The NES Isn’t Entirely Foreign to Teens

Watch Game of Thrones’ Macie Williams and a group of teenagers between the ages of 15-19 react to the original NES.

Interestingly, many of the teens actually knew what an NES is, but have never seen one up-close and personal before. When first presented with the NES, one teen’s first question was “Is that a projector?”, however, for others, when they saw the name on the box, they immediately knew that it was an NES, while others thought it was a video player or a game boy.

Next, the host asked them a series of games from the 80s, of which all of them knew Super Mario Bros., while only a few knew of Legend of Zelda, though one girl somehow got it confused with Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Other interesting highlights in the video included the teens learning how to load the cartridges into the system, blowing on the cartridges to make it work, and then actually playing Super Mario Bros.

For me, although it is fun to see how these teens reacted to the NES, what was more interesting to me is to see how far we have come in the video game industry. Many of the teens have played some of the NES titles simply because several titles have been republished on the DS. Also, they recognized many of the game titles simply because these titles have become such huge franchises that still exist today on the modern consoles.

Yes, I am now officially old. I actually had the Nintendo Famicom that was gifted to me by relatives in Japan, and then cousins from Taiwan would bring over cartridges that contained 20+ games on a single cartridge. I wonder… 30 years from now, what will we have that would be so awesome that it makes the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 look old?