The complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System
platform, from code to silicon, focusing on its technical constraints
and its expressive affordances.
In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The
Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled
players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it
was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of "My Name is
Error," a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice
explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment
System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a
detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive
affordances, and its cultural significance.
Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice
explains, Nintendo's translation challenges were not just linguistic but
also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation.
Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first
cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family
Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the
"translation" problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S.
videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's
breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable
software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived
proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of
Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through
cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and
its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software
emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.
