Name: I Am Error
ISBN: 9780262534543

I Am Error

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.

What Hacker News says

philistineNov 2025

Nope. I'd go with anything from MIT. Racing The Beam and I Am Error were transcendental for me. Some stuff from Boss Fight books is absurdly good. Final Fantasy V immediately comes to mind.

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coldpieJun 2022

> Also, the video has a lot of info about how levels are constructed in Mario in general, which I found very informative.

If you'd like a lot more on this kind of topic, check out the book "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice (published by MIT Press; don't buy from Amazon). It goes into a bunch of detail about how the NES hardware worked and how specific games used it.

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eleusiveMar 2022

Folks who found this article interesting will also appreciate Nathan Altice's book "I AM ERROR" which looks at how the NES's various technical decisions and limitations influenced the NES's lasting cultural legacy. The book contains a surprising amount of technical depth combined with history, business, and sociology. It's really excellent.

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bigbillheckMay 2021

I can recommend "I Am Error", Nathan Altice's book about the NES: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-error

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rchoudhuryMay 2021

I Am Error was excellent, as was Racing the Beam by Montfort and Bogost. That's from the same "platform studies" series as the Altice book, but focused on the technical and social development of the Atari 2600.

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coldpieOct 2019

Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a great book about how the NES worked. It includes a chapter about how SMB1 in particular stored its level layouts.

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