SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How the Nintendo Entertainment System Changed Gaming Forever

For the holidays in 1986 (and ’87) (and ’88) the most stupendous, most wanted, most amazing thing any kid could possibly get – outside of a pony, *maybe* – was the NES. That year, video games came back from the dead and changed forever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Chuck here again, continuing on with our twelve
Days of Christmas Toys playlist. Right now, I'm going to
serve up a delicious serving of nostalgia for anybody that's
probably Gen xers would be my guest. But the episode
is how the Nintendo Entertainment System changed gaming forever because

(00:23):
oil Boy did it. Please enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
and we're ten years old right now, and this is
stuff you should know.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Can I go ahead and admit something?

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Oh? Yes, I'm nervous though, but yes, go ahead.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Well, I was a little bit old for Nintendo the
Nees system. And that's not to say that kids my
age weren't playing it, but like it really boomed in
popularity right when I was sort of like fifteen sixteen
and starting to sort of drive and get out in
the world. And I also did not own one, so

(01:16):
like I never played Mario Kart and Zelda and sort
of these classic games. Eventually, in college, I remember it
had to have been a Super Nintendo in like ninety two.
My roommate had one, so that's where I first started
playing Super Mario World, and I played stuff like Tetris

(01:38):
and Mario and the game Boy that my brother had.
But I've never owned a Nintendo.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Well, I can tell you that Nintendo came out and
I was ten eleven years old, not driving yet, and
it was and I owned one too, so it was
definitely in my wheelhouse.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, I mean later in college, my my good friend
Clay got a the first PlayStation and that's where we
started going with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And then
I got on the PlayStation train. But it's just funny
reading through this. I was like, I played some of
these games here and there, but I was not Nintendo kid.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah, I have to say I jumped from Nintendo. I
never had a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but I
have friends who had those. Went off into the N
sixty four world with the GoldenEye.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, I played that, right. My friend John ed one
of those, and I played a lot of that.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
That was so great. And then I got the first
PlayStation too, the first PlayStation, I mean, not to be confusing,
and at that point I realized that I was thinking
about how to play games while I was not playing games,
Like when I was just walking around living life and
I made a decision, a very faithful decision that I've
never regretted, that I was going to give up video

(02:52):
games because I was too addicted to them. Oh wow,
this was college and I never looked back.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Wow, so you were into them, huh?

Speaker 3 (03:00):
I was big time into him. Yeah. It was like
this is if it's reaching out from beyond the time
I'm playing it, then Yes, I was a little too
into him if you ask me, was ever a gamer
or anything like that. I just really enjoyed playing games.
Maybe a little too much.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
In your favor. In your defense, rather, I would say
that I think everyone who's ever played like Tetris has
Tetris dreams and sees the world has like Tetris boards
occasionally if you're into it. Yeah, and you know my deal,
as you know said before, as I was heavy Atari kid,
big time arcade kid, and then played this kind of

(03:36):
stuff with friends here and there. And then now every
year I'll usually or every couple of years, I'll get
two or three PlayStation games, playing them obsessively for a
couple of months, and then it sits for nine months
to a year.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Yeah, I'm with ye. I think that's healthy. That's a
healthy way to play video games, you know.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yeah, I still enjoy it though. It's a lot of fun.
But yeah, my buddy Doug Dillard growing up, had one
rich friend and he had a and television, and so
I had kind of some fun today watching the old
because I remember thinking the in television football was really great,
and when I looked at it today, I mean it's
very very basic, but it was pretty good still, like

(04:13):
your calling plays and all the sounds came flooding back.
It was a big rush of nostalgia.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, it's somehow two bit graphics, I think.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, And this, to be clear, what we're going to
talk about today is the original NES. This could have
been a two parter if we would have gone down
the road of the sixty four. Like we're not even
talking about the music today at all. No, So there
was plenty more material here. But this is just a
bit of an homage for the Christmas season.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, because I mean it's the holidays, So one of
the greatest things you can do during the holidays is
reminisced nostalgically about holidays past. And I definitely associate the
NES or other. I didn't realize this until I started
researching it. Some people call it the NESTS. Did you
know that?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
No?

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Really? Yeah, Some actual like legit gamers call it ness.
Other people call it NES, and apparently there's some big disagreement.
I've always called it NES. Yeah, but I always associate
the NES was a pretty significant portion of my life.
But like it always is tied to Christmas as well.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
All right, well, you're gonna wax nostalgic a bit more,
even though I did play a little bit of ease
here and there.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Okay, So one of the things, like the Nintendo Entertainment
System has an amazingly great story to it, like it's
it's just so fun to tell because Nintendo came along
at a time when the video game market in North
America had so totally bottomed out. Yeah, that people looked

(05:43):
at video games like imagine think about how big Atari was.
People looked at it. It crashed so hard that it
was a fad that was never coming back, like it
had already lived its life. Yeah, and Nintendo walked into
this burning city that was the video game industry and said,
let's give this another shot, And they actually managed to succeed.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Yeah, I mean Atari was dead as disco. We talked
a little bit about it before, especially in the ET episode,
and I did a full Atari guest two parter with Strickland.
Yeah back in the day on tech stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
I'll bet that was a fun one.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
It was a lot of fun. But yeah, ET came
along and certainly didn't kill Atari, but it helped usher
in the end of Atari. And it wasn't just this
one game. It was sort of a flash in the
pan for a few years, and parents were also weighing
in and saying, you know, I don't like my kid
playing this much garbage on the television, Like, I don't

(06:48):
think it's good for their brains. I don't think it
was a part of the Satanic panic necessarily. It was
pre Satanic panic that it was more along the lines
of your writing your brain, right.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
So I was that the thing that triggered it? Or
was it the terrible, terrible games that really triggered the
what's called the North American video game crash of nineteen
eighty three. It was the games, wasn't it.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Well, I mean I think it was the two part thing,
Like kids got a little less interested because the game
started to suck quite frankly, and then I think you
also had parents beating the drum of okay, hey, and
Atari wasn't really coming out with you know, the new
systems weren't that great. The twenty six hundred and the
fifty two hundred came along, I mean, rather the fifty
two hundred followed up, and it was just okay. So

(07:33):
they needed something needed to happen, and that thing that
needed to happen was Nintendo.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah. And also at the same time, one of the
other things that had ushered helped usher out video games
was the personal computers starting to come into the world absolutely,
and with the personal computer, you could like do your taxes,
your kid could like practice math, and they played games
on floppy disc too. So exactly, yes, I played Wolf

(08:00):
and Oh. I'm so glad you said that, because I
was looking at Castle Vania on floppy disk and I'm like,
it came out in nineteen ninety, like I was definitely
playing it before that. It was Wolf and Style. Thank you, man,
you just made a really great neural pathway circuit, like
connect completely in my brain.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Good.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
But I saw it described by a guy named Chris
Kohler who wrote an article on this and wired back
in twenty ten. He said that video games were dead, dead, dead,
personal computers were the future, and anything that just played
games and couldn't do your taxes was hopelessly backward. That
was kind of like the premise. So just to get across,

(08:39):
I don't want to beat this jrump too hard, but
to get across how huge the crash was. The video
game crash of North America. In nineteen eighty two, Atari
raked in two billion dollars. Atari alone in nineteen eighty
three they lost five hundred and thirty six million dollars.
That's a swift fall, yes, but that's how quickly that

(09:00):
it happened, and so people basically, if it crashes that hard,
people hate your product. And I think that's kind of
where we were at in nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, but as you pointed out this, we need to
keep pointing out this was the North American crash.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, good point.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
It did not happen in Japan in nineteen eighty three.
They were just like, I don't know what you're talking about,
because we have arcades over here that are flourishing. We
invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. It's still a
lot of fun to play. Those games are still fun
to play, yeah, for sure. And in nineteen eighty this
was a few years before the United States crash, they said, hey,

(09:38):
you know what, there's this gaming thing going on, home
gaming going on in America, and maybe we should get
together a team over here to just sort of poke
around because we're Nintendo. We make a lot of toys
and we have for a long time, and we're big
in the arcade world, but we don't have really a
console system going. And that led to I think actually,

(09:59):
there was a console called the Epoch Cassette Vision in
nineteen eighty one, and it was sort of the biggest
thing in Japan at the time.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
But well I think it was kind of the only
thing in Japan at the time.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Too, well, which makes it the biggest. I guess you
could also say it was the smallest. That's true. But
it was not a Nintendo product, right.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
No, it absolutely wasn't. In fact, it was Nintendo came
along his rival to this cassette vision, Epoch Cassette Vision.
So the head of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, he apparently was
this driving force. He had some really great people working
for him in Japan and in North America, but he

(10:39):
seems to have been this person who would be like,
do this enormous undertaking and do it in an hour
kind of thing. He kind of seems to have had
a sense that there was a really narrow window that
was open right now that could close at any time,
and that they needed to get this stuff done, but
they also needed to do it really well and wright

(11:00):
basically out of the gate. And they actually managed to
because in nineteen eighty three, after just a couple of
years of research and development, they released what's called the
Family Coom or the Family Computer, which was essentially the
direct predecessor of the Nintendo Entertainment system that they released
a couple of years later in North America.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, I mean, it's not very often that a head
of a company or a boss comes along and says,
I want to do something better and cheaper than what
is currently out there, and it actually happened. And listeners
at home, if you can look this stuff up as
you go safely, please do because just seeing these all
these various units we're going to talk about is really

(11:40):
a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, they teeter on the edge of being creepy. They're
like at that age, they're not quite wicker wheelchair creepy,
but they're getting there. Give them another decade or so,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, I think they're cool looking. I mean, this is
the kind of thing that would look cool sitting on
a shelf as a collector these days.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
I think there's a lot of people who have that.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Actually, oh I'm sure, so look up the epoch cassette
vision because that's kind of fun. But the Famicon was
this red and white box. It top loaded, It had
two wired controllers, and it had very importantly on the
control pad it had. It had the dpad. It had
the directional pad on the left with the up and down,
left and right arrows, and then an A and B button,

(12:21):
which no one knew at the time, but that would
kind of revolutionize the gaming world. As you know, they
got a little fancy over the years, but it's still
sort of that's still the bones of what a controller is.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Absolutely like it was. I can never remember the full quote,
but somebody said it was like they invented the airplane
and got it right fully out of the gate, like
tray tables and everything Essentially, it was like, that's what
they did with that controller design. And now you think
about it, you look at it, like the Nintendo brick

(12:52):
and especially the Famcom controllers, they look so old fashioned.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, but if you could put.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yourself in the mindset of somebody in Japan in nineteen
eighty three, if you looked around at the other stuff available,
it was it was just from the future. And that
was one of the things that Nintendo did really really
well during this period. They figured out what everyone thought
the future was, what it contained, what it looked like,

(13:21):
and they gave it to everybody. It was a really
like exuberant time. It was like the future had been
brought to the present and it was all thanks to
Nintendo basically.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
So it retailed for about one hundred and fifty bucks
back then, which is what close to five hundred.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Today, Yeah, four hundred something like that.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
All right, So, I mean kind of on par with,
you know, the range of even modern gaming. I mean,
what's the new PlayStation like five maybe I don't know,
I'm not sure. I think it's somewhere in there, five
or six hundred bucks.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Do you remember that PlayStation ad that was like for
PlayStation seven it was just people running around the real world.
It was all like VR and augmented reality.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
I don't remember that.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
It was pretty cool because it came out in like
the nineties and you're like, whoah, and we're pretty close
to that now already, you know.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
Oh for sure. They bundled the Donkey Kong and Donkey
Kong Junior games and the Popeye games, which were basically
about the same quality as you would get at the arcade.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, it was huge.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
It was a huge deal. I mean, especially if you
grew up playing Atari. I loved Atari, but Atari was
Atari and it had a lot of limits. And this
was you know, you went to the arcade so you
could play games better than Atari. Now you could do
it at home.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Right, Yeah, so that was an enormous progression. But it
wasn't just like the graphics the quality of the look
of it. It was also the gameplay too, Like it
was way more fun than most of the games you
were going to play on an Atari. It was just
funner to play some of these famcom games. And it
took off like a rocket. It knocked the epoch cassette

(14:54):
vision right off of the top place into the history books.
Basically essentially. Yeah, they saw half a million units in
two months after its release. I think by the end
of nineteen eighty four, they'd sold two and a half
million units, so in about a year or so. And
they were like, Okay, I think we're definitely onto something,
and they had enough hubris enough I guess, at least

(15:18):
self assurance that they set their sights on North America again,
which was a tattered, burning ruin as far as video
games were concerned.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
It's a great spot for a break.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
I think so too, all right.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
I think where we left off the United States was
a version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yeah, yeah, and
The Walking Dead. And Nintendo came along and said we
are going to save you and bring you into the future.
And it was a tough sell at first in the
US because, like you said, the video game craze for

(16:12):
lack of a better word, had kind of come and gone.
This was nineteen eighty five. Parents were still not you know,
they were like, I'm glad that went away, basically, and
now we have these PCs in our homes and my
kid can play Oregon Trail or whatever. And they seem
happy enough with that, and Nintendo knew all this was
going on. They knew it was going to be a
tougher sell that they knew, so they knew they had

(16:32):
to come up with something awesome. And their first crack
at that was something called the AVS, the Advanced Video System,
And they said, we'll give it a keyboard, so it
looks like a computer. It'll have a little cassette disk drive,
it'll be able to do some stuff. It'll but you know,
they bundled it with all kinds of fun stuff. It
had a joystick, it had a keyboard like a musical keyboard,

(16:54):
and it had this wireless which is we'll explain how
all this works in a little bit. It's pretty cool.
But it had a little raygun, a little zapper.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, and you really said a mouthful with the word wireless. Man.
This was nineteen eighty five, and this Advanced Video System
came out with wireless controllers like it was. That's really impressive.
And it was really slick looking too, like really futuristic looking.
But also yes, they put enough computer peripherals in it

(17:25):
that it did it didn't look like a video game system, right. Yeah,
So they took it to CEES. The January version that
I think even back then was in Vegas. But it's sorry,
it's the Consumer Electronics Show, right.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, I've never been to that, of you.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
No, huh. Stricklin has great stories from it, though.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, he goes every year, I think, I think so.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
But at CES in January nineteen eighty five, they're like,
here you go, everybody, here's the future, the advanced video system.
And no one cared at all about it. They didn't
even get people coming over to play, to mess around.
No one could have cared less about that thing.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, which is a little bit surprising looking back, because
the games were good and they knew that. I guess
they were just a little gun shy, But it seems
like Atari made so much money. I'm surprised there wasn't
someone that was like, hey, maybe round two is going
to be a real thing. But it, you know, it
didn't work. They didn't get any response.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
No, And I think that really goes to just kind
of underline just how bad a reputation video games had, because,
you know, Dave points out that the consoles that had
been going for like one hundred, one hundred and fifty
dollars the year before, these retailers were stuck with them,
and they were selling them for like forty bucks, which
is how much the games used to go for. Now

(18:45):
the games were like four dollars. So the retailers have
been so badly burned. I think they all got caught
with these hot potatoes when the crash happened that they
were like never again. Yeah, and that's what Nintendo was
working against, which is as Dave Dave again, Dave helped
us with this, as you were either a very foolish
company to try this or a very smart one because

(19:05):
again it had a terrible reputation, but that also meant
that there was no competition in this enormous market right now.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah. Absolutely, So they knew they had to have almost
like a trick to get their foot in the door,
and they came up with one and they found this.
Uh is Gaming Historian Is it a I know it
had a YouTube channel, but is it also just a
full website.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
I don't know. All I know is of the YouTube
channel where they make really high quality YouTube videos that
are really interesting.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
It's good stuff. But someone at Gaming Historian came up
with this very app metaphor about a trojan horse, and
that's kind of what they were looking for was a
way to get these things in the home by almost
tricking parents into thinking it wasn't a gaming system and
it was more just sort of like a toy because
kids still got and bought or you know, received toys
and stuff. It's not like they shut down the toy industry.

(19:58):
It was just home video game. So what they invented
was the ROB the rob the robotic Operating Buddy, which
is a very sweet name. You should totally go look
at ROB online and especially YouTube videos of rob and
action and just be prepared for the speed of ROB.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
Right. But the thing is ROB was a robot. He
moved and he functioned, He interacted with the games that
they came up.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
With very slowly, right, very slowly.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
But this was a time where like robots were kind
of hard to come by. Yeah, they were not like that.
It was not an easy thing to get your hands on.
And now all of a sudden there's this company saying like, hey,
we have this whole thing and it has a robot too. Yeah,
and it was one of the greatest strokes of marketing
genius that any company's ever come up with. As we'll see.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, I mean what they ended up with was a
robot that didn't I mean, it functioned as it should,
but like I said, it's super super slow. They only
ended up having a couple of games you could use
the robot, and it was just sort of a sneaky
way to get these consoles in the door. And because
it was all part of the same system and that's

(21:10):
how it worked, they managed to get the little Trojan
Horse robot through the door. And thanks to a guy
named Lance bar he helped design a lot of this stuff.
He designed the Zapper ray gun, which we'll talk a
little bit more about in a sec but he designed
it as a front loading system, which made sort of
people think of VCRs. It was also a very they

(21:32):
call it zero four solution, so there wasn't a lot
of wear on the on the cartridges and it just
worked really well.

Speaker 3 (21:40):
Plus it looked like you said, it looked like a VCR.
Those were wildly popular at the time, and I don't
think we said chuck. So that January CEES was just
a complete like catastrophe for Nintendo. They'd spent all this
time coming up with the advanced video system and it
went nowhere. So again the head of the company Hiroshi

(22:02):
Yamauchi told a couple of people like, hey, redesign this
in an hour, and they did. And Lance Barr was
the guy who did it, and he knocked it out
of the park because the NEES as it debuted later
on in North America was essentially what he came up
with in that one hour that he was given to
do it. So they had they did all this and

(22:24):
had it done in time for the July nineteen eighty
five CEES like six months after that huge colossal failure.
They went back to the drawing board and came back
in six months with the Nintendo Entertainment System fully fleshed out,
including Robot and zappor Gun.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Well notably Robot, because that's what it all. Anyone cared
about it.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
First, Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Like at CES, the NES system was sort of to
the side and everyone was just trying to get their
hands on Rob and play Gyromite, which I'm telling you
you got to just spend five minutes watching Rob play
this game, because he shows a split screen of the
the TV screen of what's happening on the game, which

(23:08):
really isn't much, and then Rob just very slowly picking
up these spindle tops and making them spin.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
Yeah, and I wasn't the the game historian video that
that really kind of went into detail about how Rob
played and setting up his accessories and everything.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
I watched a bunch of them.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, I'm not sure, Okay, I think it was that one.
If not, it was another one I saw it where
they really kind of showed like the idea of Rob
was pretty ingenious. He was player too, but you were
actually playing together like you in gyro Might. You were
kind of running through this maze and there were like
pillars that you couldn't get past. You had to get
Rob to do it for you. And again he got

(23:48):
some lunch so slowly. Yeah, good, get an eye, examine
your glasses. Made in an hour or two and then yeah,
he would have completed that and you could advance to
the next column or whatever. It was a great idea.
It was a cool concept, but it just the execution
was terrible. But he essentially just pushed the buttons on
the player two controller, So if you got tired and

(24:08):
frustrated of waiting for Rob, you could just push the
buttons on the player two controller yourself and play gyro
Mighte that way. But the point was They don't seem
in retrospect to have really thought Rob was going to
take off. In fact, the games that they he came
with in North America were the Japanese versions. They hadn't

(24:29):
even bothered to make the North American version of these.
They just put like kind of this like like fix
on it that made it compatible with the North American system.
But when you loaded up gyro Mighte, the intro screen
showed the Japanese name for it at the very beginning
of it.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
I feel like I saw other games that had Japanese
writing and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's a memory.
It may have just been like boot up screens or something.
So they decide it was such a you know, I
grabber at cees that they decided, all right, let's go
to New York City and let's test it out there
in one city, roll it out, see what happens. The

(25:11):
New York retailer said, hey, buddy, I got look at this.
I got a warehouse full of Atari's over here that
I can't even give away, like I don't know about
a new gaming system. And they said, all right, here's
what we'll do. We will ship them to your store
from Japan for free. We will. You can just sell
what you sell and pay us for those. Whatever you

(25:32):
don't sell you can return to us. We'll take them back.
We'll send over a team in your store to set
up these big marketing interactive marketing displays, and we'll we'll
take on all of the risk and all you guys
got to do is try and sell some of these.
And they went, yeah, all right.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
That was a great Joe Pesci by the way, saw
Joe Pecchi. So yeah, they did this in five hundred stores.
And normally, when you when you did like kind of
a soft test release of something like this, you might
choose like to Peka Kansas, or's somewhere that no one
cares about, right, But they went full bore and hit
New York City. And I think I've seen it, you know,

(26:11):
mentioned a few times that like it was based on
that that Frank Sinatra song, the idea that you if
you made it in New York, you could make it anywhere,
and they they did make it in New York. Oh,
I can't remember.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
I want to rock one, okay, I want I want
to hear that version.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Man, I've got that MP three. It's so good. It
still holds up.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
I want to rock.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Yeah, the Twisted Sister song.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
You got that MP three or MP four, I don't
know what they buy it.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
I bought it at Toys r US.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Very cool.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
So they they didn't knock it out of the park necessarily.
They sold about half the units that they had produced
for this test market in New York. Yeah, I think
like fifty thousand, but it was enough for Yamauchi to say,
let's give this a try. Let's roll out to the
rest of the country. Another bold move because normally, after
your first test, like run your first test market, you

(27:12):
do like four or five more And he said, now,
let's skip that, Let's just go right to the rest
of the country. And he did.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah. And that was the Christmas season too, So I
get the feeling that they were They weren't super disappointed,
but they weren't super pumped either. It felt like it
was right in that area. And it's funny looking back historically,
like it was right in that zone where it was
just enough to keep it going. And you wonder kind

(27:38):
of the sliding doors pathways that the gaming world would
have taken had it sold thirty thousand units, you know.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, for sure. I saw somebody say, like Nintendo. Had
Nintendo not been successful, like the games as we know
them today would definitely not exist.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
We'd still be playing checkers like a bunch of dopes.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, and going outside and needs it. So that was
nineteen eighty five holiday season. By nineteen eighty six, they
hit on something else. So like one of the things
that they did was take a poll of that people
in the test market who had bought the Nintendo and
I think like the vast majority of them said that

(28:20):
Rob the Robot was the reason they had bought the
whole system to get that robot. That's how well that
marketing ployee worked. So Rob had kind of served as
purpose though everyone knew he was slow, they weren't releasing
more games for them, so they came up with Originally
the way you bought Nintendo, it was the Nintendo Entertainment

(28:42):
System console, two controllers, the zapper gun, Rob the Robot,
and all of Rob the Robot's accessories, and then two games,
one of which was gyro mighte that game you play
with Rob, Right, Yeah, Okay, that's a lot of stuff,
and of course it was pretty expensive at the time.
So for the national rollout, they kept the Deluxe set,

(29:03):
but they also came up with something called the ANS
Control Deck, which was just the console, two controllers, and
very very importantly Super Mario Brothers. And that was ninety
nine bucks. And they sold those things as fast as
they could make them for the holidays that year.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, you really can't overstate the importance of Super Mario Brothers.
That was a game that came along and with actually
with a Famicon in nineteen eighty five, and it was
just it was the most advanced looking game and playing
game that any kid had ever seen. It was as
day points out. It was the first game that you

(29:43):
could play and have fun playing forever. Like you could
go on and on finding the hidden worlds, finding the
easter eggs, dropping down pipes into other sections that you
and other levels that you never even knew existed, banging
away hidden bricks, like there were so many discoveries and

(30:04):
places to go in Super Mario Brothers. They created sort
of a new way of gaming, which was like, Hey,
how would you like to be little Josh Clark? How
but put your cigarette down? How would you like to
play a video game? The same one for the next
seven hours?

Speaker 3 (30:22):
Hot Dog? That's what I would have said, and that
really hot dog.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
It was a whole new deal though, because even when
I played Autari, like we played for hours at a time,
but I don't know, you played a game for thirty
forty five minutes and you'd pop in another. And that's
why you had like forty games in your in your
controller box, because none of them you could play for
hours and hours and hours in a row and not
eventually be like, Okay, this is getting a little bit old,

(30:52):
even as a kid.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Yeah, so the gameplay was just light years ahead of
anything I've almost every single source that I've seen on
the Internet that talks about how Super Mario Brothers change
things uses the word light years ahead, yeah, of everything else,
because it really was. There was a guy named Shigeru Miyamoto.
He designed the game very famously. He obviously became a

(31:16):
legend overnight because of it.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
They were also smart enough to do some really savvy
marketing moves which kind of rolled out in a few
different ways. They well, they had a lot of advertising money.
That was sort of a given. They had about twenty
million bucks to spend off the bat, which is a
ton of money for advertising now and then. But they
created a call center. They trained these players and these

(31:38):
gamers basically to master these games and sit on the
phone and you could call a number if you got
stuck and talk to a human being that could walk
you through a level that you couldn't get through. They
had Nintendo Power magazine, which is a very big deal.
And they created the first you know, gaming championships where

(31:59):
and these are still just huge, you know, where kids
and adults alike. You know, now adults from all over
the world come together to battle each other out. And
the very first ones were created by Nintendo with the
Grand Championships at Universal Studios, Hollywood.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, you can
make the case that they created the esports phenomena. They
lead the groundwork for it to come at least, right
I would think, so, yeah, that's pretty cool. So there
was a poll of Nintendo players after the national rollout
that found that ninety five percent of teams polled said
that they recommended the nes to their friends, and I

(32:36):
think eighty three percent of adults and eighty five percent
of little kids. That is eye popping, and that that
means that they were successful. They used rob to get
their feet in the door, and they knew that if
they just got their console in the hands of Americans,
they would change their minds forever about video games. And
that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 1 (32:55):
And they avoided the Atari mistake, which was they did
their best to try and keep bad games from being
able to play it on their system. And that's what
happened with Atari. With the games got so bad. I
mean there are hundreds and hundreds. We talked about this
in the ET game episode, like ET gets unfairly piled

(33:15):
upon because it was just such a big release, but
there were far worst games released on the Atari system,
hundreds and hundreds of really really bad games that just
no one even remembers. And Nintendo saw this play out
in America and knew that they couldn't let that happen
to them, So they designed a proprietary system where you

(33:37):
could only play officially licensed Anys games. It created a
lock chip on their circuit board and only Nintendo officially
licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or
the key chip to unlock it. And that really kept
quality control, you know, under their wing. They said even
to third parties, they said, you can only make two

(33:58):
of these games a year, Like, don't come at us
with two hundred games, Like make something really really good
that will approve of and we will put the Nintendo
Celo of Quality on the front of the cover.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah. Like they were really nitpicky too, Like as you
were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo like
explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff,
and Nintendo would make notes and send it back and
make you change stuff. And that's what you could do
if you had eighty percent of the market as far

(34:31):
as video games were, because people had to come to you.
And it was really smart for them to just kind
of protect their intellectual property like that because it was
so good. But they were basically so heavy handed about it. Yeah,
that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one
point for their licensing practices.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah. I mean, anytime you control that much of a market,
the FTC is gonna sniff around.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
And there were other companies out there trying to boo
led games still. There was one called ten Gen that
had a few license games, but they wanted more money,
and so they went to the patent office and said, hey,
can we take a look at that patent for these
lock and key chips, and they said, sure, here it is,
and so they I guess illegally because they ended up

(35:21):
getting sued and Nintendo won. So, I mean, I don't
know how that patent law works. I wasn't. I'm surprised
that you could just go get a patent and rip
it off.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Well, you're supposed to improve upon it. They seem to
have just ripped it off. But I think it's one
of those things that I was like, gray illegal, gray
area that wouldn't be decided anywhere outside of court.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Okay, makes it, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, So they just tangan rolled the dice and they
lost essentially, Okay, I think. So, I see, I've actually
heard it both ways. I just wanted to fill it
out by saying the other. So there's this YouTuber named
Ninten Drew and he has a called ten Weird nes
Facts and he talks about that that key chip thing

(36:05):
where people were trying to get around it, and he
said other companies didn't even bother to come up with
a chip. They just used a low voltage spike to
scramble the brains of the lock chip so that it
wouldn't work anymore, and now the game could be played.
And as an example, he used he used a game

(36:25):
from the developer tree and it was for Bible Adventures. No,
I've never even heard of it, but if you put
Bible Adventures in your NES, it would scramble its brain
so that you could play Bible Adventures.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
I would think some of these might endanger the game
console itself.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
You'd think, so, yeah, it's pretty pretty reckless.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, Jesus killed by Nintendo.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Uh so Rob did not work out. Poor Rob did
its job and got its foot, the little robotic foot
in the door. But kids were like, this is not
so playing these games, these two games with Rob isn't
where it's at. It's really Super Mario and all these
other games, and so Rob, you know, Dave kind of
funnily points out Rob inevitably ended up kind of in

(37:12):
the closet of every kid that probably owned one, and
it just became about that NES system. But that's not
to say all those peripheries were not a success, because
that zapper and the game Duck Hunt were both big
deals that kids loved to play.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, and I did not realize this, but the laser gone,
what was it? Called the zapper. It was not. It
didn't shoot anything at your TV because if you stop
and think about it, your TV's not set up to
accept that kind of thing, or your TV screen certainly is.
So what happened instead is it was a light detector.
So when you pulled the trigger on the zapper, your

(37:52):
screen in just a nanosecond, maybe a little slower than that,
but still faster than you could register it, the screen
went and whatever ducks are on the screen turned into
white squares. And if you had the zapper pointing at
the duck when you took the shot, the zapper would
register that white flash of light that was a duck

(38:12):
that square, and it would register it as a hit.
That's how the zapper worked, which is pretty ingenious.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Very ingenious. And the kid thinks it's a laser gun
because they don't know how that stuff works exactly.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
There is no kid who picked up the zapper and
didn't go beep beep.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
All right, I guess here a minute forty, we'll take
our second break, and we'll come back and talk a
little bit about what happened next.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Okay, Chuck. So there were a couple of other peripherals
that came along that were as man as Rob was,
maybe even a little Mayor. One was the power Pad,
the other was the power Glove. And again these were
things that were really cool and helped advance the any
system and made a bunch of money for everybody, but
when you played with them, they weren't very good.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, the power pad is was a pad. It had
another use from another company. It was called a fun
and Fitness pad from Bandai, and Nintendo bought them out
and basically repackaged it and said, hey, now you can
do like track and field games by running on this
dumb thing. And that technology is still very popular, like

(39:41):
if you go to arcades, those dance games, and there's
still like I played one not too long ago with
my daughter, daved Busters, where you do like track and
field stuff is still around. But at home a kid
isn't going to do like they're inside kids because they
don't want to be outside running around. Yeah, they want
to be on the ca ouch. And so the power
pad didn't go so well. It ended up in the

(40:02):
closet with Rob almost called him a rod. And then
that glove though, the power glove, it was really cool
and it looks cool today like if imagine people buy
these just for Halloween costumes because it looks kind of neat.
But Punch Out, which is a great boxing game, Power

(40:24):
Glove was kind of the only game where you really
maximized what you could get out of the glove, right.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
I also saw there's a scene in the Fred Savage
movie The Wizard where this kid pulls out a power
Glove and plays rad Racer. So he's using it like
he's he's steering. But it just they didn't really develop
any game specifically for the power Glove, so it ended
up it was a little bit because they da've likens
it to WE. Eventually Nintendo came out with the WE system,

(40:52):
which used essentially the same kind of technology, but yeah,
it was ahead of its time, so it ended up
in the closet with the power pad and.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Rob no Man clause.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
It's kind full exactly, but as kind of clunky as
those were. That controller we talked about that was revolutionary.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Yeah, there's a writer, a game pro named ty K
Kim who came up with this cool analogy that they found,
which is that what Nintendo had landed on with that
controller was what Kim referenced as the language of console gaming,
and that really kind of locks it down as to
what they did. Like you know, we were talking earlier
about that first nes brick. You know, it was all

(41:35):
kind of there, like they grew and morphed, but that
directional pad was revolutionary. Those buttons were revolutionary, and they
landed on the idea of a kid holding something in
their two hands and mainly using their thumbs to operate it.
Thumbs and pointer fingers, I guess now, but mainly thumbs.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
Yeah, because with the Atari joystick you would use your
thumb for the red but but you used your whole
hand to move the joystick. This was just totally different,
and it was really simple. It was really sleek. Everything
was laid out just right, and it was it was
just so perfectly made out of the gate that, like
you're saying, it just laid the groundwork for all of

(42:18):
the console controllers to come even today still it's based
on those.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
Yeah, they had. It didn't start there. They had it
initially on this handheld game called a Game and Watch,
which if you look this it looks like it's sort
of the predecessor to the game Boy, and it's called
a Game and Watch because it had a clock on it,
so it told told the time in it was a game,
so they call it the game and Watch. But that's
where the dpad came from. And Donkey Kong is a

(42:46):
game that really took great advantage of the D pad,
and it was it just seemed like the natural. And
now they make the little mini joysticks which are which
are great, but some I think the I think the Xbox.
Do they have joy stix or do they still use
that depad?

Speaker 3 (43:07):
I don't know, remember addicted, so I gave it up.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
So you never played an Xbox?

Speaker 3 (43:12):
No, No, I've seen ads for it, but I can't
recall the controller.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, I played a lot of my same friend John Pindell,
who you know. John's backstage in New York. John, he
had the N sixty four. He was my Golden Eye partner.
But he also got an Xbox and we were both
addicted to the Tony Hawk skating game for about a year.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
Oh yeah, that was a good game.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
And that was a game that carried with you in
real life because if you played enough Tony Hawk, you
would just someone who'd never skateboarded. You would be walking
around in the world and going like I could totally
grind that gutter on top of that that roof. It's
pretty funny.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
So the another thing that those controllers did was give
us the cheat code. Yeah, I guess you could conceivably
do it on like an Atari joystick. But they really
came along thanks to the NES because there was a
developer who was trying to turn the arcade game Gradius
into a Nintendo game, and it was really hard, so

(44:13):
he created this cheat code to make it easier to
kind of game test for him so he wouldn't have
to start over every time, and is extraordinarily famous. Up up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
be a start. And that's called the Konami code because
the guy worked for Konami and it worked for Gradius,
but he became much more famous with the game Contra.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
I never I guess you played a lot of Contra probably,
huh for sure? Now what was Contra? I don't even know.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
It was a really kind of groundbreaking shooter game where
I saw it described well as like a cross between
Rambo and Aliens. Ah. Okay, so if I remember correctly,
you're into some sort of weird other world and you
and your buddy are kind of like buff and where
like headbands and you have like spiky blonde hair. Oh yeah,

(45:00):
but and you just shoot all sorts of stuff and
it's really neat because you get different kinds of weapons
that shoot in different ways. And now you're like, this
is clunky and old, But at the time it was,
there was just again, nothing like it on the market,
Like a lot of the games that we understand today
originated on the NES.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, for sure, I think I've seen Contra that sounds familiar.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
But if you did the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,
BA start with Contra, if you did it at the
intro screen right before the game started, you would get
thirty extra lives which you could use to great effect.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Oh that's great. They ended up it's a staggering number,
still considering that they were kept a sort of a
heavy hand on the amount of games being produced, but
they ended up with close to seven hundred games for
the original NES. And I think in ninety five is
when they launched the sixteen bit No No No Super

(45:57):
Niningenda was ninety one, and that was the one that
I guess my roommate had where I ended up playing
a lot of Super Mario and then Super Mario two
and three of course came along. We already mentioned punch Out.
That was I remember playing punch Out. That was a
great game. Mike Tyson was the biggest boxer in the
world at the time. But there is a little fun
fact that Dave dug up and I think I remember this,

(46:19):
but the arcade punch Out had a boxer. The Russian
boxer's name was Vodka drunken Ski, so great.

Speaker 3 (46:30):
And he got changed to Soda Popinski very famously. Anyone
who played punch Out is very familiar with Soda Popinski.
And one of the big revelations of my childhood was
that the great tiger who wore a turban with a
gem on it. His gem flashed before he came at
you to throw a punch. When I realized that you
could pretict it, yeah, it just changed my life.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
That's funny. It changed your line.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
It did.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
Hey, you might never become a podcaster. You never know.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
It's possible. That whole glass or the sliding doors, glass.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
Doors, yeah, the glass ceiling, yeah, different thing.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
So what else, Chuck, There's some other ones too that
we have to shout out.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Well, I'll shout out Tetris because that's a game I
played a lot on the game Boy talk about addictive,
Tetris was super addictive. I think I literally owe Tetris
to my car packing skills today when we go on
road trips and stuff, Emily, I always still jokes like,
Chuck is going to Tetris this thing. It was great.
Tetris is a very simple game. If you've never played it,

(47:33):
it's uh oh, I don't even know if it's worth describing,
but it's It's a game where you stacked different shaped
blocks right, and when you got solid lines, a line
would disappear, and the whole goal of this game is
to to keep those lines low. And as it built
higher and higher and higher, there was less room for
those blocks to drop, and it would go seemingly go
faster and faster.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
Very yeah, especially as they just kept building up and
they're dropping then it's like it drops right onto another block.
You're up that high. It's just like you know, it's
just it is very stressful, it is, but it was
fun well.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
And it's also I think one of the more satisfying
games ever invented in that when you would things would
get a little hairy, and if you got like two
in a row of the exact ones that you needed
and made I think it was a Tetris when you
got like was it like five or was it four?

Speaker 3 (48:26):
I don't remember, blobably four because the tallest block was
four high?

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Was it four high? But it would make all four
disappear at once, And if you got a couple of
those and you went from like seventy percent high to
down to like twenty percent in an instant, there's no
feeling like that.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
No, No, Tetris was pretty good. I loved it too.

Speaker 1 (48:44):
It was awesome.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
I want to shout out some other ones. There was
another one, Metroid, which I rented countless times for an
entire weekend from Blockbuster, and it would spend the entire
weekend with friends trying to beat it. And if I
remember correctly, I never beat Metroid. But it was really
groundbreaking in that there wasn't like some path you had
to stick to, like you were meant to explore these

(49:07):
vast areas and find stuff before you could advance to
the next level. That was pretty new actually, So Metroid
was groundbreaking too. And then there are other ones that
were just fun to play, like ice hockey. Did you
play that one.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
I was always into sports games, so I was. I
played hockey and golf and what about tennis? Tennis? I
played all those.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
It was fun. Did you play the MLB Baseball game.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
I'm not sure if I played that one.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
That one was very addictive. RC pro Am Ductails was
actually a lot of fun. And then there was an
army one called jack Hole. And then if you liked
skateboarding at the time, which I did, there was Skate
or Die, which was pretty good, but my money was
on Town and Country Designs Skate and Surf I think
it was called, and you could skateboard and then you

(49:53):
would go surf and it was a lot of fun
to play too.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yeah. I was so into the sports games, and I
still play the PlayStation what is it, PGA two K
for their golf game. It's still a lot of fun.
But I played. I was addicted to the Atari Beach
volleyball game, wherein it was two players aside and both
players were connected to one another. They could not move independently,

(50:19):
so when you're moving your joystick around, they're both running
in the exact same pattern.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
Yeah, that's hilarious. That sounds. It reminds me of another
game that Dave dug up called Chase the Chuck Wagon,
which was just about as bad as it got for
atari where a dog chases the wagon from the chuck
Wagon commercials.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
It's a branded game.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Poop out, Yeah, who would have thought? And then it
would poop out like food and the dog would eat
the food. That was like the point of the game.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
You should speak a little bit about Zelda though, the
legend of Zelda. That's a game again that by the
time that came out, it felt like a kid's thing,
and again we couldn't afford an nes So what was
Zelda all about?

Speaker 3 (50:58):
So I never liked Zeldah. It did something to my
mind or my brain that was not comfortable. I don't
know why. Wow, It's almost like have you ever what's
your grocery store? Kroger, Republics?

Speaker 1 (51:11):
I can't remember both, but generally publics.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Okay. So there's a lot of people out there who
are only publics and only Kroger. And I think my
theory is is that they're laid out in a certain
way that they appeal to one type of person and
then the other one appeals to a different type of person.
So if you are a public's person and you go
into a Kroger. It feels weird and out of place
and reality is just slightly askew. That's how Legend of

(51:35):
Zelda Baby feels. So I never got into it, but
I know some people like have essentially dedicated their lives
to that game, like beyond playing, it's like probably dress
up as link the main character, have like all sorts
of toys and stuff like that. Like, Legend of Zelda
was really big too.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yeah, and it was certainly not the first open role game,
but and I think there's not a solid agreement on
what that was. There are some arguments for the Great
Atari Game Adventure that was the first open world game
I played, right, Really, your avatar was a square, but
it was so much fun because you could go anywhere

(52:12):
for the first time. It was really different and new.
But I think Zelda is kind of regarded as the
Legend of Zelda as one of the first open world
like really good open world games. I guess right, Yeah,
it advanced.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Ones and it was by the same guy who did
Super Mario Brothers, so that's not surprising. Yeah, what else
you got, Chuck, I mean, not a whole lot else.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
I guess we should. We should definitely talk about blowing
in those cartridges, because I even made that joke before
we recorded because my microphone wasn't working and Dave, who's
sitting in for Jerry, said, unplug the cable and just
plug it back in. I said, should I blow in it?

Speaker 3 (52:50):
Right? And you don't want to? Actually? So did you
know about that? Right?

Speaker 1 (52:54):
I blew in a lot of cartridges Atari cartridges too.

Speaker 3 (52:57):
So that was the thing. If you're Nintendo cartridge didn't work,
you would take it out of the VCR like entry
point and you would blow on it. Everyone blew on it,
and you put it back in and it would work.
The thing is, it wasn't doing anything when you blew
on it. You weren't helping it. It just hadn't made
the correct connection the first time. So when you took

(53:19):
it out and put it back in, the chances were
that you were making the correct connection then and then
the game would work. But you, being a dumb ten
year old, thought, well, I blew on it, so that
fixed it. But the Nintendo long said do not blow
on these things. It's actually bad for them, and no
one listened until there was this guy who came along
and actually ran a study, the first, the world's first

(53:42):
study on what blowing on a Nintendo cartridge.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Does, and it didn't work. This is in twenty twelve.
His name was Frankie Bitruelo. And you know it's a
very rudimentary study, but I mean, how else you gonna
do it. You're gonna have a control game you don't
blow into, and you're gonna have a game you blow into.
And after how long did he do this?

Speaker 3 (54:03):
Thirty days? Every day for thirty days.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
The guy spent a month blown on this game. Took
this the blown cartridge out at the end and showed
that it was. It was corroded and kind of gross.
And it's funny, like you don't know what kid. You
always wonder who invented this, because every kid did it,
because every kid saw another kid do it, who just
got it from some other kid. But it was just

(54:28):
sort of known, like you would take it out and
it was always the same thing. You would do it
really quick and just go and like run the cartridge
back and forth in front of your mouth and then
stick it back in.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Yeah, I mean that sound just triggered a tidal wave
of nostalgia and Chuck, that was amazing. I don't remember that,
so don't blow in your Nintendo cartridges people who still
play Nintendo Original nes.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Maybe should follow this up again one day.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
To do one on the music of Nintendo.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
Well, it just sort of everything we didn't cover because
the n sixty four was such a big deal. And sure,
I don't know, this could be a two part a
separated by time and space.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
Okay, I like that idea, Chuck, Let's definitely do that.
And in the meantime, since Chuck and I just hashed
out a second part to this episode, of course, that
means we've just unlocked listener mail.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Maybe next Christmas it can be our you know, because
this is kind of every year we try to do
a toy, a famous toy.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
Yeah, no, I have the same thought. I just didn't
want to spill the beans.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Oh all right, consider them spilled.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Yeah, they're spilled all over.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
All right, speaking of spilling all over, this is a
correction that on something you said that I don't know
how I didn't catch this, but it's the we'll call
it the Great nutter butter Controversy of twenty two. Hey, guys,
At the end of the Vaudeville episode. Josh said, it's
weird how there were two types of Nutter butters and
they're totally different, the wafery kind and then the peanut

(55:59):
shaped cook And I don't remember what I said. It
must have just been like, huh, I think that's exactly
what you said. And you mentioned both of the same logo,
same packaging, which is not true, just two different types
of peanut butter cookies. And I guess this is what
you're talking about beause we had a bunch of people
right in. The peanut shaped cookies are the Nutter butters, Josh,
but the other wafery treats are nutty buddy bars. Did

(56:23):
you look? Is this what you meant?

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Now?

Speaker 3 (56:26):
I think this person is from an alternate Bear and
Saine Bear's dimension, because in in our dimension that there
it's the same thing, same package, same names, everything, just
different cookies.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
But is the is the nutty buddy what you were
thinking of?

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Though?

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Is what I want to know.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
In that person's dimension? Yes, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
It's easy to get a mixed up guys if you
are not a true nut specialist. And Chuck didn't pick
up on it, which was weird. Because I love both.
I don't never buy these, of course, but boy, a
little Debbie Nutty bar who so good.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
I think you would like the other version of Nutter Butters,
the kind of wayfer you one. I think you would
really like it.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
That's the Nutty Bar or the Nutty Buddy.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
No, that's the Nutter Butter. But I know what you're saying.
Oh man, who wrote this email?

Speaker 1 (57:16):
This is George. I think George is going to be
more confused now than ever.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
So George says, PS, gotta go, it's raining donuts again outside.
Thanks a lot, George. We appreciate the dispatch from your dimension.
Hopefully you guys are having a happy holiday season there too.
And if you want to be like George and reach
out and say hello, you can do that in an email.
Send it to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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