Nintendo recently published a sort of roundtable discussion between the original developers of 1985's Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom/NES. In their discussion, they talked about how much memory they had to work with when programming a game back in the day, and that when they saw they had a few bytes of memory left, they'd add little trinkets here and there to bring it right up to the limit. They then compared this to an old Japanese TV show called Gacchiri Kaimasho, which, according to the footnote in the article, was a Japanese game show that ran from 1963 to 1975. Here's the excerpt:
Miyamoto
Way back when, there was a TV show called Gacchiri Kaimasho.
Iwata
Yeah, that's right. (laughs) A shopping game show.
Nakago
For example, there'd be a 100,000-yen course, and all kinds of products like refrigerators and televisions without prices on them would be placed around the studio.
Miyamoto
You had to shop within 100,000 yen, and the contestants would start by choosing the more expensive items and throw them in the shopping cart. If you went one yen over, you were out.
Nakago
At the very end, they'd throw in some instant curries.
Miyamoto
Right, right. You could adjust about 100 yen with the curry. (laughs)
Nakago
Three curries add up to 300 yen, so...
Miyamoto
They'd be like, "I bet this'll come out perfect!"
Everyone
(laughs)
Miyamoto
We were just like that! But we knew the prices. (laughs)
And here's the full article--it's a very interesting read if you're an old-school gamer like me.
http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/mario25th/vol5_page1.jspSounds like it would have been a fun show! It's probably a long shot, but does anyone know anything else about it?
