The Nintendo Entertainment System
-Chrissie
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The Nintendo company is best-known today for some of the most popular video-game franchises of all time, Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing. Nintendo did not start as a video game company, Nintendo traces its history to a time before video games, to an era when film was just coming into being; it began in 1889 as a printer of playing cards. It stayed as such for decades, but also began producing children’s toys in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1960s, they started designing electronic game elements in partnership with Sharp and Magnavox. The latter featured a Nintendo-designed light gun in its Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercially-available console gaming system.
They partnered with companies that produced gaming systems and arcade machines, licensing them to use their equipment designs, like the light gun, and their games, like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. They also developed one of the earliest cartridge-based gaming consoles, the Famicom (short for “Family Computer”). Sales of the Famicom began in 1983 and it was incredibly popular (it sold 2.5 million copies in its first year on the market).
After this great success in Japan the company decided to market it in the United States. They faced an uphill battle, however, because video game consoles were not as popular in the US as in Japan. This was, in part, due Atari’s debacle with the video game version of E.T., as well as the glut of poorly made games that were flooding the market. Nintendo made two moves to assure its separation in people’s minds from these consoles: the first was to only allow games that had been tested and approved by Nintendo (and bearing their “Seal of Quality” label) to run on the system. The second was in its marketing of the console. The device was rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System and incorporated a robot and laser gun accessory, putting in the “toy” category in peoples’ minds, rather than the oft-maligned “video game.”
Given their recent experiences with game consoles, American retailers were wary of the product; Nintendo allayed their fears by promising to take back any inventory left unsold after ninety days. This paved the way for test market releases in 1985 in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The New York debut included a massive display at upscale toy store FAO Schwarz where customers could play Nintendo’s Baseball game alongside contemporary MLB players who were also signing autographs. The NES was released nationwide in time for the 1986 Christmas season in a bundle pack with two controllers and a new title, Super Mario Brothers. Retailers sold out quickly; not only did Nintendo not have to take back any unsold inventory, they had to scramble to produce more units as quickly as possible.
Nintendo dominated the video game console market through the last half of the 1980s, in no small part because of its popular titles in the Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, and (of course) Super Mario Brothers franchises. By the beginning of the next decade, however, new systems with better graphics began to eat into the NES’ market share. Nintendo responded by producing their own 16-bit system, the Super Nintendo.
Nintendo ceased production on the original NES in 1995, but the system has remained sufficiently popular as to warrant not only the inclusion of its games on recent systems, like the Wii and Switch, but also the production of a duplicate of the NES with many of its most popular games already loaded. This proved to be even more difficult to find at the time of its release than the original one was in 1985. And that just proves that, for the generation who grew up playing the NES, there’s nothing like 8-bit images and a five-button rectangular controller.