Where were you in 1985?  If you were part of the Nintendo SWAT Team, then you were in New York City working hard to give the brand new Nintendo Entertainment System (with Zapper and Robotic Operating Buddy) a healthy kickstart into the marketplace.  Join Frank Cifaldi over at 1UP as he explores what the small team made up of key members of Nintendo's American operation had to do to get the NES into stores and into our hearts.  This is the NES's origin story told by those who were there in the trenches when everybody around them said to pack it up and go home.

By day, members of the "SWAT team" went out to selected stores in the greater New York and New Jersey area -- all 500 of them, give or take -- to set up NES demo stations using James' displays. The stores were not often happy to see them.

"You'd have the floor sales people who are rolling their eyes, or the manager coming down and saying, 'Somebody told me I've got to sell this crap,'" remembered Phillips.

"I remember one woman coming up to me, and I don't know what sparked her to do this, but she came up to me and said, 'Nintendo. That's a Japanese company, right?' And I said 'Yeah! Yeah, it is, but we're actually from--' and I started doing my merry little jingle. And she goes, 'I hope you FAIL!'"

"I guess I was totally oblivious to the kind of nationalistic fervor over trade imbalance and all of that stuff."

At night, the staff would regroup at the warehouse, have a quick dinner, prepare the stock for the next day, and then race back out to do store demos late into the night.

"It was quite an experience," said James. "It was probably the longest and hardest I ever worked consecutive days in my life."

I've read bits and pieces of this story over the years, but this is the first time I've seen it compiled into a single cohesive narrative.  It's a fascinating story and shows just how many stars had to align properly at the right time in order for the NES to succeed.  Just think; if enough of these events had gone wrong and things had turned out differently, PTB would probably be about television shows instead of video games.