It’s been 40 years to the day since the Nintendo Entertainment System made its US debut, and to celebrate, gaming accessory maker 8BitDo has unveiled a line of NES-themed products. The includes a limited edition version of the company’s that comes with an NES Retro Receiver, so it can be used with the classic console. There’s also the NES-inspired speaker and , the latter of which sports a full aluminum alloy build and an eye-watering $500 price tag. All are available for pre-order now.
The Ultimate 2 controller is one of our favorite controllers , and the NES40 version comes with all the same features, including TMR joysticks, Hall Effect triggers with mode switching and lots of customization options. But with this one, you also get the NES Retro Receiver (a transparent black version that’s exclusive to this drop), four custom joystick caps and a robot keychain that pays homage to Nintendo’s R.O.B. toy robot. The controller set costs $80 and will ship November 18. It’s compatible with Switch 1, 2 and Windows, as well as the original NES using the receiver accessory.
The Retro 68 Keyboard is 8BitDo’s first 68-key keyboard, and it’s made entirely of aluminum alloy. That includes the shell, keycaps and buttons, according to the company. It uses Kailh Box Ice Cream Pro Max switches. The keyboard features the NES colorway (like its similar, much less expensive ) and comes with programmable wireless dual Super Buttons. 8BitDo says it gets up to 300 usage hours on a charge thanks to its 6500mAh battery. It’s compatible with Windows and Android, and is expected to ship in January 2026.
The Retro Cube 2 speaker isn’t just a cosmetic update to the original Cube Speaker, but brings some improvements in battery life and functionality too. The dual-speaker system has three connection modes — Bluetooth, 2.4G wireless and wired USB — and comes with a charging dock. It has a 2000mAh battery that gets up to 30 hours of use between charges. Like the earlier version, it has D-pad controls for volume, playback and pairing. The $50 speaker ships on December 12.
If you’re paying for access to Nintendo’s Switch Online package, you too are probably perennially wondering whether you’re actually getting anything out of it, but then remembering it’s only $20 a year and it stores all your saves in the cloud. Thankfully, every so often a few more prehistoric games get added to assuage any remaining feelings of wastage. Today it’s Super R-Type, Wrecking Crew ‘98, and, er, Sugoi Hebereke.
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Obviously, only madness awaits those who try to fathom the workings within Nintendo, but it still bemuses me that these online libraries of decades-old games have been so slowly drip-fed. Right now, after almost six years of existence, Nintendo Switch Online—with today’s addition of Wrecking Crew—finally includes almost all of Nintendo’s in-house developed, US-released SNES games, conspicuously lacking its last, Wario’s Woods.
Alongside Sugoi Hebereke (Amazing Hebereke—a Sunsoft fighting game that no one cared about at the time, getting its first U.S. release), the game anyone’s going to care about in this collection is Super R-Type, essentially a souped-up port of the wonderful arcade/Amiga side-scrolling shooter game, R-Type II.
Stunningly hard, it was—amusingly—somewhat easier on SNES thanks to its atrocious slow-down that would occasionally bring the game to a total slideshow. Whether or not that will be replicated when playing it on Switch, we’re not sure.
I still find it a struggle to get too excited about Switch Online’s offerings. Things like online access and cloud saves seem like they’d be right and proper to just offer as part of paying for a console, and while 63 SNES games, 21 Game Boy games, and 71 NES games seems like a bumper library to play through, the fact that you can’t just download them to the system makes them a hassle to play, and most of them are obviously extraordinarily dated and tough to stick with.
The more expensive ($50 per year) and clumsily named Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack option improves things with 30 N64 games, 14 Sega Genesis titles, and a paltry 15 (admittedly excellent) Game Boy Advance games, which are a lot more tempting to get stuck into today. However, the lack of first-party GBA games on there is very disappointing, and only becomes more so with every announcement like this, that seems to prioritize unwanted SNES bargain bin guff. Where’s Wario Land 4? Where’s Rhythm Tengoku? F-Zero Climax, Pokémon, and more than anything else, Mario Golf: Advance Tour? Whine moan complain.
Anyway, it’s a big news day for all you Wrecking Crew ‘98 fans, and god bless you.
At the start of the 1980s, video games were mostly relegated to coin-gobbling arcade machines, but their surging popularity prompted a Time Magazine cover story in January 1982 with a cringeworthy warning: “GRONK! FLASH! ZAP! Video Games are Blitzing the World!”
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If this sounds like Big Boomer Energy, that’s because Baby Boomers were between 20 and 40 years old at the time and represented the dominant group of consumers. Media panic about gaming addiction depicted arcades as depraved places for lowlifes. Meanwhile, an oversaturation of at-home consoles and a parade of middling games led the entire American game industry to crash in 1983.
Nintendo pretty much single-handedly saved gaming with the NES (see on Amazon) back in 1985, and pop culture has never the same. Originally released in Japan as the Famicom (“Family Computer”), the NES is a redesign specifically tailored to western markets. Instead of a video game console, it was branded as an “Entertainment System” with a “Control Deck” that used “Game Paks.”
A risky bet
“It started with a phone call in 1981,” NES creator Masayuki Uemura told author and reporter Matt Alt in 2019, “President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges. He always liked to call me after he’d had a few drinks, so I didn’t think much of it. I just said, ‘Sure thing, boss,’ and hung up. It wasn’t until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, ‘That thing we talked about—you’re on it?’ that it hit me: He was serious.”
Uemura, who had originally been poached from Sharp to develop light-gun technology for toys at Nintendo, then spent six months deconstructing and reverse-engineering rival consoles like the Atari 2600 and Magnavox to study the circuitry. The 8-bit Famicom he designed proved more powerful than its competitors, and the toy-like color scheme was hand-picked by a scarf that Nintendo President Yamauchi liked (the same red and white Mario wears on the cover of Super Mario Bros.). It helps that in 1984, Japanese legislators modified an act regulating entry to places like bars and casinos to include arcades out of concern that it impacted “public morals.” Younger Japanese had to resort to home consoles instead, so the Famicom came at the perfect time for it to boom.
Famicom games on display at Tokyo used game store Super Potato.Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg (Getty Images)
To capitalize on the American market, however, required a totally different approach—one that would pay off big-time.
In a lecture at New York University in 2015, Uemura said the front-loading design of the NES was inspired by VCRs, a booming form of at-home entertainment in America at the time. The Game Pak cartridges are 5.25 x 4.75 x 0.75 inches, with a considerable amount of heft to them, and the simple, boxy grey design is nothing short of iconic. They slide into the front of the system, and then the user has to press the cartridge down so its brass-plated nickel connectors hit the cartridge slot’s connector pins. Frequent use actually wears down the pins, which can lead to a flawed connection.
For years, gamers propagated the myth that blowing in the Game Paks to clear out dust would solve this problem, which instead exacerbated it due to the moisture in their breath. Still, sliding the paks in, pressing them down, pressing them again, pulling them out, blowing in them, and repeating the process felt like a game unto itself.
The console’s most memorable and successful accessories was the NES Zapper, a light gun that launched alongside the console in America. “America loves guns,” Uemura said when talking about how Nintendo marketed the NES in the west. Most of us had the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt dual cartridge and delighted in blasting ducks while that gleeful dog retrieved their bodies. For your typical millennial gamer, the Nintendo Entertainment System served as the primary gateway into a lifelong hobby that never let up. I have fond memories playing The Legend of Zelda with my grandmother. She would’ve loved Tears of the Kingdom.
The origin of the classics
Take one look at Nintendo’s biggest releases in the last couple years, and you can trace many of them all back to the NES: Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Fire Emblem.
By 1990, Nintendo had seized more than 90 percent of the U.S. video game market, thanks in no small part to a rigid third-party licensing agreement that still serves as a major industry precedent. Game developers that wanted to publish games for the NES had to agree to an exclusive licensing deal that restricted them from porting games to other consoles. Nintendo also directly approved each game to ensure a certain standard of quality.
Konami, Capcom, Taito, and Namco all participated in this and remain prominent developers even today. Castlevania fan? Thank Nintendo and the NES for that. Even Square and Enix saw great success putting Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest on the NES. Now, 20 years after the companies merged into Square Enix, both franchises are still going strong.
Photo: Reddit
Despite all its success and rapid sales over a few short years, the NES doesn’t even break the top 10 best-selling video game consoles of all time at roughly 62 million units to date — even the widely panned PlayStation Portable sold more over time — but Nintendo’s breakthrough home console remains arguably one of the most important pieces of tech ever created.
“When console games were popularized and presented to everyone, it felt like we were all exploring a new frontier of dreams together,” Masayuki Uemura told Used Games magazine in 2000. “Although some people may occasionally have wasted their money on a bad game here or there, both creators and players were obsessed with games then. I believe there’s still wonder to be found in that older generation of games.”
He was right. The NES Classic Edition — a dedicated emulator featuring 30 NES classics — rolled out from late 2016 into 2017 with many of the 2.3 million units selling out immediately. The 2018 relaunch saw similar demand.
The lasting legacy of the NES, however, lies with the Nintendo Switch which has sold more than 129 million units to date. With patents for what could be the successor to the Nintendo Switch, now’s as good a time as any to remember and appreciate what the Nintendo Entertainment System did for gaming 38 years ago.
Nintendo is registering several new patents from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that are extremely broad, to the point where they seem unreasonable for other developers to be beholden to.
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Automaton, a gaming website that focuses on Japanese games like Zelda, has a roundup of the 32 patents Nintendo put forth. Some of them are specific to Link’s latest adventure, including things like Riju’s lightning ability, which lets the player target enemies with a bow and bring down a lighting strike wherever the arrow lands. The weirder ones are related to baseline game design and coding that applies to plenty of other video games on the market. One of the hopeful patents relates to the physics of a character riding on top of a moving vehicle and reacting dynamically to it in a realistic manner.
The distinction, according to Automaton’s translation of Japanese site Hatena Blog user nayoa2k’s post on the matter, is down to how Tears of the Kingdom codes these interactions. Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games. The two are functionally the same, but given that plenty of video games displayed characters who can walk around on top of moving vehicles, it’s highly unlikely this kind of approach hasn’t been utilized before.
On top of trying to patent the tech, Nintendo seeks to patent the loading screen that shows up when the player is fast-traveling across Hyrule. This specifically refers to the screen that shows the map transition from the player’s starting point to their destination. Sure, that’s pretty specific and not something every game utilizes, but it’s still such a general concept that it feels almost petty to patent it when it’s hardly an iconic draw of Tears of the Kingdom.
It’s not uncommon for game developers to try to patent mechanics and features. One of the most famous examples is when Bandai Namco had a patent on loading screen mini-games, which finally ended in 2015.
Who knows if these patents actually go anywhere? But when game design concepts are gatekept like this, it only leads to a loss of innovation for other devs. Though these specific patents are small in the grand scheme of things, they can be a slippery slope for things like WB patenting Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System, which should be in more games.
Some retro gaming enthusiasts are so preoccupied with what they could build, they won’t stop to question if they should. One such diabolical maker has combined his love of retro consoles with his expertise in 3D printing and robotics to build the NESdestroyer: a repurposed NES console shell with a fully mobile, circular-saw-equipped combat robot inside. It is a delightful work of destructive art.
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Having previously built fabulous creations such as the world’s fastest Roomba and an aquatic drone with a first-person camera controlled via head-tracking, Australian maker Electrosync’s latest creation is likely to inspire fear in the hearts of Sega Master System owners. Featuring a dangerous blade capable of easily slicing through flesh, watermelons, and beer cans, Electrosync’s NESdestroyer is a mechanical death machine you can’t help but fall in love with. Observe, from start to finish, the birth of this beauty via his YouTube channel:
Electrosync
Inspired by his love of the great sport of competitive combat robotics, Electrosync saw fit to do what might make more than a few retro gamers squirm: dice up and repurpose an actual Nintendo Entertainment System shell to serve as the suit of armor for a battle-ready robot. Its high-speed blade inspires dread, but it’s also cute as hell, especially in this video from Electrosync’s Instagram featuring delicate acoustic guitar played over motorized carnage.
Isn’t it adorable?
Built for “exhibition matches” in the BattleBots TV show’s beetleweight class (for robots at three pounds, or 1.36 kilograms), the entire original guts of the NES console had to go to make way for conversion into a combat machine. The actual robotic parts were made of repurposed parts themselves, including a pulley from a 3D printer, and a motor Electrosync salvaged from a drone he crashed.
Once built and ready for fighting, Electrosync sicced his creation on a watermelon, a fake NES game, and a can of Australian beer (Victoria Bitter). While the NES cartridge’s plastic proved an unbeatable foe (causing the blade’s motors to jam up), NESdestroyer made quick, messy, gory work of the beer and watermelon.
Electrosync has also teased that more is to come. Describing the fruit and beer as mere “training,” he closes his video by saying the NESdestroyer’s next challenge will be the Nintendo Entertainment System’s arch nemesis: The Sega Master System. This will be a fight for the ages.
Electrosync has made the design files for the NESdestroyer available on his Patreon, should you harbor ambitions of destruction yourself.
Do you ever wish you could reacquire the games you once had? And not just copies of the same ones, but the very discs or cartridges you used? Well, the Named Cassette Museum in Tokyo is making that very thing a reality for many gamers: reuniting those who once wrote their names, addresses, or other personal identifying information on Famicom cassettes (and those from other consoles) with their old games.
For Junji Seki, the director of the Named Cassette Museum, collecting Famicom cassettes started out as a hobby. But whereas many collectors might not be too thrilled about discovering a potentially valuable game with someone’s name scrawled on it, Seki saw a different kind of value: Reuniting folks with the very cartridges that they once lost and learning the story behind them. Seki started the museum in 2015, all to document the history of these individual Famicom cassettes and to bring some happiness into the lives of gamers who had long lost (and likely given up hope of finding) their old games.
The museum has a few requirements if you spot a cassette you think was once yours: You must let the director deliver the game by hand, you must buy it (for a price of your choice), and you must let the museum document the story on its website to learn a bit about the history, how the cassette might’ve been lost, and any particular memories of the game.
It’s not just personal stories. In a translated interview with Mirai-idea.jp, Seki says that , personally marked-up games tell a story about the time they were acquired and used. “If you look at [a] cassette“that says ‘110 yen,’ it’s probably when the 3 percent consumption tax was introduced” in 1989. Seki is also interested in deciphering what certain handwriting might mean, why certain letters are capitalized and others aren’t.
Seki doesn’t just collect games either. As the president of game studio Happymeal, he’s also a developer. And the experience of the Named Cassette Museum directly inspires the games he makes. One such game, Ise-Shima Mystery Guide: Fake Black Pearl (which received a Japan-only release on the Nintendo Switch) is “a reproduction of the atmosphere of the Famicom era,” according to a translation from Seki.
As someone who once had many physical games that are now long lost to time, the idea of once again getting to see or hold such relics of days gone is pretty exciting; collecting old games can become a pricey endeavor, but when it tells the story of the gamer who once enjoyed the worlds contained inside the plastic and the tech, well it’s hard to put a price on that. And when you consider the wide expanse of streaming and on-demand gaming services like Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, efforts to save our physical connections with games we love and grew up with are even more important.
