Why the Famicom Has Aged Well Part 2: No Planned Obsolescence

This is the second part in my series examining why the Famicom has aged well. Oh boy.

This time I make the basic argument that the Famicom has held up well simply because it was designed to do so. In this regard it is a wholly different, and vastly superior, creature than the type of consoles that producers are interested in making today.

I start off with an interesting, though not entirely scientific, comparison. Here is a pile of 11 old-school Famicoms:
These are all of my red and white Famicoms, gathered here and there over the past couple of years. Here are a few relevant statistics about this pile:

91% of them (10 out of 11) come from junk piles.

82% of them (9 out of 11) are in working condition.

26 years is their average age (rough estimate).

300 yen (3$ US) is the average price I paid for them.

1051 games were released for this console.

100% of those 1051 games can still be played on this console.


I think these stats are fairly impressive, and I'll be referring back to some of them throughout this post. The first one I want to draw everyone's attention to is the fact that 82% of these 26 year old consoles are still in working order.

Compare that with this rather shocking article about the failure rate of the current generation of consoles. Within 2 years of purchase, a whopping 23.7% of XBox 360s and 10% of Playstation 3s had failed. Within 2 years! The Wii was the only one with anything near a respectable rate of 2.7%.

These were all, it should be pointed out, purchased new and not damaged by their owners (ie they just stopped working on their own without anyone dropping them, etc.)

Lets take the PS 3 as an example as its failure rate falls roughly in the middle of the 3. If we extrapolate that ten percent every two years forward for 26 years we are left with only 25.41% of PS3s that have not failed. Yikes.

Of course we have to account for the fact that Sony is repairing the ones that failed under warranty. I don't think this will make much difference in the long run though as their warranty only lasts for 1 year (though it can be extended, I doubt few would pay to do so). Also we have to take into account that the 10% per year failure rate is for brand-spanking new models. As these things age it is reasonable to assume that the failure rate will go up. It is hard to tell how much it will go up, but I think it is safe to say that far fewer than 25.41% of PS3s currently out there will still be functioning 26 years from now.

Again - compare that with these babies:
Almost all of them come from JUNK bins, yet 82% of them are still working after 26 years.

The gist of what I am getting at here is succinctly laid out in Table 1-1 below.

Table 1-1 Piece of Crap Comparison Table

	Not a Piece of Crap?	Piece of Crap?
Famicom	O
Playstation 3		O

To appreciate the significance of the findings in Table 1-1 it is necessary to discuss a concept that has been slowly creeping into the video game world for some time now: planned obsolescence.

The idea is simple and probably something you all have a visceral hatred for. Manufacturers deliberately making their products less long-lasting so as to force you to buy more of them. The classic example is the light bulb. Early light bulbs produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were quite long lasting. Then in the 1920s the major bulb manufacturers realized they could sell more bulbs if they just made lower quality ones that burnt out quickly. So they formed a cartel and agreed that they would not make light bulbs which lasted more than 1,000 hours.

Video game makers aren't quite that evil, but this sort of thinking is clearly working its way into the industry. The Famicom was made to last - and it has. Current gen consoles much less so. This isnt' necessarily part of some evil plan by the makers - the fact that current consoles are much more complicated and have moving parts explains much of the difference. The old Famicom Disk System for example is way worse than the Famicom, simply because of that bloody drive belt.
So I'm not saying the manufacturers are deliberately designing consoles to break down quicker, though in fact the consoles (except maybe the Wii) do seem to be doing just that. I think its more a case of the manufacturers simply not caring if the consoles last longer than a few years, which is how long they figure they'll be able to milk them as cash cows and then move on to the next gen.

Where planned obsolescence is coming into play with the newer stuff is more with what is generally referred to as "systemic obsolescence". That is, where something like software becomes incompatible with newer systems and hence obsolete.

You can see that the video game industry is consciously moving towards making every game you buy obsolete in this sense within a few years. I don't mean obsolete as in "outdated" but obsolete as in "cannot be used at all". This article here in which the author relates his frustration at being unable to play his copy of Heavy Rain because the Playstation Network was down illustrates the point nicely. As the writer aptly points out:

"...what does bother me is that Heavy Rain is a single-player game. There is no logical reason that the game cannot be played off-line, yet because of this reported error, I was completely unable to play the game at all."

This is the sort of thing people should be really mad about. The comments to the article generally responded by saying stuff like "Yeah, but don't worry. Sony fixes these problems quickly and the system will be back up quick, so why are you complaining?"

This kind of thinking misses the long-term point though. That game will only be useful for as long as Sony is willing to incur expense to maintain the Playstation network for PS3 users. Do you really think they are going to still be doing that 26 years from now? The answer, I think, is a resounding "no". When Sony decides (as it will) that it wants everyone to buy PS4s and ditch their PS3s, all they have to do is flip a switch and presto - your PSN dependent game becomes useless.

I'm not saying that they will do that, I don't know. But the fact is, with Famicom games (and of course all old games) you don't have to worry about that. You know that so long as the thing is physically fine, it'll work. It will never be made obsolete to the extent that you cannot use it.

Of course most new games still don't require a network to function, but I predict that within a very short time, pretty much all video games will be released in this way - your continued use of it will after a certain contractually guaranteed time period be completely at the whim of the manufacturer. It'll all be digitally distributed and your use of the game will be dependent on them completely. This is the sort of thing that I dislike strongly. When you buy a physical item, you acquire full property rights to it. You can use it and dispose of it as you see fit.

When you buy something digitally, it is more like you are buying a service rather than an actual product. The company always has a string tied to the thing you bought - such as through making your use of it dependent on a service (like the PSN) that they control. You can't dispose of it as you see fit, but they can.

I think people should be concerned about this not just because of the fundamentally anti-consumer bent all of this has but because of broader concerns related to the environment and social responsibility. This point can best be summed up in one image:
(source)

This is where E-waste ends up. Poor countries with no effective health or environmental regulations where kids scavenge the toxic components for metals.

You know what doesn't end up as E-waste? Famicoms.

You know why Famicoms don't end up as E-waste? Because of what I wrote above. Famicoms are durable and they were NOT deliberately engineered to become obsolete within a few years. All 1051 game cartridges still work on them. This means that there is still a thriving market for used Famicoms even though the things are now 28 years old. Even broken ones don't usually get thrown out as they can be scavenged for parts (hence my keeping the two Famicoms I have which don't work).

Today's consoles though? Nope. Future E-waste is what they are, unless the console makers get off their asses and start taking the issue seriously (which they, and Nintendo in particular, don't). They aren't built to last and the games they have are increasingly being designed to no longer work after a few years.

To a certain extent this is by accident - the increased complexity of the consoles seems to naturally lend them to breaking down easier than simpler cartridge based consoles of the past. To a large extent though this is deliberate policy by the game makers themselves, who have a very open hatred for the used game market and seem to be doing everything they can to snuff it out by increasingly making new games nontransferable and completely useless without their networks.

So anyway, that was a much longer post than I thought it would be. But basically it all boils down to this: Old consoles like the Famicom are built to last and will never become obsolete. This is good for consumers and good for the environment. The video game industry today hates that. It wants you to have to buy stuff again and again and it really doesn't seem to give a crap about the consequences. This is one of the reasons I never buy new stuff. Partly its economic considerations, but to a large extent it is because I find all of this very disturbing and want no part of it.

Vive la Famicom: the socially responsible console.

To end on an upbeat note, I present me latest salute to the Famicom: A new world record in console-stacking. 11 consoles.

Why the Famicom Has Aged Well Part 1: Imagination

This is a new series in which I explore some random concepts that answer the basic question "why has the Famicom aged well?"

Today's concept: imagination.

I begin by drawing your attention to the different types of label art that grace the covers of a few Famicom games.

Jaleco carts like Ninja Ja Ja Maru Kun here usually had a cartoon like illustration on the label (and box):
Nintendo carts like F-1 Race also went that route:
Sometimes they would go with an actual photo, like Mike Tyson here:
Atari games like Millipede usually had paintings:
Tecmo also used a lot of paintings, like with Super Star Force here:
These are just a few examples. You'll notice the one thing these all have in common: None of the images on the game labels or boxes are in any way an accurate representation of what the game itself looks like. They are all a very idealized version that is more the maker's way of saying "this is what we would have made the game look like if we had the technological ability to do so. But we don't, so the game isn't going to look anything like this when you actually play it."

So far as I can tell, the only Famicom game maker that was really up-front about what the games looked like was Namco, which usually incorporated images from the game itself into the label art, like with Battle City here:
Or Skykid:
Even Namco had to add some cartoon versions of their characters to spice up the cart though.

Jaleco also put an image of the actual game on its carts, but hid it on the back:
Anyway, what does all of this have to do with the Famicom aging well?

You'll notice that today's games generally don't have this striking contrast between the images on the cover art and what the games themselves look like. They just don't have to: the graphics in the game actually look good enough to put on the game's cover.

When I was a kid, I used to hate that. I wanted games to look like the cover art, but had to suffice with the 8-bit graphics and limited memory of those games.

In retrospect though, the disjuncture between the ideal (the cover art) and the reality (the actual game's graphics) created the perfect space for one's imagination to work.

Let me demonstrate what I mean with Gradius here:
The image is quite resonating. Lots of bad guy space ships are attacking and you have to fight them. In terms of the story, this is basically all the game-makers told us. There is a brief blurb on the back of the box which more or less says the same thing - giving the name "Bacterian" to the enemy - and that is it.

As for the rest of the story, it was more or less open to your imagination. You can infer a few things from playing the game itself - the types of weapons the enemy have, how many there are etc. But the actual story - why the Bacterians are attacking, who they are, where they are from, what they are like, etc - was up to you.

Most recent games in similar genres (if I may generalize) are not very good at this. The technology allows the game-maker's imagination to be fully realized. Everything is presented in minute detail. Elaborate story-lines play out. Massive worlds to explore are provided. Basically everything that I wanted to have in a game when I was a kid is there.

This is, of course, great. But it does alter the relationship between the game player and the game. New games leave precious little to the imagination. Everything is there, more or less spoon-fed to your brain. The more the technology allows the game-maker's imagination to be fully realized, the less room it leaves the player's imagination to run free.

Gradius probably isn't the best example here as it did have a rudimentary storyline, though most of that was developed not in the original game but in later versions. Simpler games like Millipede or Galaga probably illustrate the point better. Or Arkanoid - which has a delightful storyline that makes absolutely no sense in relation to the way the game is played (a spaceship that acts as a ping pong paddle in a life-and-death struggle with aliens? Only on the Famicom.)

At any rate, the thing I'm getting at is this: the human mind likes mystery. The technological limitations of the Famicom (and other early consoles) left a lot of stuff unexplained and graphically unrealized. This forced the player to use their imagination a lot.
The label art teased you, made you wonder what the world in which the game was set was like. The game's graphics weren't good enough to really satisfy your curiosity, so you'd try to fill in the blanks yourself. If you know a bit about human psychology, you know that this type of activity can be quite stimulating and pleasant - in fact it is the sort of thing that your brain does subconsciously all the time. The fact that early games didn't really develop the storylines and hadn't discovered the "cut scene" yet contributed to that.

Playing a Famicom game is kind of like looking at the world through the eyes of a five year old. Everything is shrouded in mystery. You don't know why mushrooms are floating around, just that if you jump on one, its a good thing. You are extremely limited in your ability to move about the world you are in, but those limitations make the world seem so much bigger and more intriguing.

Playing a PS2 game (I don't have any consoles more recent than that) is more like looking at the world through the eyes of an adult. You can move about freely, go wherever you want. You know why the mushrooms are floating around because it is explained in the voluminous back-story the game has given you. The limitations are gone, but ironically this makes the world seem smaller and less intriguing.

This isn't to say that new games are bad and Famicom games are good. Also I should stress (before I get it in the comments) that a lot of newer gen games are great at making gamers use their imaginations - but they usually do that in a different way than the Famicom, which more or less did it by accident.

What I am saying is that Famicom games - by virtue of their technological backwardness - offer something quite different from current generation games in terms of imagination. Having this distinctive feature gives the Famicom a certain appeal that, I believe, has allowed it to age well in comparison with later consoles that were more technologically advanced (the Super Famicom, N64 and so on). Graphics and storylines in games on those consoles were much more advanced than games on the Famicom. At the time they were released, this made those games much more popular. Unfortunately in the long run it also made them much more similar to the current gen games, with which they are often compared (unfavorably). The crude graphics of the Famicom games, on the other hand, sets them apart. This, in a weird way, may be one of the reasons the Famicom has aged well.