I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer by Nathan Altice (review)

I desperately wanted to write this book. Of course, then it wouldn’t have been this book. When I was told someone else was going to be writing “the NES book,” I was intensely jealous. Consequently, I went into my reading of the text with unreasonable expectations. I have critiqued the atheoretical perspective of many of the platform studies texts, and I have an intense sense of care for the object of this text. Nathan Altice does an exceptional job of overcoming my unreasonable expectations, making this jilted lover of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) appreciate his take on the project.

The NES and its Japanese counterpart the Nintendo Famicom (Famicom) sit central in this Platform Studies series text published by MIT Press, edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. The series draws heavily on a conceptual framework rooted in object-oriented ontology. What is most intriguing in the choice of studying both the NES and Famicom simultaneously is that Altice runs the perfect gambit by destabilizing the “objectness” of the NES/Famicom from the very beginning. While it does not run explicitly throughout the text, he leverages “translation” in an explicitly Derridean sense, which again defuses some of my critiques of the platform studies approach.

Most importantly, the book also explores the NES/Famicom as an object not ready made, but rather an object becoming. Throughout the text, the NES/Famicom shifts and swerves over time. On the one hand, we have the opportunity to learn of the history of the Famicom and its simultaneously limited and yet innovative design and construction. The nuances of this device have come to have lasting impacts on videogame design and development and an entire generation of developers that drew heavily on the resulting “8-bit” aesthetics.

Altice gives us a distinct perspective on the NES/Famicom and the games produced for these systems through the lens of translation: PAL/NTSC, Japanese/English, and PRG-ROM/CHR-ROM. While on the one hand the book can feel at times overly technical, Altice decodes the objects and ushers the reader through a very nuanced and detailed unpacking of a device almost constantly under translation. The author walks readers through the construction of things like levels of Super Mario Bros., which becomes a kind of translational object for understanding game design and development practice. “Design data” is as much a part of a game as its “engine” or pixelated art “assets.”

There is a sense of contingency and lack of closure, which at its core troubles the foundations of platform studies. The NES/Famicom as a platform under translation and manipulation sits at the core of the text. Altice draws on Mark Sample’s notion of the “pre-platform,” or as I might say, the object-becoming. Early versions of a North American bound version of the NES trouble the idea of a kind of steady or self-assured product development cycle. The Famicom’s strange set of peripheral devices that made the device’s lifespan in Japan significantly longer than that of its American-bound counterpart encourage us to see every port on the device as an opportunity for platforms to swerve out of control. Clearly this level of attention tells us something new about platforms, particularly those like the NES/Famicom.

Ever present in the text is the figure of the emulator, to which members of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) would be well suited to pay heed. The history and archival future of videogames is intimately tied to software systems that they would rather classify as the tools of pirates. Throughout the text, FCEUX (an NES/Famicom/Famicom Disk System emulator) and Macifom (an NES emulator) loom large.

Piracy and ideas about software and development become encoded into the platform in interesting ways, as I have written about in my work as well. Altice’s devotion to the device makes it clear that this is a kind of labor of love...