Kirin's Retro Closet

A guest appearance from some other closet - this Famicom Family Basic Data Recorder is a new addition to the collection of tech historian Benj Edwards, my frequent co-conspirator on the Retronauts East podcast.

In the days before battery-backed saves or even the Famicom disk system, this gadget could be used to save custom tracks and stages in games like Excitebike and Wrecking Crew. Or it could be paired with the Family Basic Keyboard to write and save your own BASIC programs, just like on the TI-99/4A and other early micro computers over here.

Also it’s just kind of cool to have a cassette recorder in Famicom styling.

I didn’t have any super-uncommon NES games, but everyone has Mario so I skipped ahead to Marble Madness, a fun little race game published by Milton Bradley for NES (with the port evidently handled by Rare), but was originally an arcade game developed for Atari by Mark Cerny (later of Naughty Dog and Insomniac).

One unusual feature was you could set the controls to “45 degree” mode, where you hold the controller at an angle to make isometric navigation easier, as you don’t have to hold diagonals all the time.

Does the internet need another pic of the venerable NES? I dunno, but I found mine in a box from the basement, so here we are. Not even very yellow! I lucked out (and also it hasn’t been in the light much).

Also dug up most of the NES and SNES carts and manuals, so we can get some proper complete shots of those in the coming weeks.

A few better things from the 1994 software catalog I’ve been mining... It was a good time to be Square, with FFIII, Secret of Mana, and Breath of Fire hitting in rapid succession. And Nintendo was steadily extending the life of the good ol’ Game Boy with the Super Game Boy that let you play on your TV with added color via a SNES adapter, and some surprisingly slick releases like Donkey Kong ‘94.

The Nintendo Super Power Supplies Catalog, 1993-1995. I think you got these if you had a NP subscription? There was a “stamps” system where you could save on merch. All kinds of fun stuff in here. In addition to the usual branded clothing and accessories you could also get a collection of the awesome Super Mario Adventures manga, and even rare stuff like the StarFox competition-exclusive game pak. And remember those Mega Man X pogs I posted a while back? They made ones for Mario, Metroid, and other series too. And of course since this was the 90s you could also play it loud on your jeans jacket.

Nintendo flier from 1991 with some early SNES games. Pilotwings, F-Zero, and SimCity were launch releases in August, Super Tennis followed in November, Link to the Past was Apirl ‘92, and Super Play Action Football must have been delayed, not seeing release until the next August. Apparently it still wasn’t very good.

I didn’t get a Game Boy until fairly late in its lifespan, when I got a used one from a cousin with a handful of loose games - the standard Mario Land and Tetris plus some tennis game and a few others. So I never ended up buying much for the system, but I did pick up these two 1993 releases. Link’s Awakening needs no introduction as a well-loved classic from that series. FF Legend III, aka SaGa 3, is a little less popular, but what’s not to love about a Final Fantasy (sort of) game where you get to blow enemies up with your stealth spaceship?

Had a hiatus due to hard drive failure, let’s come back with Mega Man X... pogs? Sure, okay. This was another random Nintendo Power subscription bonus. Did anybody ever actually play with these things?

Super Nintendo, NES, and Game Boy controller decals from Nintendo Power’s Super Power Club, early 90s

Let’s see what’s inside the 1989 Super Mario Bros Sticker Fun book that I’m using for an icon here... turns out it’s mostly just posters where you’re supposed to use the stickers to color things in, though there’s also “collector cards” and some miscellaneous stickers and activity pages. Fun old-style Mario art, though. There’s even a Mushroom King! I don’t think he ever appeared in a game (unless he was relegated to one of the SMB3 kingdoms).

Also it looks like 13-year-old me had ideas about using some of the stickers to make an ambitious SMB tabletop game, with lots of items and some sort of dice system to battle enemies, though it doesn’t appear to have progressed past the planning stages.

Let’s follow up the NES boxes with an SNES set - this is 1991, ‘92, and ‘93, one year per row; evidently I bought a pretty regular number of games in high school. I left for college in ‘94 so the likes of FFIII and Chrono Trigger are, uh, elsewhere hopefully. Though actually this set is missing some earlier ones too like F-Zero, Mario Kart, SimCity, and SSF2Turbo...

NES time! This collection of boxes from 1984-1990 is a good bit of the collection I had as a kid, though it’s missing a few - I know I had Clash at Demonhead and Life Force, plus of course SMB + Duck Hunt as a pack-in, and I borrowed several games from friends.

In a happy coincidence I just dug out some SNES boxes and one of them matches a recent Retronauts episode... just not one I was on. Bob Mackey talked about this one. Honestly I have no idea why I bought this game; I didn’t even really watch the show back then. But it sure was colorful. Some of the minigames were entertaining but overall it was kind of a mess.

Check out this Star Fox swag. Don’t remember where or how I got it, but it’s definitely from the original 1993 SNES release.

Ah, the lengths we went to in order to make the original Game Boy viewble in less-than-ideal conditions...