If you've ever opened a NES cartridge (without watching a video tutorial) you'll be surprised: the board containing the game takes up very, very little space, so almost everything inside is empty and unused. Was it necessary to use so much plastic on them? As you'll see, Nintendo had its reasons.
Strictly speaking, NES cartridges have their official name: Nintendo Entertainment System Game Pak. For practical purposes, the NES Game Pak or simply Game Pak. They are not the largest cartridges, but in cases like the titanic games of the Neo Geo The boards were “identical” to those of SNK's arcades. The ones for Nintendo's 8-Bits, however, were the equivalent of those for Japanese Famicoms, whose cartridges had different sizes, shapes and colours, but which – generally – occupied approximately half the space. The boards for both consoles, however, were very similar.
![Nes Famicom Cartridge](https://i.blogs.es/069182/nes-famicom-cartidge/450_1000.webp)
NES Game Pak, Famicom cartridge and Tetris game board for NES
To start with the basics, the Famicom is the equivalent of the NES in Japan, but technically they are not the same console: their games are not compatible with each other, since its motherboard is 60 pins compared to the 72 pins of the 8-bits sold in America and Europe. Not to mention the Disk System that we would not see in the West and that enabled the original The Legend of Zelda or the authentic Super Mario Bros. 2.
Naturally, reimagining the Famicom cartridges for Western markets meant redesigning the entire console. However, the key to this move is not so much in the aesthetics, but in when Nintendo decided to take the plunge: in the mid-80s, Europe was experiencing a fever for microcomputers and in Japan the popularity of Mario and Dragon Quest was exploding, but the video game industry in the United States was on the verge of disappearing. At least, until Donkey Kong came along.
Nintendo's success was due to its games… And its cartridges
Donkey Kong It was the success that Nintendo needed in video games and had been looking for for a long time. Now it had a license to rely on and a flagship that put it on the level of other blockbusters like Space Invaders, Pac-Man either Pong. Its console debut was not actually on the NES, but on the legendary Atari. The same applies to Mario and Luigi. The problem was that Atari was going under and with it all the credibility of the video game industry in North America.
In 1983 and for years afterward, the video game market in the United States was collapsing. Consumer distrust, who preferred to return to the arcades rather than be disappointed by overpriced home console games, had a snowball effect. Atari also had no control over third-party cartridges that reached the shelves, but it also suffered huge failures of its own.
At a cultural level, it has been established that this crisis reached its lowest point with the debacle of the official ET video game and its colossal number of returns. The reality is somewhat more complex but the consequences were the same: Atari and all the companies that had followed in its wake were also paying the price.
In this context, Nintendo wanted to have a chance, and was fully aware that it was not enough to do things differently as a company: everyone, from consumers to wholesalers, had to understand in a simple way that theirs was different. And the best way to capture such an abstract concept, make it tangible and spread it immediately was to through its cartridges.
The iconography and functionality of NES cartridges
In the mid-eighties, almost everyone knew what a video game console was, but the NES was, in practice, an Entertainment System. It may sound pretentious, but after the Atari incident, Nintendo had to set its distance and each of its titles had to pass a quality control test that guaranteed it the famous seal of quality.
However, before that symbol was printed on boxes and manuals, it had to gain validity, and to do that, a brand image had to be created. That's where the games come in, including those already on other systems, but also the design of the console and the cartridges.
![Screenshot 6053](https://i.blogs.es/04d73c/screenshot_6053/450_1000.webp)
![Screenshot 6053](https://i.blogs.es/04d73c/screenshot_6053/450_1000.webp)
Intellivision cartridge, Atari 2600 cartridge, NES Game Pak and Magnavox Odyssey 2 cartridge
Unlike Atari games, the Intellivision or the Magnavox Odyssey 2, you don't need to read a letter to knowing you have a NES game in your hand. Neither now, nor four decades ago. In fact, as we mentioned at the beginning, Nintendo called them Game Paks for wholesalers and distributors instead of cartridges. Perhaps on a technical level, the video games of the time were similar on an aesthetic level, but Nintendo was already creating a brand image to last.
In contrast to the Japanese Famicom games, all Game Paks are exactly the same in shape, size, and color with a few exceptions (the gold ones on the The Legend of Zelda and The Adventure of Link or the dice during the Nintendo World Championship, for example) and it's not just a question of format, but something else: you knew when you were dealing with licensed and non-licensed games at a glance. In fact, the way the Game Paks were introduced into the console was also an experience in itself.
The NES gaming experience begins when you hear the click
On its journey west, Nintendo tried out a ton of NES prototypes. The key to its success was to calculate every element, including a reasonable and affordable starting price for all families (not unlike the Switch) and familiar, but more modern forms with a special touch: the way of introducing the games was exactly the same. same as video players VHS and Beta.
![Screenshot 6051](https://i.blogs.es/edae99/screenshot_6051/450_1000.webp)
![Screenshot 6051](https://i.blogs.es/edae99/screenshot_6051/450_1000.webp)
Detail of the Nintendo Entertainment System patent with the slot
This process, somewhat more complex than that of the Atari slots or the later Mega Drive and SNES but never cumbersome, served multiple purposes: at Nintendo they put an additional barrier to unlicensed software and hardware And, as long as we were at it, we were able to have additional control over the importation of games or some inevitable adapters for those games that were a hit in Japan and arrived much later in the United States.
This was not just protectionism on the part of Nintendo, but an effort to demonstrate to consumers the value of your brandAnd it paid off. Nintendo entered a collapsing market, making it clear that they were not only “an Atari” of another company, but a brand with its own philosophies and its own quality standards. A whim? The truth is that it didn't take long for adapters to appear that enabled NES games to be played on the Famicom, and all of us who lived through the 16-bit era were amazed by this gadget that opened the doors to the successes of the Super Famicom for the SNES.
More than plastic and chips: art, obsession… and nostalgia
![H2x1 Metroidinterview](https://i.blogs.es/c756f6/h2x1_metroidinterview/450_1000.webp)
![H2x1 Metroidinterview](https://i.blogs.es/c756f6/h2x1_metroidinterview/450_1000.webp)
From here on, it's obvious: it would be of little use to call NES cartridges Game Paks if what came inside them were disappointments and mediocre games. In addition to the combined talent of geniuses from the house like Shigeru Miyamoto or Gunpei Yokoi, we must add that companies like Capcom, Konami, Squaresoft or Hudson Soft excelled, obsessed the world and knew how to masterfully squeeze the 8 bits out of their systems. Perhaps without the visual power of the arcades, as in the case of Double Dragon, but with the ever-increasing charm of Nintendo systems.
So if the cartridges were so big, was the extra space wasted? Technically no. The other reality is that the way Game Paks were designed opened the possibility of using special chips (MMC or memory management controllers in the case of Nintendo, as well as third-party chips from Konami or Sunsoft) that gave developers more room to maneuver. So, in those specific cases, their design was taken advantage of.
Four decades later, NES Game Paks are part of the console's iconographyAt the time, they were an element that served several purposes at once: their very design turned each cartridge into an ambassador of the Nintendo brand and philosophy, standing out enormously compared to those of other consoles, but also compared to those that tried, with or without success, to put games on the shelves without the seal of quality of the Big N.
![H2x1 The Legend of Zelda Interview](https://i.blogs.es/9a58b0/h2x1_thelegendofzeldainterview/450_1000.webp)
![H2x1 The Legend of Zelda Interview](https://i.blogs.es/9a58b0/h2x1_thelegendofzeldainterview/450_1000.webp)
The Legend of Zelda box had a hole (inside the shield) that showed that the Game Pak is gold
Not all of them were gold-coloured, but each one fascinates gamers even with the console turned off. And we won't deny it, the fact that they were manufactured by Nintendo itself gave it other added advantages such as controlling the timing of the releases, limiting the number of new products that arrived or the ability to prioritise the release of the games that most interested it. But that's another story.
Game Paks were a central cog in a very well-planned plan. Ideas that today have little room for improvement in a time when the disc format and game cards are not differentiated from each other and digital sales have won out over the physical format. And despite the fact that, like the rest of the games of the time, they were still plates and chips protected by two pieces of plastic, those cartridges never resigned themselves to being something merely functional. As a result, four decades later Each NES cartridge still has a special value.
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