Debuting at PRGE: "Staying With Power"

Hi everyone! I wanted to give you a little sneak peek at what we're up to at Portland Retro Gaming Expo next week. As you may know, starting last year became the official sponsor of PRGE's annual museum. Last year's main gallery was themed around the 40th anniversary of the Atari 2600. We also had some little miscellaneous exhibits, including some Wonderswan oddities, a few vintage store demo kiosks, and some oddball prototype collections. It was our first time doing a museum gallery, and while we were really happy with the results, we didn't really have all that much time to actually design the thing (plus we were working with an existing collection, instead of sourcing our own).

This year we're going all in on one very special gallery that we've planned and sourced ourselves. The entire museum this year is dedicated to celebrating the last 35 years of Nintendo's NES with our "Staying With Power" exhibit. 

What we want to show people is that the NES never really went away. If you know where to look, not a year went by without a new NES game being made, sometimes in some really unexpected places. Our exhibit will walk you through what we consider the four stages of the NES' life (so far), with a lot of really great artifacts we've sourced from our archies and from several different collectors:

1. How the NES Got Here (1970s-1986)

The story of the creation of the Famicom and its slow integration into North America. We'll show some of Nintendo's early products, including its first forays into dedicated home consoles. We'll also get into the Game & Watch series, Nintendo's first big hit with Donkey Kong, and then the launch of the Famicom itself. This chapter concludes with the struggles to get the Famicom over to North America, including an aborted deal with Atari, the never-launched "AVS" system, its early usage in arcade hardware, and finally, the launch of the NES itself on American soil.

2. Nintendo Power (1987-1993)

This chapter focuses on the explosion of the NES, and how NES mania invaded pop culture and everyday Americana. We'll show the emergence of licensed products, how the media discussed the system, and how NES games transcended the video game media and made the jump into comics, movies, and TV shows.

3. The Torch Gets Passed (1994-2003)

This is the chapter that challenges the notion that the NES died when Nintendo stopped supporting it. We'll show how new, unofficial software was still being sold through the 90s in places like Russia and China, how the NES tech itself was cloned and used in products like educational toy computers and low-cost game consoles, the emergence of collector communities cataloging the library and discovering unreleased games, and how a new generation of creators and fans discovered the system with the birth of emulation and homebrew in the late 90s.

4. The Industry Takes It Back (2004-Present)

With the expiration of some of the NES' hardware patents in 2003, a brand new industry emerged for completely legal "plug and play" systems using the same basic hardware, many of which contained brand new NES games, including newly-created ports of famous games like Frogger! This era also sees the industry embracing the commercial emulation of NES games, including Nintendo itself with its Classic NES Series for the Game Boy Advance and, later, its Virtual Console services and the NES Classic miniaturized consoles.

I'll also be giving a companion talk for the exhibit Sunday morning at 10:30am. I hope to see some of you there! If you can't make it, don't worry, we'll have photos and video later.