In June of 1993 [Nintendo announced](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/06/02/Nintendo-sells-100-millionth-Mario-game/6185738993600/) that they had sold 100 million Mario games. This of course includes games that came bundled with systems, but still quite an accomplishment.
The Consumer Electronics Show is a trade show that many video game companies went to before E3 started, and Nintendo attended the summer version in June of 1993. Nintendo had a lot of games to show off that year, but they also staged a stunt where they toppled 10,000 SNES games arranged in the shape of Mario like dominoes.
Though the dominoes toppled as they were supposed to some spectators rushed to grab them as soon as the last game had fallen over, [as reported in the Record Journal](https://imgur.com/a/99TD4bV). The games were actually empty and at least some of the people who grabbed them gave them up. This report somewhat implies that Nintendo donated these specific empty cartridges used as dominoes to the Starlight Children’s Foundation, but it’s more likely that they donated actual complete games.
There was also [a picture taken after the toppling](https://imgur.com/a/H2YyVUf) that appeared in The Day.
Total (a British magazine) [reported on the event](https://imgur.com/a/NUXcWbP) briefly.
There’s even [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brqN4M7Q7V0) where a Spanish-speaking reporter interviews someone from Nintendo briefly and then we get to the see the games falling over and some people grabbing them.
I found this event particularly interesting because it seemed to be impossible to find anything about it by doing web searches. The blurb from Total was the first thing I found, and it was only by searching Google’s newspaper archive that I was able to learn that this happened at CES. I had already looked at several YouTube videos about Nintendo at CES in 1993, but none of them featured the dominoes, and the toppling video has just 250 views. Hopefully this event will be easier to find on the web now.
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by Ebon_Praetor
2 Comments
Very interesting stuff. Thanks for the in depth research!
damn that’s cool. This the kind of stuff I want to see posted more instead of “hey guys was the SNES cool..” and “hot take” after hot take lmao