A rare look at Nintendo of America in 1990 was recently uploaded to YouTube by the channel 'btm0815ma'.
This "raw" footage was filmed at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington as part of a news report. Apart from a look at the assembly of NES, there's an interview where one guy says it's a fun place to work and even a look at the Nintendo Power Line.
"From June 1990, here is raw footage shot at the Nintendo of America headquarters facility in Redmond, Washington."
It's great to see this sort of history being shared online, and most certainly brings back some nostalgic feels.
[source kotaku.com]
Comments 21
FINAL FRONTIER TAKE TWO. Bless him
This kind of thing is right up my alley. What a fascinating time in the game industry.
Interviewer: We're trying to show kids that it's fun to play games but you got to go to school to do things like that. Comment on that.
Employee: I just found this job out of college...
not really. I started as a temp in customer service that year. Was really fun for many years because Nintendo spent freely on its service. Those were the pre-internet days where game counselors would walk you throgh games like Lolo for the cost of a long distance call. It was a fun place to work with some really nice people.
Maybe we can extract some mystic, cryptic knowledge that might be better off unknown..
Like what happened to Donkey Kong Music The Video Game for the Famicom?
Look there’s my uncle!
@NintoRich Aw man I didn't believe you during recess I'm so sorry! I take it all back man I'll get you that ice cream I owe you.
This footage is so interesting...I love that it's unedited interview stuff; that's golden. Bless this person for uploading it.
Also, there's someone in the video at about the 16 minute mark who looks suspiciously like Jon...haha
I absolutely do not envy devs from that time period. I’m far too used to useful IDEs and languages a layer or two above pure assembly!
@nessisonett of course you are!
@NintoRich What a coincidence! He’s sitting right next to my uncle!
He described the interview process to me a while back. He walked in the room, they asked if he had any nephews or nieces, he said, “yes”, and they said, “you’re hired”. It was pretty gruelling, by the sound of it.
That's some pretty fancy CAD equipment for 1990 that guy was using!
I was designing games in that era, and it was very, very different from how they are made today. It was a difficult and mind numbing process of coding, and yet we were able to make games with little to no bugs, compared with today and the vastly simpler process of game designing, when they do not get it right, and have to patch, patch, patch them and still have continual problems. Interesting, eh?
I had no idea NES consoles were ever assembled at Nintendo of America. Does anyone know the story behind this and when they stopped doing this? I thought that maybe they would do final assembly in the US in order to be able to put "Made in the USA" on the console, but I've never seen a NES console that said anything other than "Made in Japan".
I have seen the edited version of this before.
@tektite_captain
If my memory is correct there was tariffs placed on semiconductors and assembled products from Japan in the 1980's. They got around this by shipping them unassembled for final assembly in the USA.
That poor guy sitting next to him as he repeats it over and over again
Ah, 1990.
The year they were trying to stop the Game Genie from making games too easy to play "devaluing them".
Nintendo would NEVER produce games that almost play themselves!
@Zidentia Thanks, I didn't know that. It's interesting to think that at the height of the NES's popularity in the US, each had to be at least partially hand-assembled.
And now it all gets srewed up in China. By slaves. What a mess.
@tektite_captain Same here, find any information on this?
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