being rather shocked by how 'mute' the reception to the NES from the UK gamer was, both packs (standard+deluxe) seeing £40? knocked off RRP after mere 2 months and then Nintendo taking charge/setting up company to promote+sell NES in Uk.I also used to encounter those NES coin-Op's in pubs etc around here, choice of 10? games, pay to keep playing, but again, games seemed rather old hat and out of place in a coin-op.


The Turtles frenzy seemed to save the NES bacon over here somewhat as the Nes+Turtles game bundles seemed to be great sellers.

Going back to the 'press' angle, i can recal ACE magazine slagging off the NES hardware when reviewing things like Ghosts And Goblins, Rush And attack etc, saying the hardware was fine for things like SMB, but way beneath delivering conversions like these.

So, point i'm making/question/s i'm asking here are basically, just how did the UK 'respond' to the NES in your exp? (sorry USA readers) and does the NES really deserve the position it seems to have been awarded in UK gaming history in todays media?.

I just find it bizzare the NES gets more coverage in Retro circles than the Atari Lynx or ST and are left pondering why this is.

I'm NOT a NES hater by any means, just very curious to see how things reached stage they have....

[AmigaJay]

Wasnt very popular from where I lived and general perception at the time, the hardware was already 4 years out of date by the time the UK got it, British folk were lapping up arcade conversions and Sega and Atari were the names everyone wanted to play at home, either on the Master System or 8 bit computers, the turtles nearly swayed me at the time but Wonderboy 3 convinced me thank god!

[Rogue Trooper]

I'm from the SW of England and down here, console wise, i knew of a few Nes owners, but they were mainly parents who'd bought it for the kids as they were so into Turtles, but most either went for the MS for the SEGA conversions and of course, SONIC or went straight for the Mega Drive.

Nes seemed far too late arriving on these shores, looked dated in terms of a shoebox type casing, harsh looking control pads and games that just did'nt scream OMG, sure they were fantastically playable in many cases once you got into them, but they lacked a 'wow' factor, if you just saw them running or being played.

there were plenty of NES reviews in various magazines at the time, but then as we're showing on here, so there were 7800 or MSX or.....


Yet i never see the MSX or 7800 or even ST treated in same regard as i do the NES, which makes me question why the format gets so much coverage from publications today, when dealing with Retro (talking a UK viewpoint).Userbase was'nt that huge, so just who are they trying to appeal to, looking back at the system i wonder?.

[TL]

I knew one person with a NES, my next door neighbour and he had just moved over from Singapore, which was very Americanised and the only system they had there really was the NES (and lots of pirate games!).

Compare that to the 6 people I knew with a Sega Master System, 2 people I knew with a 7800, 6 people with a 2600 and I even knew a rich kid with an imported Japanese PC Engine. At my school we all mocked the NES in magazines for its bland looking graphics, kiddie games and rubbish arcade conversions.

I do wonder just how bad the NES would have done if it wasn't for the Turtles game, which wasn't even very good. It had a short spike in sales when that came out that was then killed off when the game hit the home computers thanks to Image Works.

The sales figure for the NES in the UK was 600,000 and from what I have heard a large portion of that came when the machine was under £50 and marketed as a budget machine once the SNES had come out. In comparison the Atari ST sold 1.5 million in the UK, the Master System sold 2.2 million and I couldn't find any UK sales figures for the Atari 7800 but I found a European sales figure of 1.77 million.

[DreamcastRIP]

So, point i'm making/question/s i'm asking here are basically, just how did the UK 'respond' to the NES in your exp?

Of all the fellow gamers I knew at school and outside of school during that era not one single person owned a NES.

The console was most notable for its horrible flickering sprites and for gathering dust in branches of Boots the Chemist as I recall it.

and does the NES really deserve the position it seems to have been awarded in UK gaming history in todays media?.

Not at all. It was too little too late here in the UK and the vast majority of gamers here were left distinctly unimpressed by it. Hence why it saw price cuts and even then people weren't interested in it.

In my experience it's a vocal minority of Nintendo fanboys with a penchant for rewriting history who are to blame if there is any misunderstanding regarding just how spectacularly the NES bombed in this country. These cheerleaders seem to swallow the kind of revisionist pish uttered by some and propogate it across the internet. The gullible then accept it as fact.

It doesn't help that the likes of the UK's official Nintendo magazine's website publishes revisionist nonsense too. Then we have Nintendo TV adverts like the one a few years back featuring Ant and Dec with said Geordies talking as if we were all playing on NES here back in the day.

So, it's not just idiotic fanboys who are to blame for this parlous state of affairs because Nintendo itself has been complicit in it too.

I just find it bizzare the NES gets more coverage in Retro circles than the Atari Lynx or ST and are left pondering why this is.

If you're at all referring to the likes of Retro Gamer magazine then such a thing is a well known failing of the publication. Also, the magazine is sold in the USA so the disproportionate amount of NES coverage the magazine featues is quite possibly due to it wishing to expand its readership in that country.

Seems a great way of alienating the core readership if you ask me but that's merely my opinion.

[Rogue Trooper]

I'm loving the responses so far (and DC opinion is very much welcomed and what i'm looking for here, i want the 'voices' as it were of those who lived through the NES years in UK, from areas outside my area, only way i can build up a much better picture of how the NES was seen in UK).some fantastic food for thought given by your goodselves so far.

looking at the comments and sales figures given, plus attitudes from publications like ACE/Zzap 64 and Crash etc, it's clear the NES amounted to little more than a footnote in UK gaming history, almost like the warm up act for the SNES and yet i've seen Retro Gamer (and other magazines to a certain degree) paint this bizzare picture that the NES arrived just in time, a gaming messiah as it were, that we'd grown tired, bored of our punny C64's our humble Spectrums, we were on brink of giving up on gaming etc, when i honestly cannot recal a more exciting time to be a gamer.


8 Bit scene in UK was very active, magazines just bombarding us with reports on new, exciting hardware waiting in the wings, be it the ST, the Konix MS, the Mega Drive, The PC Engine, etc etc.Sure the NES was in there, but so were the 7800, the 65XE etc etc.In the mag scans i've been sending The Laird, hell even the aging 2600 is brought into the comparisons.

Many of the magazines were suggesting to get the best of both worlds you needed a computer+console, but the NES was never pushed as the machine to go for.

DC makes a very strong case that it is indeed this need to make Retro Gamer fit in with what's expected to make it appeal to the overseas market, which i canm understand as publication has to make money to survive, but i feel does the UK gaming scene an injustice somewhat as it's giving a version of events that just did not happen, ergo it's basically re-writing history at it's whim and thus insulting it's readership on a good few levels, almost saying it's not capable of understanding a world in which the NES was'nt a dominant force throughout.

[DreamcastRIP]

... looking at the comments and sales figures given, plus attitudes from publications like ACE/Zzap 64 and Crash etc, it's clear the NES amounted to little more than a footnote in UK gaming history

Well put, RT. That's exactly how most UK videogame mags of the time and the overwhelming majority of gamers here thought of the NES.

8 Bit scene in UK was very active, magazines just bombarding us with reports on new, exciting hardware waiting in the wings, be it the ST, the Konix MS, the Mega Drive, The PC Engine, etc etc.

...Many of the magazines were suggesting to get the best of both worlds you needed a computer+console, but the NES was never pushed as the machine to go for.

Indeed. Like I said, NES was too little too late here in the UK. It launched at a time when many gamers had been playing on their 8-bit micros for some years already and were looking to a new exciting future, i.e. upgrading to a 16-bit micro in the form of an Atari ST or Commodore Amiga. Also, the likes of C+VG were featuring screenshots of games for the PC Engine which appeared to offer the then holy grail of arcade coin-op quality on a home gaming system.

We were looking to move on up into this brave new world of gaming... and there was Nintendo trying to sell us its 8-bit console with its obscenely priced games that was a Westernised Famicom from 1984. Too little too late...

DC makes a very strong case that it is indeed this need to make Retro Gamer fit in with what's expected to make it appeal to the overseas market, which i canm understand as publication has to make money to survive

Yep, it's a commercial entity owned by a publishing group, not a fanzine. It must do what it feels it needs to survive and prosper. If the core readership here in the UK don't like the magazine for this or any other reason then they're free to vote with their wallets by ceasing to buy it.

It's only one magazine at the end of the day and there's a damn sight more to the retro gaming scene than one magazine. I realise that RG is the only nationally published retro gaming monthly magazine that's widely available to purchase but I also realise that some people seem to overstate its importance in the grand scheme of things, i.e. if RG ceases to be then the retro gaming scene will carry on regardless.

... but i feel does the UK gaming scene an injustice somewhat as it's giving a version of events that just did not happen, ergo it's basically re-writing history at it's whim and thus insulting it's readership on a good few levels

If I'm interpretting those references correctly then I assume you're possibly referring to the woeful 'NES Collector's Guide' from a past issue of RG. The first page of that article was quite possibly the worst piece of retro gaming journalism I've had the misfortune to encounter. Chock full of factual innaccuracies, gushing hyperbole and the very worst kind of revisionist history... written by a known Nintendo fanboy. Utterly appalling in every way and quite frankly amazing that it was green lighted for publication without having been checked over properly first.

So, returning to a theme I explored in my initial post, the reason such poor understanding seems to exist in some quarters with regard to how insignificant NES was in the UK seems to be down to a variety of factors. Namely idiotic fanboys, drivel espoused by the ill-informed on the internet, the website of the the officially licensed UK Nintendo magazine, low quality journalism in the UK's sole national retro gaming publication and Nintendo's own TV adverts here.

Young gamers in the UK choosing to enter the world of retro gaming can hardly be blamed for wrongly believing the NES to have been a popular gaming platform in the UK when faced with such a wall of revisionist tripe seemingly at every turn should they try doing a little reading up on gaming history. I find that quite depressing the more I think about it, to be honest.  :1:

[TL]

Something that really sums up this revisionist nonsense for me is a post I read on RG recently when this same subject was brought up in passing.

Somebody said that he was round his friends house talking about retro gaming and his friend starting going on about how much he loved his NES back in the day, how classic the games were and how he would love to get one. He then then informed his friend, who he had known since they were young kids, that he had never owned a NES. He had in fact owned a Master System and that was what he was remembering, his friend even asked him if he was sure because he thought he had a Nintendo like everyone else!

I guess that shows just how easily people can be brainwashed by the media and the likes of those sickening Ant & Dec adverts.

[Rogue Trooper]

2 very well written post's there by Laird and DC.

People at work, younger than myself might often bring up distant memories of a game they played years ago and stumble around trying to work out what system it was on (was it the Master system, err no C64, no...it was Amiga was'nt it?-basically going through the systems they owned, but i've never even heard the NES brought up as a format).


I was looking at old ACE article, 'Hotboxes'-basically a comparision of all the consoles avaiable/upcoming at the time, to quote from the NES 'review':

'......as an ACE reader, only appealing if your buying for a younger human being only' (and they put European sales at less than 500,000).

Now if i start to look at a few NES articles in todays press, well Retro Gamer:

Front  page feature:When Grey Mattered-How Nintendo's 8-Bit Console Helped Reignite The Industry- feature  opens with talk of how NES has recognised status as saviour of the video gaming industry (not going to comment on that just yet) it's honest enough to admit the NES had to struggle+fight here in UK, but again, i'm struggling to see just where this 'reputation' it's refered to having gained in UK is borne from.


Then my eyebrows shot up reading of  'outstanding tech specs' at start of the piece, then it details how surprising the choice of CPU for the NES was, not because it was cutting edge, but because it was knocking on in years already, MSOS 6502 was designed in 1975 and choosen because it was now dirt cheap and all Nintendo had done to it was it had it moddified, so just where were these outstanding tech specs?, but thankfully, that piece was well written enought to bury these 'blips' under a wealth of truth about how poorly the NES fared in UK, so off to a bumpy, but promising start.

But then as soon as you hit the NES collectors guide...oh dear oh dear oh dear.I honestly am loathe to quote from it on here, as i've no desire to further spread the utter rubbish passed off as fact, i'll just say that so much  was written in response to it by subscribers such as ourselves, so much ignored by the RG team and so many leapt to the magazines defence, it's gained a piece of RG history, but for all the wrong reasons.

As DC says, there is hope, RG magazine+forum are far, far from the only places to go to quench a thirst for Retro and kids these days are very switched on, very connected, so hopefully they will seek out new sources, places like here perhaps where we will give personal exp and show magazine scans+quotes  from the UK NES era to show how machine was recived and how far the truth is being twisted to suit the needs of current era Nintendo+it's followers.

[Rogue Trooper]

Looking at issue 1 of The Games Machine, NES (and MS) looked at in 'Dust To Dust, Attics To Attics?' feature, how did the games fare then well few quotes:

Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Donkey Kong 3 and Popeye are accurate but unexciting conversions of thier ageing arcade counterparts.Mario Bros is another arcade conversion, only not so old and a lot more fun.Mach Rider is an unexciting blend of racing and shooting action.Excitebike-Even the built in course designer does'nt make it as exciting as the name suggests.......

So hardly set UK press world on fire, turn a few pages big 2-page advert for the NES from Nintendo which slags ofthe existing 8 Bit home computers (now you can enjoy the amazing 52 colour 3-D graphics of Nintendo-on most home computers, you've been lucky to get 16 colours until now.Nintendo's superb graphics give the games a convincing true 3-D feel...).


Hang on Nintendo, twice in that ad you refer to the 3-D graphics of the NES and say NES has a true 3D feel, but there's NO true 3D to the games shown, no polygons, no wire-frame 3D nothing.

Looking at issue 2, Super Mario Bros reviewed RRP £19.99 Overall 89% (game is simple to understand and therefore easy to play) but reviewer ends by suggesting game would make it onto home micro's as after all Mario Bros had. Vampire Killer (Castlevania) is reviewed on MSX cart, RRP as £18.95, overall 69%, along with Metal Gear, RRP £20.95, overall 79%, Excite Bike RRP £28.50 gets overall 52%-Very playable, it tires steadily as you play, may appeal to younger gamers


Skipping forward to issue 6, still no sign of more NES games, but MS games like Rocky, Zillion, Afterburner, Action Fighter, Alien Syndrome, Outrun all been reviewed, more MSX carts under review USAS (RRP £19.95) Overall 88% and F1 Spirt (RRP £18.95)-In short a top class MSX2 game, no score given though.Issue 7, MSX range feature+Blade Eagle+Fantasy Zone 3 reviewed on MS, Salamander on MSX (£19.95) Overall 82%, Issue 8 PC Engine to beat Nintendo-TGM explains why R-Type is tipped to make PC Eng a world beater (with PC engine-The Midget Monster) shows just how much UK mags were getting behind newer systems, still no more NES reviews, yet MS has Rescue Mission, Issue 9...no, no more NES games.....nor issue 10....


Issue 11 news: 'Millions of Nintendo's predicted, said current figures for UK NES ownership around 40,000 which paled next to many million 8-Bit micro's and at least 120,000 Atari ST's', but Nintendo's UK firm NESI was confident the NES was all set to conquer Britian and continue Nintendo's domination and ahhh the irony here, turn a few pages and TGM does an article:'What ever happened to the Nintendo?-.....But in Britian it flopped-as even it's most vocal new salesman, Luther De Gale, admits-while the Sega succeeded'


Fantastic opening start to the article, choice quote from writer: 'I've only just seen 1 (NES) in my local computer store-and i supplied it to them!'

Then from Richard Eddy: 'Look throught the window of your local computer shop and you'll see Spectrums, Commodores, PC's all your computer buying heart can desire-but n-n-n-no Nintendo.Few of the major chains stock it either.It's nearly a year since TGM started covering Nintendo games, but there simply haven't been any new UK titles-the collection stands at about 30 compared with 100 in the USA.

'Cartridge based games are released every month for the Sega....Mastertronic who are handling the UK MS sales, say there are approx 40,000 Segas in Britian and they claim to be pulling in £5 Million a year from the console'


Back on NES in UK: '....Last years fiasco, when a £300,000 TV ad campain produced by toy giant Mattel apparently failed to produce even 100,000 sales' and 'Thier (Nintendo's) console has been passed on from 1 firm to another in search of sucsess-1st to Mattel, then to US Gold's offshoot GO! and now to NESI'.


Still NO NES games for review that issue, yet MS had:

3-D Maze Hunter, Alex Kidd, Aztec Adventure and Penguin land.

Issue 12 had on front page:'The Next Nintendo-basher? The first British Games Console! The Konix Console-It's Brilliant!' and: 'Rival:Could Nintendo get blown away in Konix's Slipstream?'

Still no NES reviews though MSX cart Kings Valley II Overall 85%, RRP £19.95 or on tape MSX Elite overall 80%.

Kinda hits home when a UK magazine has more MSX games to review which offer better VFM than it does NES games.


And yet RG etc would have us believe the NES was doing the buisness in the UK, deserves more coverage than the ST? Ohh please....

[Rogue Trooper]

TGM is really proving to be a great source of showing just how different the level of support was between the Master System and the NES in UK. Continuing from earlier issues, Issue 13 saw NO NES games reviewed, 4 MS games.Issue 14 had 5 MS games, 1 NES game, thankfully it was a good game, RC Pro-Am, Overall 85% '..fun derived from racing cute cars is unbeatable', but in same issue, PC Engine reviews appearing...

Drunken Master (63%) priced at £24.99, R-Type 2 (Overall 83%, priced at £24.99).

Master System had  Shinobi (82% and TGM Star Player Awarded), Captain Silver (49%), Golvellius (66%), Double Dragon (81%) and  Lord Of The Sword (58%).

The previous issue had seen MS versions of Thunderblade (overall 76%), Kenseiden (86%), Monopoly (64%), Miracle Warriors (40%).

So whilst the quality varied, it was clear to UK gamers looking at the 2 consoles, which was seeing the better software support and what was in future offerings from up and coming new consoles.

Issue 16 fared better for NES 2 games reviewed Top Gun (65%) but RRP of £29.95 and Castlevania 71% and review notes it was originally released on MSX as Vampire Killer and again your looking at RRP of £29.95 and this is in the very issue TGM did a 4-Page feature on the Konix Multi-system (The Power Generation) with claims of console hitting streets that autumn, priced £149 and being a 16 Bit console, it then goes onto say:

'Come this autumn, £199 (inc VAT) will buy you a multi-system and joystick, 2 games, a 1 Mb disck drive and 12 month guarantee....further games will cost you £14.99 each.'


Reference made to the NES by Konix's Wyn Holloway in the Konix article:

'The SEGA (MS) is a far better machine than the Nintendo (NES);but (in other countries)the Nintendo succeeded'.

Issue following this?

Nintendo has Gradius (76%) £24.95 'NES owners had to wait a long time for this, it's lost little of it's former glory'

MS has 2 games Rampage (58%) 'similar to previous home conversions the SEGA version lacks variety...£25 too high a price to pay for for a game with such limited interest' and Rastan (43%) 'Rastans a dwarf and most sprites are blocky with minimal animation'...

but PC Eng has:

Galaga 88 (86%) RRP £29.95
Victory Run (59%) £24.95
Vigilante (75%) £29.95
Dragon Spirt (65%) £29.95

Plus chance to win a console, ads from Micro Media with quotes from press (TGM, C+VG+Jeff Minter praising the hardware)


So the NES was seen as delivering too little, too late and too expensive a range of games by a leading UK multi-format mag.

[Rogue Trooper]

TGM again, feature:Console Dawn Nintendo horror stories from UK developers claiming because Nintendo held all control over product and it's shipping date, serious issues had arisen, 1 claiming that despite paying Nintendo in advance for 200, 00 cartridges and packing costs, thier game was not shipped until months after it had been completed, with rumours saying others had suffered similar.

quote from further in the article:

'Other UK developers have been saying recently that Nintendo is an 8-bit machine not worth worrying about here.It's basically too late for UK software houses to get into the huge market anyway-things change fast and as usual the majority got left behind in the rush'.

Article written by Phil Harrison of Vivid Image Developments.

Reviewed within said piece Mega Drive wise:Altered Beast 87%, Alex Kidd 82% and Super Thunderblade 76%, Space Harrier 2 85%

NES had Rush 'n' Attack 81%, Super Mario Bros 2 92% and Ghosts 'n' Goblins 84%

2600 had River Raid 2 76% and F-14 Tomcat at 82%


With PC Engine having Tiger at 86%, P-47 at 68% and Deep Blue at 58%

So no-one can say TGM had any anti-Nes bias.

[TL]

Another story that sprung to mind:

When I used to post a lot on Atari Age we had a thread about console sales figures and the NES came up in the discussion. I started talking about how badly it did here and how the SMS kicked its arse etc. and a big argument ended up breaking out because several Americans accused me of lying! They just wouldn't have it that the NES sold badly over here. Another member then joined in to back me up and started posting magazine scans that talked about NES sales in comparison to the SMS and these same few people just dismissed them as lies. No matter what evidence we put in front of them they just wouldn't accept that NES was anything but a global success story. It really was totally unbelievable.

[Rogue Trooper]

That's a very interesting story there Laird and highlights a concern of mine, if certain publications continue to push this myth that we brits really took to the NES, it's going to become 'established' fact and soon as anyone say's hang on guys and girls, it was'nt quite like that, it arrived too late over here, that ship had sailed and we were bombarded by new systems (Konix, STe, Lynx, PC Eng, MD, MS Sam Coupe etc) in the news each and every month, you end facing a wall of pain as pro-Nintendo fans might 'struggle' to accept that and could end up using UK publications to back up thier view of history.


Not saying that will happen, but there's a risk maybe? at very least we've a situation where a publication seems to alter it's take on what happened, one minute saying NES struggled in UK, next that NES saved UK gaming....it cannot be both.

I've opened this thread to try and see just which version of events bears more fruit, happy to hear of events or examples where the latter version is born out.





I'm going to take a look at a few other publications, see how NES is treated there, but going by examples in my past few TGM posts, i cannot see any sign of bias, MS+PC Engine games get just as mixed scores as the NES games do.

[DreamcastRIP]

Here's something from Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) which I suspect is precisely the kind of retarded revisionist crap Nintendo would like to have us in the UK believe,

* "It's very likely that had Nintendo not created the NES, you wouldn't be playing games today."

- Comical! All those 8-bit and 16-bit home computers plus the PC must have not existed in Nintendo's view of the world then. 
First off, the crash was a North America thing which had next to no effect on Europe, much less the UK, where the gaming industry powered on regardless.
Secondly, the crash in North America only really affected the console-based games industry (plus the arcades) - the gaming scene in the USA for computers still did okay.
Thirdly, E.T. may have had far too many cartridges of it manufactured but the fact that hardly ever gets pointed out is that it was still one of the top selling Atari VCS/2600 titles regardless of its poor quality.
Finally, Atari itself never went "bankrupt" as the article would seem to imply.


*"No one bought games because there was nothing good to buy, and videogaming was about to be dismissed as a passing fad."

- Yes, that's right folks, because the console games industry went belly up in North America alone that meant that every single game you played on your 8-bit home computers from 1983 onwards was indeed rubbish 


*"the Famicom was released in the US and Europe as the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it took the world by storm."

- Wrong again. Firstly, when Nintendo first tried launching it in a test market in the USA the system (as it then was) was totally dismissed. Only later once Nintendo had got their act together did it take off. Secondly, NES did not take "the world by storm" - Japan and North America are not "the world" last time I checked. 


"by 1987 the company was at the forefront of the videogames industry, easily seeing off competitors such as Sega's Master System."

- Disingenuous once again. The Sega Master System utterly destroyed NES in places such as the UK and Brazil.


"Nowadays, videogames are not only still alive, they're stronger than ever, and have continued to go from strength to strength. But had it not been for the NES, gaming would have died out with the Cabbage Patch dolls."

- Where will this revisionist the-world-acording-to-Nintendo claptrap ever end?  :24:


Source: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co. ... tendo-nes/