Hey everyone. If you’re winding down the year (or already grinding through these weird days between holidays), do yourself a favor: grab a drink, get comfy, and make time for the Video Game History Foundation’s new documentary.

Frank Cifaldi and the VGHF crew just dropped “The Untold Story of the NES” — a 45-minute deep dive into how the Famicom survived its near-death in the U.S. and became the Nintendo we know. And yes, it’s worth every minute.

You might think you know this tale. Atari deal falls apart. NOA takes a wild gamble. The rest is history. But this documentary, built from 15 years of research and freshly unearthed archives, stitches the saga together in a way that feels new.

It starts when Minoru Arakawa’s team stared down a broken deal and asked: Can we even do this ourselves? Then come the focus groups—the kind of brutally negative feedback that would’ve killed most projects. (Thankfully, Nintendo ignored it.)

But here’s where it gets really cool.

We all credit Lance Barr for the NES’s iconic, B&O-inspired design. But did you know the chunky front-loader we ended up with was basically a panic move by Nintendo’s engineers in Japan? They took Barr’s sleek “AVS” prototype and bulked it into a dust-proof “lunchbox” with that famous front slot. Barr himself hated the final look.

Little details like that fill this thing. It’s a beautifully paced timeline of near-failure turned into monster success, packed with materials you haven’t seen before. And it wraps up with a satisfying bow on the Atari thread, too.

So if you’ve got 45 minutes to kill before the new year rolls in, watch this. It’s one of the best video game history docs I’ve seen.

👉 Support their work: gamehistory.org/donate

Trust me, you’ll walk away with a new appreciation for the brick that saved an industry.