There was a slight disturbance in the force today, as countless NES systems cried out simultaneously at the thought of never being able to access professional Nintendo-provided support ever again. For the past 24 years, Nintendo has provided repairs for the console that started it all, but this week a spokesman told Agence France Presse that the company has decided to end support due to increasingly short supplies of replacement parts.
In a perfect world these parts would grow on digital 8-bit trees; would be picked by blocky Donkey Kong monkey sprites; and would then be installed by magical Nintendo engineers that never slept or tired of their monotonous tasks… but this is not the case. Instead, we must now trudge onward with what we have left (a doorless, fully-working NES from 1986, in my case), knowledgeable of the fact that when our NES goes kaput — as all hardware must do eventually — we will have to tinker with it ourselves or cast into the circular “game over” file forever. Or make it into a purse.
Except in my house. We have an army of nanobots that — when not making grey goo out of our furniture — is busily assembling spare NES parts for that inevitable day the NES light goes from steady red, to blinking red, to darkness.
Has anyone out there actually used this service for their NES lately?