Tecmo Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Now that it's football season, Tecmo Bowl fans out there may appreciate this 1988 group advertisement for Tecmo brand NES games. Tecmo published quite a few high quality titles for Nintendo's 8-bit console, some of which are seen here. Three of my personal favorite Tecmo titles are Rygar, Mighty Bomb Jack, and Ninja Gaiden II.

I was always impressed with Tecmo's box art illustrations and logo designs as a kid — they really jumped out at me when browsing NES games at a local rental store. You can see examples of Tecmo's eye-catching cover designs near the bottom of the ad.

It's interesting to note the presence of "Dragon Ninja (Tentative Title)" in this ad. From what I can tell, it appears to be an early version of Ninja Gaiden.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What are your favorite Tecmo NES games?

It's like a Transformer on your wrist.

I don't remember where this watch came from. Maybe my parents bought it for my brother before me. Maybe I begged for it when I saw it at a local Revco drug store (as I did with many toys back then). What I do know is that I played with it as a three-year-old kid, and I was completely distraught when I lost part of it in my back yard.

You see, this digital watch isn't just a watch — it's a transforming humanoid robot. The center piece detaches from the wrist strap and unfolds into a tiny robot man. It was first sold in 1984 by Takara, the company responsible for originating the popular Transformers toy line in Japan. At some point I lost the robot part of my watch, and I figured I would never see it again.

A few years later, my mom stepped in from the back yard and presented a dirty piece of plastic in her soil-stained hands. Joy swelled in my heart as I recognized what she had found while digging in her garden bed: my missing robot watch.

It was dirty, of course, and the clock portion no longer worked due to years of weather exposure, but I was still ecstatic. If you ever lost a favorite toy as a child, you know how painful it is. Rarely does one ever find such a missing toy again. This was the one that came back, the one small victory for lost toys everywhere. That tiny hole in my heart, the one left vacant by my missing robot buddy, had been filled.

Ironically, I probably just put the watch in a box and forgot about it. Decades passed. While looking through some childhood knickknacks recently, I found it again and thought you might enjoy the story. It still feels good to know, as I hold this toy watch in my hands, that not all things we lose are gone forever.

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Discussion Topic of the Week: What's the coolest digital watch you've ever owned? Did you ever own a robot or game watch?

"Safety is a pilot's first and foremost concern."

The most defining cultural, political, and national moment of my generation happened ten years ago next Sunday. You know what it is. The pain from that day is still fresh enough in my mind that I barely want to talk about it.

I recently ran across this advertisement for Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 in a 1995 issue of ComputerLife magazine. It gave me chills when I first saw it — as almost anything involving airplanes and the World Trade Center does for most Americans. The ad encourages the reader to fly safely when navigating close to the Twin Towers.

The fact that Microsoft designed an ad like this means nothing, of course — I'm not implying any kind of supernatural foresight embedded into a 1995 computer game advertisement. It's just creepy in retrospect. The World Trade Center's stature as one of the world's tallest and most famous landmark buildings inevitably teased human minds to make dramatic juxtapositions like this — sometimes harmlessly, and sometimes — one time — with devastating results.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Where were you when you first heard about the September 11th, 2001 attacks? Did they change your computer or video game habits in any way?

When printing this sticker, Apple refused to stay within the lines.

Apple included corporate logo stickers like this with just about every computer sold by the company from the Apple II era (late 1970s) up to at least the iMac G4 (2002) — the last time I noticed one. This particular sticker came packaged with a 1983 Apple IIe.

The stickers changed over time, of course. At first, the font switched from Motter Tektura (seen here) to Apple Garamond in the mid-1980s. The last Apple sticker I own, from 2002, simply consists of a solid white Apple logo, no text.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Steve Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO last Wednesday. What do you think will happen to Apple without him?

"Nintendo Super Levitation Pak ™ not included."

Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System ("Super NES" or "SNES" for short) 20 years ago this week — way back in 1991.

As a devotee of the NES at the time, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the Super NES when it came on the market. It's funny, but I didn't expect it at all. You'll have to keep in mind I was only 10 years old and my video game market knowledge was limited to what Nintendo Power told me. When I first saw a preview of the Super Famicom hardware (the Japanese Super NES) in Nintendo Power, I thought "why?" Wasn't the NES good enough?

I ended up getting a used Super NES in 1992 (in a set with Mario Paint), and I enjoyed it quite a bit. But it never felt the same as my NES (in retrospect, this was probably due to simply growing up), and I soon grew jaded by the general software offerings for the system.

Sure, I kept up with hits like Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario Kart, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong Country, but it felt like every third-party title in between paled in quality compared to Nintendo's offerings. That trend continues to this day on Nintendo consoles.

Rose-Colored Glasses

After the advent of widespread Internet use, folks began to rediscover hidden gems of the SNES catalog, such as many classic RPGs games that many American gamers passed over (and Nintendo failed to promote) at the time of their release. As I dug through the old SNES catalog in the emulator era, I too began to appreciate the Super NES more than I had during its heyday.

Quite a few people now hold the Super NES platform as the pinnacle of 2D sprite-based gaming, which many gamers began to sorely miss after the 3D polygonal graphics revolution began. We now clearly see the SNES as a pivot point between two distinct epochs in video games. That reputation will likely continue as the story of Nintendo's 16-bit home console echoes through history.

Further Reading

For more Super NES-related stuff on VC&G, check out my Why Super Nintendos Lose Their Color: Plastic Discoloration in Classic Machines article from 2007.

If you've ever wondered how many Super NES games start with the word "super," check out Super Game 64 Advance DS: The Nintendo Game Naming Formula Revealed!, also from 2007.

That same year, I wrote about how I put Secret Cartridge Messages in certain Super NES games that I rented. I also wrote about how sad I was when I finally finished Earthbound for the Super NES.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a Super NES? What did you think of it at the time?

Bet you've never scanned a website before.

This week's Retro Scan happens to be the 300th entry of this series that I've posted since 2006. We already celebrated the 5th anniversary of RSTOW back in January, so this isn't quite as exciting of a milestone.

Still, I thought I'd take this opportunity to do something once thought impossible: I scanned the Vintage Computing and Gaming website. More specifically, I scanned an Amazon Kindle showing the very first Retro Scan of the Week post from back in January 2006.

Did I scan something retro? Not really, but I have the feeling that this Kindle, with its monochrome e-paper screen, will seem very quaint in just a few years. The 2006 RSOTW post itself is already over five years old, which feels like an eternity in Internet time.

Will there be 300 more Retro Scans? Only time will tell.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you think e-readers will permanently replace paper books? If so, how soon?

"The pee cee ate mah leeeegs!"

Thirty years ago this week, IBM released the very first entry in its Personal Computer line, the IBM PC 5150. To celebrate, I dug up this very early IBM PC advertisement you see above. It hails from the tender year of 1982 — a time when corrective lenses made giant squid eyeballs jealous.

I've also wrangled up a list of previous IBM PC-related Retro Scans of the Week for you to enjoy (links below). The first you'll see is a sister ad to this one.

• The IBM PC Kid
• Presenting the IBM of Personal Computers
• IBM Taught Me How to Read
• Stunning IBM PC Paper Art
• Introducing the IBM 5110 Computing System

The 30th anniversary of a machine that started a 30-year computing paradigm is a very big deal (Well, as far as anniversaries go, anyway), so expect to hear more about the IBM PC from me soon.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first use an IBM PC or compatible machine? What did you think at the time?

I think he's going to miss the dragon.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite martial arts-themed video or computer game?

Atari 810 Disk Drive Receipt

Thirty years ago this month, my father ordered an Atari 810 disk drive for our family's Atari 800 from a place called "Omega Sales Co., Inc." in Rhode Island. Thirty years ago yesterday, Omega filled out the invoice you see here and shipped the order to my dad.

From the invoice, you can see that my father also ordered a copy of Star Raiders for the 800 and a set of joysticks. Unfortunately, the joysticks were out of stock and had to be backordered.

I still have our family Atari 810, and I still love the unique sound it makes when reading disks. That device composed the soundtrack to my computing childhood.

Price Check

• The Atari 810 sold for US $449 from this vendor, which is equivalent to $1,114.95 in 2011 dollars. To translate, the thing was bloody expensive. The 810 could read 88 kilobytes of data per disk side (one side at a time), which makes for a whopping $12.66 per kilobyte in today's dollars. Right now, you can buy a 2 terabyte (~2,000,000,000 kilobyte) hard disk for $80, which works out to $.00000004 dollars per kilobyte.
• A Star Raiders cartridge sold for $32, which is equivalent to $79.46 in 2011 dollars.
• A pair of joysticks (I assume official Atari brand) went for $15, which is equivalent to $37.25 today.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's the most memorable computer or video game item your parents have ever purchased for you?

The Tandy 2800 HD, Tandy 1100FD, Tandy 102, and Tandy 1500 HD

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a Tandy brand computer? What model(s)?