Happy 25th birthday, NES!

We all know that Super Mario jerk is 25 this year, because Nintendo won’t let us forget, but look who else is celebrating their big two-five today: it’s the Nintendo Entertainment System! As the birthplace of Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, this wondrous machine was an epic landmark in videogame history.

Strictly speaking, today is the NES’s North American birthday, as it arrived here on October 18, 1985. In Japan, the console arrived over two years earlier, in July 1983.

Nit-picing aside, the NES still ranks as one of my favorite ever game consoles. It was my first ever piece of Nintendo hardware, and I still recall Christmas Day 1987, when I received my own NES with Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, the goddamn amazing NES Zapper, and the, er, totally mediocre Isolated Warrior.

Happy birthday, old man!

[Via 1UP]