Nintendo: Thirty Years In America From NES to Wii U

This year the Famicom turned 30 years young.

Known in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The game changing system is known for its memorable characters and intuitive controls that resuscitated a failing gaming industry in America. Nintendo entered the U.S. economy amid a crashing domestic game industry. The bottom had fallen out of the arcade market and a flood of cheap, gimmicky consoles, which sometimes worked but often didn't, had disenchanted the public.

We pick out the ten most important moments of Nintendo’s history in America and how it affected gaming around the world, and your gaming life at home.

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The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983, but it took several years, several renamings, and a complete redesign for Nintendo to get its newly packaged console to the U.S. market. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) arrived stateside in 1985.

Part of the delay with getting the NES into the hands of gamers was the crash of the game market in the US. After the success of the cabinet era and the explosion of arcades as a multi-billion dollar business, the bottom had fallen out. Poor quality games – like the famously unplayable E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – led to disenchantment with the home market. Atari’s console, home console leader at the time, crashed.

The overall game market in the North America in 1983 was $3.2 Billion dollars by 1985 things had gotten so bad that unsold game cartridges were being buried in landfill the market’s bubble had popped. Gaming in the U.S. had dropped to a $100 million business.

Into a crippled market, the NES was released. The 8-bit console branded itself as a family entertainment system, not a gaming platform. Nintendo created a whole new language for its system. No longer would you put cartridges in your video game console, now you would load “game paks” into the “control deck” of the entertainment system, these subtle changes set it apart from a wary public.

NES launched in October 1985 with 18 launch titles, featured an included controller, a light gun, and a cassette drive meant to interface wirelessly. This last feature proved too gimmicky for a wary public so Nintendo did away with the interfacing and created the final version of the NES that we know and love today.

By 1988 Nintendo made $1.5 billion, that’s fifteen times the entire gaming market from just 3 years before. Only a year after, they released the Game Boy - a chunky 8-bit device - that while technologically inferior to Sega’s full-color handheld, Game Gear, was more economical and the public was already enamored with Nintendo’s characters.

The Game Boy’s simplicity of use won over millions of users in the U.S. with killer-app games like Tetris, Super Mario Land, and Metroid. Game Boy stood the test of time, selling over 199 million units and having a 14-year lifecycle.

As the 1990s rolled around, Nintendo and the NES started facing some serious competition. Sega’s 16-bit Genesis was a high-powered console with tons of console ports and the famously fast-moving Sonic the Hedgehog.

Amid the fry of the NES’s first real competition, Nintendo released its 16-bit SNES. Eventually outselling the Sega Genesis and remaining popular for the next ten years despite its technological obsolescence. Games like Super Mario World, Street Fighter II and SimCity made it a lasting piece of hardware.

In 1988 Nintendo already saw that the low cost of production and cheaper development would make the CD the media format of the Future. It first partnered with Sony to create the device that premiered at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show dubbed the Nintendo Play Station.

The day after Nintendo broke its contract with Sony and picked its rival Philips to create its next-gen system. Starting the rivalry that continues to this day with the completion and launching of the Sony’s own PlayStation in 1994

A major turning point in Nintendo’s history took place in 1995 when, over its creator’s objections, Nintendo launched The Virtual Boy. Gunpei Yokoi, inventor of the Game Boy and Nintendo’s earlier Game & Watch systems, argued against the projects release as its monochrome graphics and imperfect design would sink it.

It did. The Virtual Boy launched in 1995 selling weakly, it was swept under the rug a year later. Yokoi was made to blame; he went on to develop the Game Boy Pocket and then retired. Nintendo lost of its best engineers and thinkers a year later when he died in a car accident.

After the failure of the Virtual Boy, Nintendo went back to basics. The N64 launched in 1996 and was not the technological marvel its predecessors were.

Starting a pattern at Nintendo of content over graphical power. N64 sales were strong beating out its ill-fated rival, the Sega Saturn. It launched at $100 less than the PlayStation making is a more economic choice at $200 and loaded with the characters we already knew we loved.

The N64 is the source of some of Nintendo’s greatest moments in gaming. Games like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and 1997’s critical hit GoldenEye 007 were revolutionary. GoldenEye 007 in particular launched a whole new genre of shooters and is the direct ancestor to games like Halo, Borderlands and Call of Duty among hundreds of other.

By the late 1990s a survey found that Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, was more recognizable to American children than Mickey Mouse.

While large and graphically fascinating titles like Call of Duty are seen as huge sellers we have to remember that the original Call of Duty sold over 125 million copies as of May 2012, according to VgCharts

Mario and his cast of characters have sold about 450 million copies in the same time as of 2012. While Mario-only based games sold 262 million units as of 2012 according to Xfinity.

During the Thanksgiving week of 2009, Nintendo sold 2.5 games or consoles per second. In terms of game sales the Wii remains a big hit, in fact in 2011 Nintendo beat out Sony and Microsoft in game profits by many billions of dollars making the Gamecube and Wii the most profitable systems at the time.

With the launch of the Wii U in fall of 2012 Nintendo tried to upgrade its popular Wii system. Not necessarily revolutionary but a solid upgrade. The biggest change being its advanced controller, the GamePad. It contains an embedded touch screen that is used to replicate or supplement the main display.

Nintendo has always stayed true to its entertainment roots that have made it such a success in America and elsewhere but now they've come up against the next generation of competitor’s consoles that put so much distance between themselves and Nintendo, graphically.

It’s been 30 years since the launch of the Famicom but the games still work. Many of us still have working Famicom and NES systems that work perfectly. Light guns that still fire and Power Gloves that still, well, look cool. Something we can't say about our old PlayStations or Xboxes for the most part. Nintendo came to America at a time when the public was wary of home consoles and they’re poorly made games and turned us into a nation of gamers.

Nintendo stock may go up and down and their systems may seem strange alongside their competitors, but not being wrapped up in their competition is one reason Nintendo has been around as long as it has. They're not afraid to innovate and most of all they love their customers and give them more of the great characters and world we've come to love.