Friday the 13th is a game developed by Atlus and published by LJN. The game came out for the NES in February 1989. The game…
Friday the 13th (1989)
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The Nintendo Entertainment System is the 8-bit home console that revived the North American gaming industry after the 1983 crash and established Nintendo as the dominant force in gaming for the next decade. Released in Japan as the Famicom in 1983 and relaunched in North America in 1985, the NES sold 61.91 million units worldwide and introduced Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid to the world. Every major gaming franchise that followed owes something to what the NES built.
The NES is what started my love for gaming. Between the Super Mario Bros series, Zelda, and everything in between, it was perfect. I had an ActionMax before it, but this was something new and I wanted to play it as much as possible.
The North American video game market collapsed in 1983, shrinking from $3.2 billion in revenue to roughly $100 million within two years. The crash was driven by a flood of low-quality games across too many competing platforms, most notably the glut of rushed Atari 2600 releases that destroyed consumer confidence. Retailers stopped stocking game consoles entirely. The concept of home gaming was considered commercially finished in North America when Nintendo began preparing its hardware for the market.
Nintendo’s solution was rebranding. The console was renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System, a deliberately vague name that avoided the toxic “video game” association entirely. The hardware was redesigned with a VCR-style front-loading cartridge slot to look like consumer electronics rather than a toy. Nintendo developed R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, an accessory that existed primarily to give retailers a reason to stock the system in the toy aisle rather than the dead games section. The strategy worked. Nintendo test-launched in New York City on October 18, 1985, offering full buy-back guarantees to nervous retailers, and the holiday season confirmed the demand was real.
The Family Computer, designed by Nintendo engineer Masayuki Uemura, launched in Japan on July 15, 1983, at ¥14,800. Its distinctive red and white housing and hardwired controllers were designed to be affordable and family-friendly. The Famicom sold rapidly in Japan despite launching alongside Sega’s SG-1000 on the same day, driven by a strong launch lineup and Nintendo’s arcade reputation from Donkey Kong and other titles. By the time Nintendo prepared the North American launch, the Famicom had already demonstrated the hardware’s commercial viability in its home market.
The NES ran on a Ricoh 2A03 CPU clocked at 1.79 MHz in North America, paired with a Picture Processing Unit that output 256 by 240 pixel resolution with 52 available colors, 25 displayable simultaneously. The sound chip produced five audio channels, capable of two pulse waves, a triangle wave, noise, and a delta modulation channel for sampled audio. Storage was entirely cartridge-based, with game sizes ranging from a few kilobytes in the early library to over 512 kilobytes in later releases as developers pushed the hardware further than its original specifications suggested it could go.
The front-loading cartridge mechanism that distinguished the NES from the Famicom’s top-loading design was also the system’s most notorious hardware flaw. The zero-insertion-force connector was prone to oxidation and poor contact, producing the graphical glitches and freeze screens that every NES owner of the era learned to fix by blowing into the cartridge. Nintendo’s later top-loading NES revision in 1993 fixed the connector issue but arrived too late in the system’s commercial life to define the experience.
Nintendo’s licensing program was one of the most significant business decisions in gaming history. Every third-party game released for the NES required Nintendo’s approval and carried the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality on its packaging. Nintendo manufactured all cartridges itself, charged licensees per cartridge, limited publishers to five NES releases per year, and prohibited them from releasing the same game on competing platforms for two years. The program was strict, occasionally arbitrary, and directly responsible for the quality of the NES library relative to the unregulated Atari era that preceded it.
The seal did not prevent every bad game from reaching shelves but it raised the floor significantly and gave consumers a meaningful signal of legitimacy. The practice of console manufacturers controlling software quality through licensing became the industry standard that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo still follow today.
The NES library contains 714 officially licensed games in North America, spanning eight years of releases from 1985 to 1994. The launch lineup included Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and fifteen other titles. Super Mario Bros. became the best-selling NES game and the foundational text of platform game design. The Legend of Zelda introduced open-world exploration and battery-backed save memory to mainstream gaming. Metroid brought atmospheric isolation and non-linear progression to the action genre. All three franchises remain among Nintendo’s most commercially significant properties today.
Beyond Nintendo’s first-party output, third-party developers produced the games that defined the NES era for many players. Capcom’s Mega Man series launched on the NES and ran to six entries on the platform. Castlevania and Contra established Konami as one of the premier NES developers. Tetris arrived on the NES after its licensing history complicated its path to other platforms. Rare’s DuckTales and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games brought licensed properties to the system with results that ranged from excellent to notorious. Square’s Final Fantasy launched on the NES as a last attempt by the company to stay in business, and the game’s success changed the trajectory of Japanese role-playing games globally.
The final licensed NES game was Wario’s Woods, released on December 10, 1994, more than two years after the Super Nintendo had launched. Commercial sales of NES software continued through August 1995, an unusually long tail for hardware that had technically been superseded.
Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition on November 11, 2016, a miniaturized hardware replica of the original console preloaded with 30 games including Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man 2, Castlevania, and Metroid. The device connected to televisions via HDMI and sold out immediately, generating a secondary market at significant markup before Nintendo increased production. The NES Classic sold over 3.6 million units and confirmed the commercial appetite for original hardware nostalgia that Nintendo has continued to serve through Nintendo Switch Online’s growing NES and SNES game libraries.
The NES did not just succeed commercially. It defined what home gaming meant for an entire generation and established the structural conventions that console gaming still follows, developer licensing programs, platform-exclusive software as competitive advantage, and first-party games as the primary reason to own the hardware. The franchises it launched, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Mega Man, Castlevania, are still being published and still selling. The fact that Nintendo is now doing those things on hardware that sold nearly 20 million units in its first year is a direct line from what the NES started in a New York City toy aisle in October 1985.
Friday the 13th is a game developed by Atlus and published by LJN. The game came out for the NES in February 1989. The game…