Remember back in the day when you had a Nintendo Entertainment System hooked up to a tube television, the connection over RF shaky, the excitement palpable? Nintendo's hoping you do, and wants you to recapture the feeling for $59.99.
On November 11, it will release the recursively named "Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition," a tiny little dedicated device packed with 30 of the greatest 8-bit hits. Pop in an authentically NES-style controller (additional ones sold separately for 10 bucks), plug into your flatscreen with HDMI, and you're back in your childhood. Pure nostalgic bliss.
But Nintendo is late to this party. Although plug-and-play retro gaming devices like Atari Flashback have been around since 2003, Nintendo waited until this year to jump into the nostalgia pool. So far, though, all indicators suggest it's doing it the right way. It's partnered up with the major Japanese game publishers from the 1980s to bring out a box filled not just with Nintendo's own hits like Mario, Zelda, and Punch-Out!!, but third-party classics like Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man 2, Tecmo Bowl, and even the original Final Fantasy. It's everything you loved about the original games, but better: for example, you'll be able to save your game progress on games that didn't allow it the first time around (hello, Castlevania).
On paper, this is a fairly robust implementation of the "tiny console" paradigm. Nintendo's got the right idea. And it will likely be a remarkable sales success. The similar Atari Flashback, now in its 6th iteration, has sold millions of units, and the company that produces it has expanded the line into tiny versions of the Colecovision, Intellivision, and Sega Genesis. The proof of concept is there, and now the console that was (and still is) an order of magnitude more popular than all of those is getting into the game.
Nintendo
