The Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition, known in Europe and Australia as the Nintendo Classic Mini: Nintendo Entertainment System and known in Japan as the Nintendo Classic Mini: Family Computer. Jesus, the guys at Nintendo really love their long ass names.

I know what a lot of you are going to say, “you’re a bit late to the party with that thing.” After all it was originally released in 2016. I’m sure many people will remember that when Nintendo first released these they either underestimated demand or they knew exactly what kind of demand to expect and they produced a limited number during the initial run which made trying to get one extremely tough. On top of that Nintendo would later decide to discontinue the NES Classic Edition five months later in favor of focusing on the production and sales of the at the time upcoming Super NES Classic Edition.

Having worked at a Best Buy for five years which included being around for the launch of the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii I knew what a challenge it would be to try to get an NES Classic with the demand being so high and supply being so low. Being an adult with a fulltime job, and an hour and a half daily commute both ways meant I couldn’t invest the time and energy needed to track one down at a brick and mortar store. Buying online seemed like the best option but Amazon was out of stock and I wasn’t willing to pay the inflated prices third party sellers were trying to get so I decided to just give up looking.

Nintendo was heavily criticized for having such a limited production run the first time around. They claimed that the limited production run was because of manufacturing limitations due to them having to focus on other products. If Nintendo intentionally limited production to increase demand by artificially creating scarcity that shit seriously got out of hand with scalpers buying up as many as they could and reselling them for as high as $500, almost ten times the original price of $59.99. Whatever the reason was, Nintendo would end up producing another, limited run of NES Classics from June 29, 2018 to December 2018.

Seeing another chance to get an NES Classic I decided to jump on it, part of it was for the site but part of it was for the sake of nostalgia. I had an original NES as a kid and I still have it and all my games and I’m pretty sure it all still works but I’m unfortunately way too lazy to go find it, on top of that with 30 games in its library the NES Classic also had several games I wanted to play when I was a kid but never got a chance to.

I’ll admit buying it when I did was a mistake. I ordered mine off of Amazon as soon as they got them in the second time around, and at the time Amazon had raised the prices by a couple bucks. Part of me thought I should have waited but another part of me was suffering from a bit of FOMO and thought that a couple extra bucks was worth not missing out again. Fast forward to a few days later and a casual trip to Best Buy revealed that they had a bunch of them in stock along with just as many Super NES Classic Editions and they were all selling for the original $59.99. On top of that If I remember correctly there was also a price drop a few weeks later so if I waited I could have saved a couple bucks. Oh well, money spent and a lesson learned the hard way.

I was really bummed at the idea of not being able to get an NES Classic when they first came out. At the time I had just launched the site and not only was I desperate for content and also understood how important it was to be first on the scene with things. I had all kinds of ideas I wanted use to generate content. My initial plan for the NES Classic would be two-fold. The first was document the actual product like I handle most of my toy and art posts, take some pictures of it and give all this backstory about it as well as give all this commentary about the pictures. The second part would be doing writeups on the actual games themselves.

When I was originally planning out my site my initial plan for videogames was to basically approach them the same way I approach movies and TV shows-after all videogames are basically the same thing as movies and TV shows, they’re a way of telling stories-only these stories are a bit more interactive. I’d give a quick summary of the games’ plots, give a description and an analysis of the characters, point out easter eggs and metaphors and symbolism. Once I fell down that rabbit hole I realized I needed to figure out how I would generate the visuals to go with my writeups. First, I thought about just taking a picture of the screen with my camera but it took me about 5 seconds to realize what a stupid idea that was. Then I started looking into how the Twitch streamers do things. I know newer systems like the PS4 and Xbox One already have the functionality for recording gameplay, but for something like the NES Classic or older videogames systems I still have in storage somewhere or a Raspberry Pi emulator (that’s another rabbit hole I fell into but I’ll save that for another day) I realized I would need to get a capture card. The capture card idea made me fall into another rabbit hole which was looking into building a custom PC, something I’ve never done before but something I thought would be a beneficial experience.

Anyway, after thinking about the logistics of how to generate the visuals like screenshots and videos it then got me thinking about becoming a Twitch streamer or making Let’s Play YouTube videos, but then I thought about how difficult it would be to get viewers and subscribers. A coworker told me he has a friend who’s trying to be a streamer and after a few years of working at it he has I believe like a dozen subscribers most of which may or may not be bots. I also had another coworker who was really into World of Warcraft and was trying to be a gaming streamer-like a professional streamer who made a career out of it. This was way back in 2011/2012 in the early days of Twitch, although I believe she may have been using another service at the time or was just making YouTube videos of herself playing games, but she was trying to buy her following by buying games on Steam and giving them out to people who could successfully recruit subs for her or would donate money to her via Paypal to keep things going for her.

I’m kind of curious how long she could have kept that going but she ended up getting laid off at the end of 2012 and when that happened she dropped off the face of the Earth by deleting all her social media accounts and looked like she gave up on the whole streaming thing. I had some other coworkers who followed/subscribed to her but those were either pity/courtesy follows because she was our coworker or they just followed her to see if they could score some of the games she would give away without having to do anything and one of them told me that when she closed her gaming channels she changed the descriptions to “No More Gaming” or something like that before actively banning all her followers/subs and deleting the channel completely. I have some theories of what made her do all that, I don’t want to go into too many details other than say that her personal life was a mess, and I’m pretty sure getting laid off was a wake up call that a career as a professional videogame streamer wasn’t the most practical career choice to be pursuing given her situation or that her method for building her audience wasn’t all that effective much less sustainable. Although given how addicted she was to WoW I highly doubt she gave up on that.

Honestly, after writing all that out and putting some more thought into it, I’m just overthinking this. I just needed to figure out how to create visual aids for some blogs and it turned into a rant on to how do I become an internet celebrity. I mean it would be cool to become a serious Twitch streamer since that would help establish my credibility and hopefully open some doors for me. Not to mention if I can get the needed YouTube views for monetization it would be nice to have an extra revenue stream coming in. I only need those visual aids

I’ve pointed this out earlier, but with COVID-19 basically having the world shut down it’s given me a lot of time to put some more thought back into my website. Aside from trying to figure out the whole creating visuals from videogames yet I figured I’d make a return to basics, so aside from pulling all of that knowledge out of my butt about the NES Classic before I went off on my rant I figured I’d also pull out my camera. I do want to point out that shooting the NES Classic was more practicing with lighting than it was practicing with my camera. At the time I shot this I didn’t have the proper setup for flashes yet, instead I was using these Neewer LED video lights I had lying around.

After being so overwhelmed with shooting things on the fly at conventions and art galleries it was nice to be able to shoot in an environment I can control and it was a good experience using those lights learning how to position and them for the right effect, I felt it was a great precursor to shooting with flashes which I did end up buying a few flashes and a remote trigger system so be prepared to see those on some future product shoots.

I may be 4 years late on this but on the plus side I did get a good learning experience and I thought the pictures didn’t come out too bad which will come in handy if I ever need to show somebody my ability to take product photos.

Enjoy!

Here’s the front of the box, the design of the box is supposed to be a throwback to how the original NES system boxes looked in the ’80s/’90s.

The back of the box giving a quick rundown what games are included. Like the front, the way the graphics are laid out on the back is a throwback to how the back of videogame boxes looked in the ’80s. For the sake of SEO and for those who aren’t familiar with what games come on the NES Classic they are:

• Balloon Fight
• Bubble Bobble
• Castlevania
• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Jr.
• Double Dragon II: The Revenge
• Dr. Mario
• Excitebike
• Final Fantasy
• Galaga
• Ghosts ‘n Goblins
• Gradius
• Ice Climber
• Kid Icarus
• Kirby’s Adventure
• Mario Bros.
• Mega Man 2
• Metroid
• Ninja Gaiden
• Pac-Man
• Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream
• StarTropics
• Super C
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros. 2
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• Tecmo Bowl
• The Legend of Zelda
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Here’s how the contents were packed. On the right you have the actual NES Classic wrapped in a polysomething wrap while the controller and cables are packed in their own separate cubby.

The actual NES Classic. If it wasn’t for the shape of the controller ports and also the fact this thing is like a third the size of an original NES you’d think this thing just came straight out of the ’80s. I wish they kept the original trapezoid design for the controller ports to give it an authentic look although I learned the reason why they went with this port design was so that people could use the NES Classic controllers to play Virtual Console games on the Wii and Wii U or use the Wii Classic Controller on the NES.

The controller for the NES Classic. It’s a bit annoying that they only give you one but it’s their way of squeezing out a few more bucks out of people. Seeing these things just makes you think how much video games have evolved over the years. No trigger buttons, no analog sticks, not even those extra buttons that made it easier to play fighting games like Street Fighter II. Just a directional pad, select and start buttons, and the A and B buttons because that’s all you needed back then. I’ll always remember that in like 99% of the games for the NES the A button was jump and B was shoot/punch/action. I was just thinking with all the crazy stuff you can do in videogames now it’s a bit hard to believe that they don’t make you play with a full keyboard in front of you or at the very least do what Atari did for the Jaguar and make you use a controller with like 15 buttons on it.

Controller with the unit plus me messing around with the focus point and experimenting with the depth of field. Plus messing with my lighting. I really need to practice my lighting positioning as well as the position of my subjects as well as to minimize unwanted shadows.

That’s pretty much all I could do with the NES Classic. Honestly, the real trick to using this thing to generate content is by using the games that are on it which I still need to figure out. Oh well, hopefully I’ll get that shit figured out soon.