I have heard that the Futhark runic alphabet uses only vertical and diagonal lines to delineate its letters because it was usually engraved in wood, where the horizontal grain would make it difficult to distinguish a stroke from its wooden background. The quirks and limitations inherent in a medium leave their mark on the products created with it as the creator seeks to work with or around them. This remains true in the world of technology where, despite the protean nature of software, any particular platform will develop its share of quirks, dark corners and unanticipated use-cases.
The Platform Studies series, published by MIT Press, takes on a specific computing platform in each book in the series, seeking to investigate the effects that the technical details of the platform, including its limitations and even its bugs, have on the products developed for it; how these platforms and their products are influenced by the larger cultural and economic context, and the influence that they end up having on their context in turn.
I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform, by Nathan Altice, explores how the Nintendo Entertainment System—and its Japanese counterpart, the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom—made its mark on the games produced for it as well as on the world that it was released into. (For the purpose of this post, I will use “NES” to loosely refer to anything that can play Super Mario Bros., whether NES, Famicom or emulator, being more specific when the case calls for it.) From obvious limitations, such as its 8-bit CPU, to more esoteric aspects, such as the fact that the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) was capable of rendering only 8 sprites per CRT scanline, causing extra sprites to blink out of sight, the limitations of the NES as a platform not only constrained what kinds of games could be created for it, but also determined the unique aesthetic that defined the look, sound and feel of those games.
The origin of the book’s title may or may not be recognizable to you depending on how well-versed you are in Nintendo lore, but for those not in the know, it is a reference to a piece of dialog in the game Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which the books explains as a poor translation of what was supposed to be a programmer in-joke.
The NES
There is a lot of ground covered here, with the unifying theme being the NES gaming console and the games and peripherals created for it: how they work, how they were developed, their cultural roots and cultural impact. It goes from the pre-history of the NES, created as it was with the intention of porting arcade games to it, to its current legacy, including how people continue to find ways to get value from these technologies, although far outpaced in technical sophistication by the latest generation of gaming consoles: by writing chiptune music using the same musical capabilities as the original console, by creating speedruns which treat a run through the game as something like a performance, or by simply playing the games on an emulator.
I am not much of a gamer, neither am I much into nostalgia, but the NES came into my life at an impressionable age and has imprinted itself into my psyche in a way that few other media has. Looking back on the hours that I spent in our basement grinding my way through Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man 2, I wonder whether the same quasi-neurotic compulsion which had me memorizing the location of every enemy and pitfall in every level is what now makes me spend hours hacking away at some puzzling software bug.
The game designers and developers who were able to create such entertaining games and iconic characters while working within the limitations of an 8-bit system deserve recognition. For example, I remember reading somewhere that the reason that Mario and Luigi wear suspenders is that the Super Mario Bros. team needed a way to distinguish their arms from their torso when viewed from the side, and suspenders allowed them to use a different color for their arms as a contrast. This is a tiny detail in the scope of the game, but it demonstrations the sort of creative solutions required when working within limitations, and these limitations are present at every step in such an environment, from art, to music, to gameplay design, to game engine programming.
As an adult, there is a certain fascination in peeking behind the curtain to see what makes the NES tick, and I Am Error goes into quite a bit of geek-pleasing detail about the NES as a computing platform, including some surprising reveals about the system so familiar to me in my childhood. For example, while the Famicom got the Family Disk System, a peripheral attachment allowing games and other software to be distributed as disks rather than the familiar boxy cartridges, the American NES was released with an expansion port hidden behind a plate on the console’s underside, a fact that never crossed my radar simply because it was never used; all the peripherals created for the NES, such as the infamous Power Glove, plugged into the same sockets as the regular D-pad controllers.
Do you remember R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy? It was a flashy peripheral that Nintendo promoted early on in the life of the NES, before the reality that it had limited actual use as a gaming partner became apparent—only two games were ever created for it—and it dropped from sight in Nintendo’s marketing. The story of R.O.B. is an interesting footnote in the history of consumer electronics, but it is also interesting to find out how the robotic buddy functioned: it got instructions about how to react to gameplay through its eyes, which received information in the form of bit patterns encoded as flashes of light produced on the screen by the game itself.
One thread running through the book is the way that NES game developers continued to expand the capabilities of the platform over its lifetime, coming up with ways to make games that could not have been anticipated when the console was first designed. The NES was created with the goal of porting arcade games such as Donkey Kong from arcade cabinets to the new home console. As the scope of the games developed for it expanded from single-screen, arcade style games to epic adventures such as the Legend of Zelda and Metroid, in which you explore expansive worlds, game developers had to find ways to expand the capabilities of the base system. One way to do this was by developing custom hardware that was included in the game cartridge itself, known today as “mappers” because they worked by mapping different sections of cartridge-internal memory onto the CPU memory space, expanding the system’s capacity and therefore expanding its creative possibilities, allowing for games with features never envisioned by the original designers. This innovation ended only after the newer generation of consoles curtailed interest in pushing the boundaries of what a Nintendo game could be.
The final chapter covers speedrunning, an aspect of gaming that I have never personally been interested in, but which nevertheless forms an interesting development in retrogaming. While some amount of problem-solving will be involved in mastering any game, as even an action game requiring quick reflexes also involves observing the patterns of each enemy and coming up with a strategy for evading or defeating them, speedrunners treat the game as a puzzle solved by reaching the end of the game in as little time as possible, finding the most judicious way to make every jump, avoid every projectile and defeat every boss.
Should You Read It?
I can recommend I Am Error to anyone interested in at least of few of these topics:
- The history of the Famicom/NES
- The history of video games & game consoles
- Retrogaming
- Famicom/NES graphics, audio and programming
- Speedrunning
- Chiptunes
All of these topics are covered to some degree in the book, so it will likely be worth your time if there is some mix that appeals to you.
I would not recommend it, however, if you are looking for a How-To for making NES games. I mentioned above that this book does get into technical details, and it is a deep enough dive to function as an introduction to the NES for someone interested in working on homebrew games or ROM hacking, but don’t expect to be able to take the information contained within and start hacking away at 6502 assembly. For that purpose, I would recommend the book Making Games for the NES, as well as the NesDev Wiki.