Name: Top 20 Things You Didn't Know About the NES
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T17:05:59.000Z
Duration: 18 min 58 s
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And today we are looking at the console that reignited home gaming and may have single handedly saved the industry.

After 40 years, you'd think we'd have discovered everything about this console.

These are 20 things you didn't know about the X NES.

Unknown Release Here's a fun bit of gaming trivia.

Being one of the most influential games ever made, nobody can actually agree on when it was released in the United States.

We know it dropped in Japan on September 13, 1985.

But when it came to the US things turned into a historical scavenger hunt.

The NES itself itself only launched in limited regions on October 18, 1985, and

record keeping back then was apparently done on napkins.

For years, fans assumed Super Mario Bros.

Arrived in 1986 because it started shipping with consoles around then.

Nintendo now insists the game launched with the nes, which is adorable, but not exactly supported by reality.

A deeply researched article from 2012 argues the US launch actually happened on November 17, 1985, about a month after the console.

With documentation being as murky as Cheep Cheep Pond, the truth may forever remain a mystery.

Theme has Lyrics Nintendo is notorious for guarding its intellectual property with the ferocity of Bowser protecting his eighth castle, firing off cease and desist letters like their party favors.

But in the early days, the company occasionally approved projects so random you'd think someone misplaced the rulebook.

Nintendo ran a contest in 1985 inviting fans to submit lyrics for the first level theme of Super Mario Bros.

A version called go go Mario 1 and was actually officially licensed by Nintendo and put on vinyl.

The track is surprisingly catchy, even if the English translation reads like Mario's motivational calendar.

Due to the previously mentioned Nintendo lawsuit ferocity, I can't play the song, so here's my best rendition.

Once again today Mario cheerfully takes off.

Again today he cheerfully searches for coins.

Again today, Mario, you will keep pushing forward.

that didn't stop new games from appearing in true undead console fashion.

New unofficial NES games keep appearing, sometimes even on actual physical cartridges.

Like it's still 1989 and Blockbuster hasn't betrayed us yet.

Thanks to the booming retro gaming obsession, passionate fans have taken it upon themselves to create brand new titles playable on original hardware.

Shockingly great titles like Always Awakening and Full Quiet remind players why that era still hits so hard.

Tight gameplay, charming visuals, and zero microtransactions trying to sell you a hat.

When people look back at Resident Evil, it's easy to assume Capcom simply invented survival horror in 1996 by trapping players in a mansion full of questionable architecture and even more questionable monsters.

But the real story wanders somewhere far stranger, right into the library of the original nes, the Famicom.

Years before zombies were moaning at locked doors, Capcom released Sweet Home.

a horror themed RPG about a film crew stuck inside a haunted mansion.

It wasn't just unusual for 1989, it was practically an alien concept on the Famicom limited inventory, strategic planning, and

a creeping dread that something horrible is waiting behind the next pixelated doorway.

That was Sweet home, and Japan got to experience it, while Western players remained blissfully untraumatized.

Screws Define Price can you tell which copy of pinball is the 3 screw and which one is the 5 screw?

If you've ever flipped over an NES cartridge and wondered why the back looks like a hardware personality test, you congratulations.

in the world of cartridges, screw count can mean the difference between Cool Nostalgia Piece and Please don't breathe near this.

Early NES games featured five screws on the back, while later releases shifted to a three screw setup with plastic locking tabs.

Nintendo never gave an official explanation, so we'll assume it came down to age old corporate logic of three screws are cheaper.

Every NES game released before mid-1987 originally shipped as a five screw version, which makes certain variants surprisingly rare.

Some collectors will pay a small fortune for them, which is fantastic news if you've learned this today and are now sprinting to your storage box.

The Nintendo seal of quality is circular, and

the Nintendo Seal of quality here is Oval Doki Doki Mario.

Most gamers have heard the classic tale of Super Mario Bros. 2, the one where Japan got a brutally difficult sequel while the rest of the world received a totally different game that began life as Doki Doki Panic.

It's one of Nintendo's most infamous bits of trivia, right up there with Luigi is taller and Bowser really needs a hobby.

The story everyone repeats isn't entirely accurate.

The game's signature vertical climbing mechanics?

They weren't originally for Doki Doki Panic at all.

Tanabe actually did pitch the idea first as a concept for a brand new Mario game.

Only after the vertical concept found a home in Doki Doki Panic did it become clear that the gameplay blended surprisingly well with Mario's universe.

Some of the NES classics that define my childhood feel like they turned my hair grey at age 5.

There's a reason those pixelated classics hit harder than modern titles with 10 difficulty settings and a Please don't hurt me mode.

Back in the NES era, game development teams were tiny, sometimes just a handful of programmers chained to their keyboards with coffee based life support.

There were no standardized difficulty guidelines and no focus groups gently suggesting, hey, maybe don't make level one impossible.

The developers simply played their own games, got extremely good at them, and concluded with great confidence.

When the NES era began, game prices weren't far off from what we pay for modern titles.

Fast forward a few decades, and the market looks like it was designed by a very confused stockbroker.

Some cartridges cost pocket change, while others sell for amounts they could pay off someone's student loans and their regrets.

Take the legendary Nintendo World Championship cartridge, which once went for a jaw dropping $100,000 on eBay.

Not to be outdone, stadium events fetched nearly $42,000, proving once and for all that that collectors will absurdly empty their bank accounts for rare plastic rectangles.

Initially going to be distributed by Atari.

Thanks to Atari and the licensed game E.T.

by the early 1980s, the video game industry looked like a clown car on fire.

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Top 20 Things You Didn't Know About the NES

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