Site History

Bisqwit found Super Mario Bros. 3 in the Internet. It was a low-quality Windows Media Video file (wmv). The video contained the text "super mario bross 3 time attack video" in the beginning and "Played by もりもと ＠やるきなす http://soramimi.egoism.jp/ http://homepage3.nifty.com/nura/ " in the end.

Provoked interest, Bisqwit went to the websites mentioned in that video, and discovered that Morimoto had created more videos for games such as Rockman, Rockman 2, and Gradius. Knowing some Japanese, Bisqwit studied how to play those movies, and the trails lead to the Famtasia Famicom emulator.

After finding that Famtasia could play those movies, Bisqwit discovered that those movies were not shown anywhere in the Internet, but that people would probably be interested in them. He was also bothered about the bad quality of the Windows Media Video file of Super Mario Bros. 3, so he started creating a toolset that would enable him to record those videos into AVI files and publish them.

As soon he got it working, he created the website, http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/nesvideos.html (an archived copy can be seen here: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/backup-nesvideos.html) where he published those movies together with the AVIs, made downloadable with BitTorrent.

Bisqwit spent a lot of time tracking sites that were linking to the newly created NESVideos site, and seeing what is being talked about there. He registered on boards and tried to correct misconception about the movies. He created and refined the sections on the site explaining those concepts, such as the "Myths and Facts" section.

In the meantime, he expanded the content from more of Morimoto's videos, and put an invitation for users' submissions. He also started creating a few movies on his own, such as Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros and Castlevania.

Videos from the Doom Done Quick project were also processed and published.

Bisqwit noticed Arc had formed a site http://nes.greatstreamingvideo.com/, and that it linked directly to some files provided by the NESvideos server. Bisqwit contacted him and thus began some cooperation between these two sites.

The first user submission was received from Arc. It was Ghosts'n Goblins. It was encoded and published at the same day.

The second user submission, not counting Arc's improvements to Ghosts'n Goblins, was Contra by Mathieu Pronovost.

From here, the submission rate started increasing, soon attracting now famous players such as Michael Fried and Jean-François Durocher (aka. Genisto).

The amount of documentation on the site had grown so much, that the site had to get a dedicated URL instead of a single .html page. Bisqwit moved it to http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/ (an archived copy can be seen here: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/nesv-old/).

TODO: Expand this section

Around this time, when FCEU came out, Famtasia started to fall out of favor due to FCEU's superiority.

A movie of Bisqwit's Solomon's Key was published. This turned out to be the final Famtasia movie published on the site.

Famtasia was (and is) no longer allowed.

The first SNES movie was submitted (and unofficially published) by Phil & Genisto. It was Contra 3: The Alien Wars.

A new rerecording version of Snes9x v1.43 was published and officially accepted on the site.

Snes9x v1.51 was released, but desync issues were not fixed until later.

TODO: Give an actual date.

FCEU, a new emulator at its time, was officially accepted on the site. Soon after, it was judged to be superior to Famtasia in every way, resulting in Famtasia's eventual obsoletion.

TODO: Expand the following sections.

Previously the NESVideos website had been under the domain of Bisqwit's personal website, http://bisqwit.iki.fi/. To improve the profile of the site, Bisqwit purchased a dedicated domain name for the site, http://tasvideos.org/. It still ran on the same server, but the address changed.

Also, the name of the site changed. When it was before NESvideos, now it became TASvideos. The name change was mostly motivated by the increase of published movies on systems other than NES.