Titles flooded the ensuing console game gold rush, eventually leading to a sector-wide crash in 1983. Nintendo’s rise in the mid-1980s, especially in North America, was yoked to the reinvention of video games as children’s media. One part of that strategy involved appealing to toy retailers who had been burned by video games—the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was initially sold with a toy robot and light gun to make it like more than just a game system. Another part involved tightly controlling licenses for games made for the system—Nintendo limited the number of titles developers could produce annually and handled all cartridge manufacture in-house.

The games were mostly innocuous, too. Titles like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and The Legend of Zelda were friendly, cartoonish affairs. Even very difficult games, like Capcom’s Mega Man series, still looked like Nickelodeon shows from across the family room. Nintendo was notorious for tightly controlling the content of its games, an easy feat to accomplish since they controlled the production process completely.

But as the 1980s gave way to the ’90s and beyond, Nintendo kids grew into adolescents and then adults. First Mario and Zelda gave way to Doom and Mortal Kombat, then Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft. Games became more violent and profane, more complex and time consuming, partly as a reaction to the kiddie-cloister of video games. Then they became thematically innocuous again, but expanded their impact to everyone: FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga. These games traded questionable content for economic duplicity. They were free to download, but coaxed players to spend money or attention for later progress.

Nintendo weathered the changes in games largely by ignoring them. It released new consoles with new features, some incremental (SNES, GameCube), and some revolutionary (N64, Wii). Then it produced new editions of existing games in the company’s core franchises. Often these games were so similar to previous titles as to be indistinguishable. Sometimes they were re-releases or re-masters. Occasionally they were truly new, but a new Mario or Zelda had come to be measured largely by virtue of how faithfully it adhered to the ethos of the series, Star Wars-style. Some of Nintendo’s technological choices were bold and original, but the company was fundamentally conservative. Thirty years after the release of its canonical console, Nintendo had mostly become a spore lodged in the memory of children who would become parents to other children.

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Today, several generations of those parents and children have two new titles with which to play—and understand—Nintendo.

The first is pure nostalgia: the NES Classic Edition. It’s a tiny replica of the original 1985 NES, which emulates 30 classic games for that system for HDMI output to your contemporary television. The concept is hardly new—all-in-one retro console emulators have been available for years, from the Atari to the Sega Genesis. But a combination of Nintendo provenance and clever design—including an authentic, full-size NES controller—have made the NES Classic Edition a hot commodity. On top of that, supplies have been profoundly limited since its release early last month, making the NES Classic Edition the hard-to-find toy of the 2016 holiday season. Speculators and opportunists have pushed the $60 retail price to $200 or more on Ebay.