The Nintendo Entertainment System (North America, Europe, and Australia)
The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, is an 8-bit video game console released by Nintendo in North America, Europe and Australia. In Japan and South Korea it is known as the Nintendo Family Computer (任天堂ファミリーコンピュータ), or Famicom (ファミコン). The most successful gaming console of its time in Asia and North America, where it helped revitalize the video game industry following the video game crash of 1983, and set the standard for subsequent consoles in everything from game design (the first modern platform game, Super Mario Bros., was the system's first "killer app") to business practices. The NES was the first console for which the manufacturer openly courted third-party developers.
This article is specifically about the history of the console. For a more general overview of the system itself, please see the main Nintendo Entertainment System article.
The Nintendo Family Computer
The Nintendo Family Computer (Japan)
The video game market experienced a period of rapid growth and unprecedented popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consoles such as the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision proved to be wildly popular, and many third party developers arose in their wake to exploit the growing industry. Nintendo was one such development studio, and, by 1982 had found success with a number of arcade games, such as Donkey Kong, which was in turn ported to, and packaged with, the Colecovision console in North America. Around this time, Nintendo announced their intentions to produce their own console hardware. Spearheaded by Masayuki Uemura, Nintendo's R&D2 team had been secretly working on a system which was originally intended to include a 16-bit CPU and a floppy disk drive, and would retail for an average for $75-100 USD. However, these original specifications proved too unrealistic, and the final product was substantially scaled back: launched in 1983, the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) was an 8-bit machine that was limited to cartridge-based games.
The Famicom was released in Japan on July 15, 1983 for 14,800 yen. Among the launch titles for this console were Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, and Popeye. The console itself was intentionally designed to resemble a toy. Its bright red and white color scheme and two hardwired controllers were unusual, though not unprecedented, for consoles of this era. In order to accommodate add-on peripherals, the system included a 15-pin expansion port which could be used to attach a light gun, Power Pad, keyboard for BASIC programming, and other specialized controllers. Many such devices were produced for the console, though many of them, such as a karaoke machine, true 3D glasses, and the Famicom Disk System, which incorporated the floppy drive dropped from the original specifications, were never released outside of Japan.
During its first year, many criticized the Famicom as unreliable, prone to programming errors and rampant freezing. Nintendo soon recalled all sold Famicom systems, and temporarily suspended production of the system while these concerns were addressed. The Famicom was subsequently reissued with a new motherboard. Following this, the Famicom's popularity soared, easily outselling its primary competitor, the Sega Master System. About 470,000 units were sold in 1983, and 1.65 million were sold in 1984.
The NES goes international
The title screen of Super Mario Bros. has gone down in video game history.
Bolstered by its success in Japan, Nintendo soon turned its attention to the larger American market. However, in the wake of the video game crash of 1983-1984, many American pundits viewed video games as a fad which had already run its course. As a new console manufacturer, Nintendo had to convince a skeptical public to embrace its system. To this end, Nintendo entered into negotiations with Atari to release the Famicom under Atari's name as the name "Nintendo Enhanced Video System." This deal eventually fell through, and Atari decided to concentrate on its own 8-bit console, the Atari 7800, once again leaving Nintendo on its own.
In June 1985, Nintendo presented its console, renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to skeptical gamers and industry insiders. As part of its strategy to win over their potential critics, Nintendo promised to buy back any unsold consoles from retailers. Nintendo sought to distance its product from the traditional American video game system: the new name emphasized that the broader entertainment potential of the system, one which used "packs" as opposed to the traditional "cartridge" (a technically meaningless distinction). The console itself was completely redesigned, losing the hard-wired controllers and opting for a front loading cartridge slot which would hide the inserted cartridge from view. A new, more subdued gray case served to make the unit much less "toy-like" in the eyes of its designers. Unfortunately, the revisions had the side-effect of making the NES more prone to breakdown, as the loading mechanism became notorious for slowly failing, requiring gamers to use a variety of methods of getting their games to run properly (such as blowing on the contacts, partially inserting the cartridges, etc.) The root cause of many of the problems is the 72-pin connector that seats the cartridge. Replacing this connector, although not officially condoned by Nintendo, restores many "dead" NES units to near-new condition. There are wide variety of alternate sources for this connector (some have even reported getting them straight from Nintendo) and the replacement is a fairly simple operation.
On the other hand, and again as a side-effect of the video game crash, it was clear that for the NES to succeed in the American market, it could not be seen exclusively as a gaming system. Many major American retailers had seriously cut back, or stopped entirely, their sales of such devices. To reach these places, Nintendo again chose to distance itself from other game developers. As part of this strategy, the NES unveiling at CES included R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy), a plastic robot that connected to the NES and was moved around as part of an on-screen game. R.O.B. convinced retailers that the NES' possibilities went far beyond traditional video game systems, and helped to gain support among toy stores willing to take a chance on Nintendo's product. Finally, Nintendo hired Worlds of Wonder , makers of Laser Tag and Teddy Ruxpin, to handle the NES's marketing.
Nintendo released its system in the United States in 1985 to test markets in New York City, where its 100,000 systems quickly sold out. A nationwide release soon followed, coming in two different packages: a full-featured "Deluxe Set" which came packaged with the R.O.B., the Zapper light gun, two game controllers, and two games (Duck Hunt, and Gyromite), available for $249 USD, as well as a scaled-down "Action Set," which omitted the R.O.B. and Gyromite, and added Super Mario Brothers, and was sold for only $199. While the NES would ultimately meet with unprecedented success, R.O.B., despite its role in building retailer support for the system, was already failing in Japan, and did not fare much better in the U.S. Only two games, Gyromite and Stack-up, were ever produced for the unit.
The NES was also released in Europe, where it received a much less enthusiastic response from European gamers. A latecomer to the market, many third party publishers went with the technically superior Sega Master System, and Nintendo lagged in market and retail penetration. The NES did outsell the Master System in Australia, although by a much smaller margin than it did in North America.
Never officially released by Nintendo in Russia, an unlicensed third-party hardware clone named the Dendy Junior was produced in the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Aesthetically, it was an exact duplicate of the original Famicom, with only the color scheme and labels changed to reflect its different name. In addition, the hardwired controllers of the original console were omitted in favor of removable controllers which connect to the front of the unit using DB-9 serial connectors, identical to those used in the Atari 2600 and the Atari 8-bit family of computers.
The later years (1987-1995)
The redesigned AV Famicom/NES 2 was more compact than its predecessors, and was modeled after the Super Nintendo Entertainment System
The successful launch of the NES catapulted Nintendo to the forefront of the video game industry. For the remainder of the 1980s, Nintendo was the undisputed king of home video games. Buoyed by the success of the system, NES game packs were similarly smashing sales records: Super Mario Bros. 3, released in 1989, would gross well over $500 million, selling over 7 million copies in America and 4 million copies in Japan, making it the most successful home video game in history. In 1990 the NES had reached a larger user base in the United States than any previous console, easily surpassing the previous record set by the Atari 2600 in 1982. Reaping the benefits of that success, in that same year Nintendo surpassed Toyota as Japan's most successful corporation. By the end of its production run, over 20 million NES units had sold in the U.S. alone, outselling its primary competitors, the Atari 7800 and the Sega Master System in North America by a wide margin. The NES could be found in more than a third of all households in America and Japan.
In 1989, Sega released the Sega Mega Drive (renamed the Genesis in North America) in Japan. When this proved technologically superior to the Famicom, Nintendo saw their market share start to erode. Nintendo responded in the form of the Super Famicom (Super NES in North America), the Famicom's 16-bit successor, in 1991. Although Nintendo announced their intention to continue to support the Famicom alongside their newer console, more and more gamers and developers flocked to the newer offering, and the original Famicom's decline accelerated.
A redesigned Famicom, called the AV Famicom, was released in Japan in 1993. The original Famicom hardware featured an RF modulator output plug, but by the early 1990s, more and more Japanese television sets had dropped RF jacks in favor of superior quality RCA composite output. The AV Famicom replaced the original model's RF modulator plug with RCA composite AV cables, eliminated the hardwired controllers, and included a new, more compact case design. Retailing for ¥4,800 to ¥7,200 (equivalent to approximately $42 to $60 USD), the AV Famicom remained in production for almost a decade before being finally discontinued in 2003. In North America a new NES model (called the NES 2) was also released, using the same design as the AV Famicom. Unlike the AV Famicom, which featured only AV output, the NES 2 omitted the RCA composite output that had been included in the NES since its initial American release, and sported only RF output capabilities.
After a full decade of production, the NES was formally discontinued in the U.S. in 1995. The NES had survived for a long time, and 50 million consoles and more than 350 million games had been sold in all. The NES has been credited with resurrecting the video game market after the disaster of the video game crash of 1983, an event which has not since been equaled.
The NES after 1995
The NES was in popular decline from 1991-1995, with the Sega Genesis and Nintendo's own Super Nintendo Entertainment System eating away at its market share, and next-generation CD-ROM-based systems on the horizon. However, even though the NES was discontinued in North America in 1995, it had left the mark of many millions of game cartridges. The secondhand market - video rental stores, Goodwill, yard sales, flea markets, games repackaged by Game Time Inc. / Game Trader Inc. and sold at retail stores such as K-Mart - was burgeoning. Parallel to, or perhaps because of this, many people began to rediscover the NES around this time, and by 1997, many older NES games were becoming popular with collectors.
At the same time, something else was happening: computer programmers who were also NES enthusiasts began to develop emulators capable of reproducing the internal workings of the NES on modern personal computers. When paired with a ROM image, a bit-for-bit copy of a NES cartridge's program code, the games could be played on a computer. Illegally copied ROMs were traded on various BBSs around the country, and as it became more popular and accessible, on the Internet. ROMs were hard to come by, and emulators were often plagued by bugs - sometimes they were designed to play one specific game.
However, emulation provided access to many rare and hard to find games that otherwise would have been lost. This provided gamers with a much wider selection than ever would have been possible with the original console. Emulators also came with a variety of built in functions that changed the gaming experience, such as save states that allowed the player to save at an exact spot in the game and resume later at that exact spot.
On April 2, 1997, Bloodlust Software released NESticle 0.2 - an emulator that was remarkably stable, compatible, and easy to use by the standards of its day (the product, according to its creator Sardu, of "two weeks of boredom") and can be said to have revolutionized the game emulation scene, spawning many imitators and competitors. After this, emulators quickly became more refined and ROMs more easily available, which brought more people into NES emulation, which in turn served as a catalyst for further development, both for NES and other console emulators.
Nintendo did not take kindly to these developments and became one of the most vocal opponents of ROM trading. Nintendo and their supporters claim that ROM trading represents little more than blatant software piracy. Proponents of ROM trading argue that emulation preserves many classic games for future generations, outside of their more fragile cartridge formats.
The NES revival settled back down, to a degree, in 2000, after the secondhand market began to dry up or charge collector's prices, and finding ROMs no longer represented the challenge it had in the past. Still, developments continue, and the NES, alongside the SNES, appears likely to command throngs of fans for years to come. There is also a strong independent community of developers dedicated to producing demos and games for the NES.
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