The 8-Bit Revival
1983–1989- NES · 7
- Game Boy · 4
The story
After the crash, American shops had written video games off. Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan in 1983 and brought it to North America in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System, with strict licensing and a Seal of Quality to win back trust.
Super Mario Bros. (1985) set the rules of the side-scrolling platformer. The Legend of Zelda and Metroid followed in 1986, and in Japan Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987) shaped the role-playing game.
In 1989 the Game Boy put a console in a pocket. Its pack-in game was Tetris, written by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union in 1984.
The games at this station are new. Homebrew developers still write for these machines today, and every game here is shared by its author under an open licence.
- Generation
- Third
- NES CPU
- Ricoh 2A03, a 6502 core at 1.79 MHz
- NES screen
- 256 × 240, 25 colours at once
- Game Boy
- 160 × 144, four shades of green