The History of the
Nintendo Entertainment System
/ Famicom

Back in 1980 The guidelines for a new, more powerful videogame system emerged when Hiroshi Yamauchi, Masayuki Uemura, and their engineers began work on a new console much more advanced than the Color TV Game systems Nintendo had sold before. The new system should be able to play many different games, each stored on different cartridges/disks. Nintendo wasn't the first company with that idea, however. Atari, Commodore, Bandai, Takara and Sharp had all released or were developing similar systems. Yamauchi told Uemura that they had to make a system that would be much better than all the competitor's machines but also cheaper so that anyone could afford it. Yamauchi set a goal for the price of the machine at 9.800 yen (about 75$). At first, Masayuki Uemura thought about using a 16-bit CPU, but that would have been way too expensive so he settled with a 8-bit CPU instead.

The Famicom!

The "Dream Machine" shapes up. Masayuki spent a lot of time with his engineers looking at Nintendo's current arcade games, trying to find the most suitable key components for a fast, yet inexpensive console. At last he settled on a cheap, not so powerful CPU called the 6502. The 6502 CPU couldn't do all the graphical work by itself so a PPU (Picture Processing Unit) was needed. They met with representatives from many semi-conductor companies but most turned down their offers. Nintendo wanted components at rock bottom prices but promised enormous orders. Unfortunately, most companies couldn't afford "gambling" like that. The lucky one was a company called Ricoh, who's semiconductor division didn't have much to do at the time. Yamauchi wasn't willing to pay more than 2,000 yen/chip which Ricoh thought was an absurdly low price. However, after Yamauchi guaranteed them a 3 million chip order within a 2 year period, they agreed! The employees at Nintendo started wondering what the hell Hiroshi was thinking. A 3 million chips order?! The most Nintendo had ever sold was 1 million copies of their Color TV Games system! The memory of the new system had to be cut down to only 2,000 bytes (16 kilobits). The suggestion to include a keyboard, modem, and a disk slot was turned down because Yamauchi wanted the system to be as cheap as possible. However, he did add some pretty expensive circuitry with a connector that could send and receive an unmodified signal to the CPU. This later enabled the NES to be hooked up to any accessory plugged into the connector (eg. a modem, keyboard etc.). Yamauchi was a perfectionist when it came to the design of the NES, spending countless hours on it.

The Famicom rocks Japan! (1983) Nintendo released their first console for the home market, the Famicom or Nintendo Entertainment System as it was called when released in the west. Famicom is short for Family Computer. The console was sold for around $100 ($25 more than it was intended to in the first place, still it was less than half the price of the competitors' machines). The Famicom sold very well in Japan and became very popular but, due the video game crash of early 1984, Nintendo had a difficult time releasing the system in America. During this crash the market was flooded by mediocre games and e.g. Atari games were sold for 10% of the suggested retail price. The American retailers promised themselves to never again sell video game consoles or computers... To prevent the same thing from happening to Nintendo's console Nintendo included a software licensing program, the famous Nintendo Seal of Quality, so Nintendo would only license games that met their minimal standards of quality. Atari's fault was that they hadn't been able to control that the games from the third party developers were good enough. This was a part of Yamauchi's plan, he knew that if Nintendo released their system when the video game market was as good as dead, there would be no competition and if successful their NES would be the only choice for gamers around the states! What few people know is that one of the first companies that Nintendo turned to, for help in the American launch of their console was Atari. Nintendo approached Atari, who by then had a big share of the American video computer game market, in 1983. They were ready to sell Atari the rights to distribute the NES everywhere outside Japan. They were so close to an agreement that they actually planned to sign the agreement on C.E.S. in June the same year. However when Atari saw that Coleco demonstarted a (unlawful) prototype of Donkey Kong for their home computer 'Adam' on the C.E.S. they refused to sign the deal since they assumed that Nintendo was also forging a deal with Coleco. You might speculate what would have happened if Atari hadn't seen that Donkey Kong protype and actually signed the deal. The worst case scenary would that they would just have abandoned the Famicom. This way they would have elimiated one possible oponent on the video game / home computer market and their own 8-bit system, the Atari 7800 ProSystem with backwards compability with the current library of Atari 2600 CVS games would have had a much better chance of success... (Atari was in fact a doomed company when they were negotiating the deal with Nintendo. They were loosing the incredile amount of $2 million - Daily. The only thing that kept the already crashed company from going bankrupt was the fact that 20% of the company was owned by Warner Communications, which now is Time Warner.) Nintendo continued to search for distributors for their console and in 1985, Mr. Arakawa (President at Nintendo of America) managed to persuade one retailer to release it as a test in New York, and you know the rest, don't you? Within 10 years of the release in February 1986, the NES sold around 30 million copies in the US only, and had approximately 90% of the 8-bit market! The NES was released in Europe one year later (1986).

The NES.

The Original NES Set

Different packages: At first the NES was sold for 249 dollars in a package (Original Set) consisting of: the control deck, 2 controllers, the Zapper lightgun and the strange toy ROB (Robotic Operation Buddy), which came with the games Duck Hunt and Gyromite. Soon, Nintendo decided to change this set and simply release the Action Set (sold for $199.99), which did away with ROB and Gyromite, instead throwing in the best "platformer" the World has ever seen - Super Mario Bros. This must have been the most successful of the many different sets! The Power Set was like the Action Set but with a new improved controller called the Power Pad and a new NES game called World Class Track Meet

The return of the NES! Around 1990 - 1991, Nintendo, in fear that the public had lost their interest in the NES, released two new sets: The Basic Set including only the control deck and 2 controllers and the Sport Set, including everything that the Basic Set did, plus the 4 player adapter NES Satellite and a double gamepak with two games: Super Spike V' Ball and World Cup Soccer. In a last desperate attempt to pump life into the NES, Nintendo in 1993 released a redesigned version in Japan and later in the US (See picture to the right!) under the name, "video game beginners console". It came bundled with a double gamepak of Final Fantasy 1 and 2. This collection sold 1 million copies, selling even more than the SNES in some cities! After the success of the Final Fantasy collection, Square (the makers of the Final Fantasy games) produced another Final Fantasy game for the NES, Final Fantasy 3 (not released in the west). Although this newer Famicom sold fairly well, Nintendo officially gave up the NES in December 1994, releasing its last game ever, entitled Wario's Woods.

The redesigned NES was released in Japan 1993 bundled with this Final Fantasy pack.

To fully understand why Hiroshi Yamauchi could be so sure that Nintendo was going to be a big hit, although the outcome exceeded even his expectations, you have to look at Japanese gaming culture and technology in the rear-view mirror.

The Japanese people have been interested in gaming since ancient times. It’s even said that the Great Wall of China was financed by a state-run lottery game, which later was became Keno, the oldest casino game still played in Las Vegas, Macau and other casino cities around the world. In later times, the gambling game Pai Gow was introduced in Japan followed by the hugely popular Japanese version of slot machines; Pachisuro (Information from www.GamblingPlanet.org)

Alongside the evolution of gambling games, Japan was in the 60s and 70s, and still is, the centre for technological inventions. They developed everything from hi-tech arcade games to digital watches and synthesizers. And it is in this context we must look at Hiroshi Yamauchi and Nintendo. The world’s best-selling game console was invented by people who had played gambling games for thousands of years and also were open-minded towards technical innovations. In other words, it’s no accident that Nintendo is a Japanese gaming console.

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