NES/Famicom backstory

in 1983 nintendo went from a card making company to a home console game company. the transition wasnt easy though. in the early 80's there was a "great depression of gaming". people didnt want to play games any more! mainly because there was nothing new. all of the arcade ideas and atari game ideas were already done, and nothing new was being made. but in 1983 nintendo took a gamble and released the Famicom in Japan. to the marketers surprise it was a HUGE hit!

Nintendo Takes a BIGGER gamble!

in 1984 nintendo was talking about trying to release the Nes in america. the only problem was, gaming was totally dead here! so to try and have a test run at the NES they released it in New York City only! they sent out exactly 10,000 copies to stores all over New York (only the ones that would take them!) to Nintendo's supervisors all 10,000 copies were sold!

but Nintendo was still unsure of distributing the NES nation wide.

Nintendo is released ALL OVER

in 1985 nintendo announces the release of the NES. consumers couldnt get enough of them! over 10,000,000 dollars in sales were made by 1989! with nintendo's big success gaming was brought back and was more popular than ever before.

After Details

according to a recent search by nintendo over 100,000,000 dollars have come in because of the success of Nintendo's gaming.

The NES didnt stop production until 1998 in America and 2002 in Japan!

I'm pretty sure the video game crash in 1983 wasn't because "there was nothing new to play". From what I read there was no quality control over games being released in the early 80s so pretty quickly the entire market was over-saturated with terrible games which just turned people off from buying video games. If you read the history about nintendo and the nes / famicom nintendo made extroardinarily strict rules about the quality of games being released on their system. Nintendo made these strict rules to ensure that the games available for their system would have a high standard of quality so people would know that buying a famicom / nes game meant value for their money. Nintendo even went as far as making silly rules like allowing one company to only released so many games in 1 year on their system. That 1 year rule is the reason why konami released certain games in america under the company name of "ultra games" this was so konami could get around the stupid game limit rule.

The reason why nintendo thrived is because they looked at all the mistakes other companies had made and fixed them. These mistakes include the lack of quality control over games being released on popular systems. Also other consoles had a lot of bootleg games which is why the NES came with the annoying lockout chip as a protection device against illegal games. Bootleg protection is found in a lot of gaming systems as well as arcade boards and it comes in many forms from encryption to lockout chips to volatile memory which stores the necessary information to decode the game(s). Nintendo also added a lot of great innovations at the time like having controllers that used a d-pad instead of a joystick or rotating device. Also the famicom / nes seems to be the first system to push into scrolling games instead of having the game being contained in the area of just 1 screen.

Nintendo used to have all the best ideas and innovations for games and the systems but recently they havn't been as on top of finding the next great idea. I still think that the snes / sfc controller is the best console controller design ever. Also the 1989 gameboy was so brilliant for its time. The idea of being able to get gaming anywhere on the go that was comparable to the home system quality was pretty awesome. I loved how you could change the carts in the original gameboy at the time that seemed like such a brilliant idea (handhelds before the original gameboy were often 1 game only and very simple / boring). I look at the original gameboy as the first serious portable gaming system and it comes from an era when nintendo was leading the entire industry in every direction. Even most modders today make portables because people seem to love the idea of having their favourite console on the go.

I agree Drakon, the crash was due to no quality control over games but I think it was also due to the vast amount of consoles available at the time too.

glenn101 wrote:

I agree Drakon, the crash was due to no quality control over games but I think it was also due to the vast amount of consoles available at the time too.

Yeah I just read more about it and I think you're right. It seems companies were pumping out new model consoles in less than a year back then. If people were going to invest their money in a console they'd like to be able to use it for a few years to get that value back.

Anyway modding halfling here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

I also forgot to mention another great idea that nintendo pioneered in the console world, battery backed sram saving rom cartridges!

Here's some quotes that caught my attention:

"In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year."

"Several publishers, notably Tengen (Atari), Color Dreams, and Camerica, challenged Nintendo's control system during the 8-bit era by producing unlicensed NES games. The concepts of such a control system remain in use on every major video game console produced today, even with fewer "cartridge-based" consoles on the market than in the 8/16-bit era. Replacing the security chips in most modern consoles are specially-encoded optical discs that cannot be copied by most users and can only be read by a particular console under normal circumstances."

Basically the nintendo copy protection idea helped the market stability so much now you can't find a system that doesn't come with it.

"Most of the Nintendo platform-control measures were adopted by later manufacturers such as Sega, Sony, and Microsoft."

Basically lack of quality control was really the cause of this 1983 market crash.

But I can also understand the frustration of buying an expensive console and then having a newer model come out a few months later.

have you played an atari lately? one thing that made buyers skeptical especially with the 7800, was that the same game released for nes and 7800, the 7800 version was crap.

double dragon and Rampage are good examples of this. it wasnt that the hardware was crap, it was capable of a lot more than they ever used it for. they just did not have any QC.

Drakon wrote:

glenn101 wrote:

I agree Drakon, the crash was due to no quality control over games but I think it was also due to the vast amount of consoles available at the time too.

Yeah I just read more about it and I think you're right. It seems companies were pumping out new model consoles in less than a year back then. If people were going to invest their money in a console they'd like to be able to use it for a few years to get that value back.

Anyway modding halfling here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

I also forgot to mention another great idea that nintendo pioneered in the console world, battery backed sram saving rom cartridges!

Here's some quotes that caught my attention:

"In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year."

"Several publishers, notably Tengen (Atari), Color Dreams, and Camerica, challenged Nintendo's control system during the 8-bit era by producing unlicensed NES games. The concepts of such a control system remain in use on every major video game console produced today, even with fewer "cartridge-based" consoles on the market than in the 8/16-bit era. Replacing the security chips in most modern consoles are specially-encoded optical discs that cannot be copied by most users and can only be read by a particular console under normal circumstances."

Basically the nintendo copy protection idea helped the market stability so much now you can't find a system that doesn't come with it.

"Most of the Nintendo platform-control measures were adopted by later manufacturers such as Sega, Sony, and Microsoft."

Basically lack of quality control was really the cause of this 1983 market crash.

But I can also understand the frustration of buying an expensive console and then having a newer model come out a few months later.