Racketboy has a .pdf up today of the very first Electronic Gaming Monthly. The issue, conveniently for us, is a preview of the “HOT NEW Nintendo games” coming soon (in 1989). You can see them in the pic above next to the insanely retro boxart from timeless classic, Mega Man 2.
It’s a pretty eclectic list, which got me thinking. Operation Wolf? Shooter. Bubble Bobble? Action puzzler. Ultima? One-of-a-kind RPG. Super Sprint? Retro racer. Mega Man 2? Power-up platformer. These games cover many genres and appeal to many tastes. That’s a pretty hardcore list, wouldn’t you say?
What I started thinking about, thanks to the NES, is that it is never the player that’s hardcore, or even the games. It’s the system they’re played on (“hardcore” is a marketing myth). The NES was the hardcore system of the late 1980’s. No player was more hardcore than any other, because every player had their likes and dislikes, and could find them all in one spot and excel at them. This post is brought to by backward thinking consoles and history repeats.