Nintendo is back in the spotlight with the recent announcement of their latest console, the Switch. It’s a versatile little machine, although it remains to be seen if the South African gaming fraternity will support this new entry in the console space.

Regardless, there is no denying the impact that Nintendo has had in moulding gaming into the juggernaut of an industry it has become. Certainly, for me, Nintendo was the fertile soil into which the seed of gaming was firmly planted. Well, this is true, as Obi Wan Kenobi once said, from a certain point of view.

You see, the Nintendo Entertainment System never made it to SA, at least not that I was aware of. What we did have, was a Chinese imitation of the Famicom system, called the Golden China Entertainment System. The first cartridge I ever placed into this box of infinite wonders was Super Mario Bros. 3. That’s right, we had access to all the big-name Nintendo titles, with the only exception being that the dialogue on 90% of these games was in, what I can only assume to be, Chinese. There were also one or two tweaks in title names we had to become familiar with. A great example would be that, for many years my favourite series was the Rockman series. I can’t tell you what it was about (Chinese dialogue, remember?), but I do know that I took on the role of a little guy dressed in blue, who had to hunt down and destroy eight bosses. As he destroys these evildoers, he takes on their powers, which he can use on the remaining bad guys. Of course, the trick was in finding which weaponry was most effective on which boss, adding a level of strategy that enhanced the experience greatly. You know this game series as Mega Man. For many years, I didn’t.


The notorious and totally legit Golden China Entertainment System, otherwise known as the Golden China TV Game. Got a ring to it.

I also came to instinctively know which games would be good and which would be bad based solely on the intro credits sequences. See, I didn’t know about developers and production houses. I had to go on experience and familiarity. I knew that if the Capcom logo appeared on screen, I was generally in for a great time. The same went for games displaying the Disney logo, or Konami. I recognized the Acclaim logo as one to avoid, with another one being LJN (except for the Wolverine game, which I loooooooved!). Sunsoft also honoured us with what I still consider to be the best NES game ever made, Batman (based on the 1989 movie of the same name)

We would play these games on this cheap copy of a console well into the night. We would pause the game, go to bed, and pick up where we left off at 6am the next morning, after the requisite peanut butter sandwich and coffee combo. We’d get to the end of a game and sit back, feeling an immense sense of pride and satisfaction, enter our initials into the record books (if the game still catered for that), proceed to write down the name of the game on our “games we’ve clocked” list, and commence with a replay.

That’s another thing, mind you. Those days we didn’t finish games, we clocked them. A conversation with a mate would look something like this: “Hey Mike, have you played Battletoads yet?” to which the likely response would be: “I played that last week, clocked it in a day.”

It’s this magic that has informed my gaming journey to date. Nintendo is responsible for building a strong foundation of 8bit masterpieces, on top of which the houses of Sony and Microsoft now stand. Nintendo, through a grey knock-off product called The Golden China Entertainment System, has created a lifelong gamer, who will forever be in their debt.