David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's so interesting. It makes a lot of sense with the way that cartridges work, too, because unlike CDs, where you know, in the modern era, you're reading a game off of some media, loading it into memory and then executing it on the hardware of the actual platform of the console. In the cartridge era, the circuitry was in the console. Everything loads instantly because you were literally playing the game on the hardware within the cartridge. It's this perfect marriage of the circuitry in the cartridge and the circuitry in the console itself that creates exactly enough resources to play that game and nothing more. The wild innovation (technology-wise) that comes out of Nintendo at this time is just incredible. They do stuff later in the Famicom and NES's life cycle. I think with Super Mario 3, the NES is old in the tooth, the Genesis is out at this point, and the graphics aren't industry-leading like they used to be. They start putting computing chips on the cartridges to help the console. Because it marries together in the same system when the cartridge is in the console, they do some similar stuff with Zelda. Okay, take us to 1983. Take us to the launching of the Famicom in Japan.…

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