The NES at 40: Seven ways it changed the gaming world forever

2tone@lemmy.world to RetroGaming@lemmy.world – 91 points –
The NES at 40: Seven ways it changed the gaming world forever | Engadget
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I'm always vaguely jealous that I missed out on NES culture first time around.

In the UK, consoles weren't really a big thing until the Megadrive and the SNES, and the NES seemed to be nowhere at all, at least where I grew up. A few people had Master Systems, but mostly it was Spectrums and C64s.

I'd see the NES in magazines occasionally, or in game ads in American comic books I got my hands on, and it always looked so cool.

In South Africa, we got the Famicom. I was young and not aware of any others until the Mega Drive. I don't even remember the SNES. Arcades ruled. Until the Gameboy and PS1

In the UK? Were 8-bit micro computers popular there instead? I missed out on all of those in being in the US!

Yeah, until about 1990... I'm not sure why, but I suspect it was because of the relative price of console games. It was a lot easier to swing 8 quid for a game than 30 quid for a NES game. Plus, there was an underlying delusion that parents were buying their kids a tool that could be used for learning if they bought a computer over a console.

Consoles were a niche thing that occupied a couple of pages in the multi-format magazines of the late 80s.