Red Ring of Death
What if Nintendo had pulled a Microsoft on “red ringing” NES consoles?
Six months after the NES launched in Japan in 1983, Nintendo engineers learned that “certain games caused the system to freeze,” according to Game Over, the best biography of Nintendo you’ll ever read. As for the malfunction, think of it as the “red ring” of 1983, only it didn’t kill your system. Nevertheless, “the circuitry on the chip had to be corrected...