In 1983, the video game industry collapsed. Retailers lost faith, consumers lost interest, and billions of dollars evaporated. Then Nintendo arrived from Japan — and brought gaming back from the dead.
The Story
The crash of 1983 was brutal. Atari had flooded the market with terrible games — most notoriously a disastrous port of E.T. — and consumers simply stopped buying. Retailers were so burned that they refused to stock video game products at all.
Nintendo launched the Famicom (Family Computer) in Japan in July 1983, right as the crash was happening in America. By the time they were ready to bring it to the US in 1985, they had to completely rebrand it. They called it the Nintendo Entertainment System — because calling it a "game console" was essentially radioactive.
They even designed a cartridge loading mechanism that looked more like a VCR than a game machine, specifically to reassure nervous retailers. They offered to let stores display it risk-free, taking back unsold units.
Then Super Mario Bros. arrived. And everything changed.
Mario's world — colorful, imaginative, perfectly tuned — showed millions of people what video games could be. The NES went on to sell over 61 million units worldwide, spawning franchises like Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, and Final Fantasy that are still alive today.
Nintendo also introduced the "Seal of Quality" — every licensed NES game required Nintendo's approval. This prevented the shovelware disaster that had killed Atari, and established the publisher certification model that every gaming platform still uses.
"Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock and roll."— Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda
Key Specs
Fun Facts
Nintendo originally approached Atari to distribute the Famicom in the US — talks collapsed over a licensing dispute.
The cartridge blow trick (blowing into cartridges to fix them) actually didn't work — but everyone believed it did.
Miyamoto designed Mario to be easy to animate: the cap avoided drawing hair, the mustache avoided drawing a mouth.
Over 700 officially licensed games were released for the NES in North America alone.
Legacy
The NES didn't just revive video games — it defined what gaming meant for an entire generation. The franchises born on this little gray box are still among the most valuable intellectual properties in entertainment.