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The curious tale of a Nintendo UK Hotliner during the console war era
- rattyc 5y agoI had to call them to get past the first level of Super Mario Bros 2... I just could not work out that I needed to jump on the eggs and pick them up, then trow them back. I felt like a moron talking to some random person on our faux vintage phone while my parents watched on frowning at me.
- jareklupinski 5y ago> “Nintendo Hotline, Keith speaking, can I help you?” > “Hi! Well, er, maybe… this is a bit embarrassing really, there’s a dragon and it’s breathing fire and I can’t get past it and I don’t know what to do.” > “Okay, no problem. Firstly, what game are you playing? You are playing a game, right?” > “Yes – sorry, Super Mario Bros.” first step of successful troubleshooting: assume nothing
- scoopertrooper 5y agoHonestly, if I somehow managed to endup in the company of a dragon breathing fire, I don't know who'd be better to call.
- laurent92 5y agoI find them lucky to answer by phone. By writing, customers tend to answer completely aside of the question, it seems they don’t even see the question sometimes.
- asddubs 5y agoI like the idea of getting a letter that says "it doesn't work" and then that person having to wait a week to get something to the effect of "what do you mean by that?" as a response
- dylanz 5y agoWhen I was about 9 years old I found a cheat code in a game. I forgot the game, but it was the famous up+up+down+down… etc, but backwards. I called Nintendo Power and talked to one of the reps there. They didn’t know about this one! They got my information and sent me a box with a copy of the game, a free years subscription to the magazine, and a tshirt. I was a VERY happy kid. I also used to “fix” games for the local video store. Qtips and rubbing alcohol.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThe first couple of photos are black and white. In 1990, everyone used color photographs except newspapers. Are they purposefully black and white to make it feel older?
- imron 5y ago> The first couple of photos are black and white. If you look carefully, you'll notice that in the black and white photos the operators are wearing headsets, there are posters on the walls and in one of them there is a SNES on the table. According to the article, this would place them at the same timeframe as the other photos.
- tadbit 5y agoLots of photographers chose to shoot B&W even when colour was available. Some used it purely for aesthetics. Others chose it because it was less expensive to purchase and easier to self develop. Or maybe it's just what they had in their camera that day.
- rootsudo 5y agoCheaper printer for publications as well. one color instead of four color needed+.
- mitigating 5y agoI always have this thought when seeing black and white photographs from the 70s onwards. Every photo from my family starting in 1977+ is color. Someone in film told me black and white does offer better detail in analog as color saturation can sometimes blur lines. They also told me that as a student they filmed in black and white since in color every object in the scene can mean more because of its. Like if you had a normal 80s bedroom but just one pillow on the bed was red then that could imply something even if you didn't mean to (maybe romance, not sure).
- holografix 5y agoI still shoot b&w today and it’s amazing how more “emotional” a photo can become once you adjust the exposure curve. Look at the work done by the classic photographer Fan Ho https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/fan-hos-incredible-black-and-white-street-photography-of-1950s-hong-kong/ https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/fan-hos-incredible-black-an...
- lostgame 5y agoThere was only one time I sincerely considered calling a tips line. It was this stupid barrel in ‘Carnival Night Zone’ in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - if you ever played the game; you know what I’m talking about - and I later wondered if it was literally placed in the game as bait to make you call the SEGA help line. Either way; this article was a fascinating look into that small world.
- hlandau 5y agoSupposedly, it became so common for people to get stuck here, the hold music for the SEGA hotline added a message telling people how to get past it, before they even spoke to someone.
- lostgame 5y agoI am not fucking surprised. Where else - ever - in the Genesis classic Sonic games did you ever have to use up or down to move an item? Also, IIRC; it wasn’t in the manual.
- nekobrain 5y agoOMG yes! I thought it was just me being too young :)
- SimeVidas 5y ago“This training consisted of completing the entire NES catalogue, about 100 games, in one month.” I’ve been playing video games my entire life, but I’m not sure I could survive this “training”.
- IntelMiner 5y agoAssuming it was paid training, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week 160 hours gives about 90 minutes per game. For the NES that's probably more than acceptable, many games were very short (Super Mario Bros can be finished by speedrunners in just 5 minutes for an extreme example)
- eru 5y agoThe sub 5 minute speed run of Super Mario Bros skips most of the game via warp pipes. A more proper comparison would be the warpless category, which takes a bit less than 20 minutes. Btw, for Mario 3 the 100% record is about one hour.
- onion2k 5y agoImagine how disappointing it'd be to accidentally speedrun a game on your first play.
- kevinmchugh 5y agoHow many hours do you think it takes for a player to get to the point they can finish the game in 5 minutes?
- rgoulter 5y agoSomething which is fun to do in your free time becomes a chore if you have to do it reliably, on a deadline.
- thih9 5y agoThey likely did it as a group, so together to some extent. When someone got stuck I suppose the others would give hints and tips. Still a difficult task, but slightly easier than going at it alone.
- gambiting 5y agoSo until very recently, Ubisoft call centre in the UK provided exactly this service - it had people familiar with latest Ubisoft releases, games consoles and walkthroughs nearby, answering calls from people lost or confused about what to do. It's a shame it got shut down last year, now support is email-only.
- johnyzee 5y ago“Little kids would phone up and ask if they could speak with Mario,” remembers Dan. “There was this wonderful innocence about it, like believing in Santa. We never had the heart to say he wasn’t real, so we’d say that he was busy making a new game and couldn’t come to the phone.” That's adorable.
- dfxm12 5y agoI wonder these guys knew any Mario canon. He was a plumber, and never depicted as a videogame dev. Kids would get confused, like if you told them Santa was out collecting kids' teeth or something.
- jaywalk 5y agoI'm not sure why kids would be confused by the star of multiple video games being busy making another video game.
- dfxm12 5y agoWhat kind of logic leads one to that conclusion? No related contemporary materials ever showed him creating videogames, but instead showed him either being a plumber or saving Peach from Bowser. The Ninja Turtles were famous cartoon characters. No one assumes they animated the cartoons because of that...
- jrootabega 5y agoI called the American hotline for help beating Mechaturtle in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They told me there was no such thing as Mechaturtle. But there WAS!! https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Mechaturtle https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Mechaturtle Those were the days when there was no source of "truth," and even the so-called experts couldn't help. I wonder what kind of person in today's world would have been staffing that hotline. A social media intern?
- dfxm12 5y agoA person wouldn't staff the hotline today. It'd be a computer on the other end, probably directing you to purchase some DLC.
- 0898 5y agoI remember – aged 10 or 11 – calling the Nintendo UK hotline, because I was stuck on Zelda: Link's Awakening. Zelda is a pretty big game, but the person I spoke to knew exactly where I was and helped me find the instrument I was trying to find. Even at that age I thought this was pretty incredible.
- baud147258 5y agoLink's Awakening is strictly linear, as far as video game go; depending on what objects and/or instruments you have, finding what the next step in the quest is simple
- amalcon 5y agoI called the tip line exactly once. I was surprised because it was actually my parents' idea, and I knew it cost money. Of course, it makes sense in retrospect. It was the copy protection part of StarTropics, which come to find out was apparently their most common question. In those days, copy protection of console games was rare, and all copy protection generally relied on physical artifacts that came with the games (sometimes manuals, sometimes dedicated objects). I'd bought the game used, and did not receive the artifact in question. In this case, the copy protection step happens pretty late in a difficult game. The copy protection thing was a "letter" from the main character's uncle with a code written in invisible ink -- that is, it wasn't obvious that it was a copy protection artifact. Naturally, many kids would lose it and be locked out of the end of the game. No wonder they got a lot of this question: the call basically unlocks the last 33% (wild probably-wrong estimate from memory) of a game you already own.
- phone8675309 5y agoNintendo had this exact problem when they initially released StarTropics on Nintendo Switch Online - they forgot that the player wouldn't have access to the manual: https://nintendoeverything.com/startropics-for-nintendo-switch-online-lacks-code-needed-to-progress/ https://nintendoeverything.com/startropics-for-nintendo-swit.... Nintendo had previously released this game for the Wii Virtual Console, but they included an image of the dipped letter in the digital manual included with the game.