Video Games innovations we owe Nintendo

Nintendo is not just any company. It is a legacy. There is no one who will be equated to dominate the video game industry as it did in the late 1980s and most of the 1990s. A whole generation grew up with NES games and even non-gamers knew perfectly what it meant to “play Nintendo”.

Here we have some gaming innovations that we owe to Nintendo. Maybe they were not the first to try these technologies, but they were responsible for setting a very high standard, and making them popular.

The cross pad.

The cross-shaped Pad was inevitable. Most games preferred the joystick for an arcade interface, like the first consoles – if the games did not look so good in home version, at least the feeling of playing must be the same. Gunpei Yokoi from Nintendo put a flat cross button in the Donkey Kong version of Game & Watch. The Yokoi version of the d-pad became a standard in the industry.

Storage system.

Most Atari “point-and-shoot” games did not need to save progress. Atari attempted the idea of a 7800 cartridge that could hold the highest scores, but Nintendo changed everything with The Legend of Zelda, which let players save their mission directly on the cartridge (and asked them to press the Reset button when the console was turned off). The idea grew in the Famicom Disk System, which returned to the somewhat simpler save procedure for The Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Kid Icarus.

Top Buttons.

The d-pad was not Nintendo’s only contribution to the control design. The next trendy addition to the company came with the Super Nintendo. Updating the basic layout of the NES control, the Super NES control had four buttons – one more than the three-button order of the Sega Genesis. But the real advantage came with the top buttons of the Super NES.

The triggers to the left and right added the option of new game combinations and technically have six action buttons (which was useful with the arrival of Street Fighter II). They became a feature of every control that followed, including the top two buttons on the PlayStation and the triggers on the Sega Dreamcast and Xbox.

The Modern Side-Scroller.

The side-scroller evolution was gradual. Donkey Kong introduced its base elements: bounces, obstacles to avoid and various ways of falling. Later, the arcade games improved the idea by moving the protagonist beyond a screen and became side-scrollers.

Portable gaming systems.

Laptops were here long before Nintendo paid attention to them, although they were rather primitive devices. Nintendo’s ideas were basically the same at first: The Game & Watch devices used basic graphics and provided only one type of game (with variations) per handheld. And so, Game Boy came.

Gunpei Yokoi was inspired by both Game & Watch and NES to create this handheld and was very well received with the Nintendo generation. While Game Boy had limited black and white graphics, the games looked pretty similar to their NES equivalents – and the Game Boy made both children and parents happy to buy a new cartridge Instead of another handheld.