⋆｡˚⋆☽ N E S ☾⋆˚｡⋆

If a console can give itself the title of a cornerstone and a major point of inflex for its industry, it would probably be Nintendo's NES, with a story we all know and I will nonetheless get onto in a bit, but let's go from the top.

It was the end of the 70's and an old-ass Japanese company known as Nintendo was already quite knee-deep into the industry of entertaintment and electronics, having already produced several electric and electro-mechanical Arcade games, a line of dedicated Pong consoles under the TV Game branding and several hand-held toys under the well known Game & Watch name.

But by the start of the 80's, given the quick advancements in computing technology and the simmering popularity of home consoles in the Japanese market, Masayuki Uemura, head of the 2nd Research & Development division of the company, was tasked by the then Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi with a seemingly impossible project, to design a console superior to the current competition and for a fraction of the price, (under about 10,000 yen, which would be around 90 USD today. Where most other offerings would go for 30 or even 50 thousand.) thus calling for considerable emphasis on a straight-forward simple design, and leaving any bells and whistles for later peripherals if the console was succesful.

The choices for hardware were mostly influenced by Coleco's ColecoVision console, which at the time had a very impressive port of Donkey Kong, setting the bar for what the console should exceed, looking up to matching the horsepower of Arcade titles like Namco's Galaxian or Nintendo's own Donkey Kong, leading them to a pretty miraculous deal with electronics company Ricoh, who offered them a bulk of brand-new and very competent chips under Nintendo's tight budget.

And after a few years of development, the Famicom released in July of 1983 for about 14,800 yen (about 130 US freedom eagles adjusted for inflation.) to a success that very quickly began to roar, becoming the best selling Japanese console by the end of 1984.

Now, time for the oh so dire American home video game market during this period, which was doing about as good as a rat in a KFC deep frier thanks to Atari's fumblings with their Atari 2600 console (which you can check out here!) which threw the growth and popularity of the industry to the ground to the point where selling pretty much anything with the words "video game" on them became impossible, as stores refused to stock such products and even if you somehow got a console on the shelves, it would basically rot in there and storage until they got chucked away. Nintendo actually had struck a deal with Atari in 1983 for them to distribute the console overseas, but of course it ended up going nowhere, thus prompting Nintendo to try and market the console themselves on American soil, and form some kind of plan to sneak themselves into the market and reignite the ashes of the industry.

Nintendo tried a few different approaches, like disguising the Famicom as a microcomputer as the 'Advanced Video Entertaintment System', which didn't look so hot, and testing the market with the use of the Nintendo VS. System line of Arcade cabinets beginning in 1984, which were basically just Famicom hardware and games in the form of Arcade machines and proved to be quite succesful in America (and really not so much in Japan, which eventually was what prompted Nintendo to leave Arcade production to focus on their home offerings.) and gave Nintendo the confidence necessary to go through with the release of the NES across the pond.

The final design of the console was unveiled at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show, ditching all the microcomputer fluff and made to look not like a video game console, but a toy, which gave it the 'Entertaintment System' in its name, had cartridges renamed to 'Game-Paks' and the overall slick boxy look of the console, with cartridges being inserted through a slot on the front of the console rather than the top just to make sure sellers and customers wouldn't get the wrong idea alongside the inclusion of accesories like the R.O.B. peripheral and the Zapper light gun to further sell on the behalf of toys.

And despite it all, and the initial doubts many people had of the console ever being succesful, it pretty much exPLODED! Releasing in September of 1986 and very quickly outselling and kicking out the microcomputer market that was slowly creeping into North America, reportedly selling over 7 million systems in the region in 1988 alone and getting to the point where 1 out of 3 households had a NES by 1990, setting itself as the most succesful video game console of the time and what would truly set Nintendo in the unfathomably tall pedestal of greatness and control over the industry that they would go on to boast about for the next decade.

The NES also saw a roll-out around 1986 and 87 in most European countries, Australia, Brazil and some of Asia, handled by different companies contracted to distribute it and each with moderate success to a struggle to keep up in the market due to competing bootleg consoles and/or insufficient marketing.

Other companies, wanting to try their best in dethroning Nintendo out of their utter dominance in the home console market decided to try their hand at making competing consoles, NEC offered the PC Engine with stunning new graphical power to good but not big enough success in Japan and a very poor reception in the US and elsewhere, Sega's Master System only managed to put up a fight in the European market and it wouldn't be until the Sega Genesis that they really presented a threat to Nintendo, who quickly replied with the SNES and began a pop culture standoff that would slowly start throwing the NES a bit out of whack by the start of the 90's, having a noticeable decline in popularity by 1993 and getting eventually discontinued in 1995, and the Famicom succumbing to the same fate some years later in 2003

From that point to today the NES still stands as a key point of recovery for the emerging video game industry of the 80's, shaping a whole industry and expanding Nintendo to becoming the industry giant it still is today and giving a starting point to many game franchises still relevant today.

Despite the Famicom and the NES looking wildly different in terms of design, with different color palettes, sizes and places to actually cram in the game cartridges which themselves are of different size, both consoles are pretty similar in terms of hardware with a few key differences mostly on the controllers side of things, as the Famicom comes in with two controllers hard-wired to the console from the sides and a single port in the front for any external peripherals while the controllers bundled with the NES are connected through two 7 pin ports also at the front of the console, and the fact that the second player controller on the Famicom features a microphone and no start and select buttons.

One of the main flaws of the front-loading system of the NES, Nicknamed Zero Insertion Force or ZIF, was that despite its name, the force put on the cartridge as it is inserted into the console bends the pins of the mechanism and makes them wear out rather quickly after being used for a while, only getting worse by its high sensitivity to any dust or filth that may get into the mechanism and Nintendo's particular choice of materials for these parts made them very prone to malfunctioning and not reading games properly, which led many players to blow into the cartridges as a way to fix the issue, despite the fact that this only really made things worse for the pins in both the cartridge and the console lol.

Getting into the console itself, most of the power of the console comes from two processors, the Ricoh 2A03, an 8-bit processor strikingly similar to the MOS 6502 (and with that I mean literally the same fucking thing with only one specific module unplugged as to evade copyright infringement from MOS Technology) which handled the logic and code of the games with the graphics being processed by the Ricoh 2C02 chip or Picture Processing Unit, also suspiciously close to the design of the Texas Instruments TMS9918 chip, which was used in Coleco's ColecoVision console. (Though this one being more of a derivative rather than an almost 1:1 clone.) Making the console capable of a palette of up to 54 colours out of which about 25 can be used at once, being able to display around 64 8x8 or 8x16 sprites at once at a resolution of 256x240 which on the Famicom could be displayed only through a Radio Frecuency (RF) connector, though the NES also had support for composite output.

This gave the console capability of outputting some pretty impressive graphics, though sadly limited to a mere 40 kilobytes of usable data per game, which was still jackshit and a ceiling that was very quickly reached within the first few years of the console's lifespan, though this was later expanded upon to much more sizeable memory throughout the following years with the use of mapper chips, which I will talk more later on.

The music characteristic to this console is through the Audio Processing Unit (APU) present in the main CPU, which gives the programmers access to 5 sound channels; 2 square waves often used for melody and harmony, one triangle wave usually used for bass, a white noice channel and a DPCM channel for sample playback both used for either drums or sound effects.

Some official noteworthy accesories developed for the console include controllers like the NES Advantage which featured an Arcade-like joystick alongside turbo buttons and the NES Max which changed the joystick for a circle pad in a more comfortable case, adapters like the NES Four Score and Satellite which expanded the max amount of controllers plugged to the console to 4, a few gimmicky novelty controllers like Mattel's Power Glove, Broderbunds U-Force or Konami's LaserScope which worked like pure unfiltered ass AND, exclusively for the Famicom, an addon known as the Famicom Disk System.

Designed by the same team behind the Famicom and released in 1986, this unit plugs to the Famicom from below and was essentially a disk drive that allowed for the console to read and play games from floppy disks encased in a proprietary case for copy protection, created for the purpose of expanding the data limits of the console (as the disks could in total hold about 112 kilobytes of data), give the Famicom extra ram and expand its sound capabilities (as it adds an extra sound channel), allow the player to save their progress into the disk itself without the need for a convoluted password system and also have a cheaper way to store the games themselves, since these disks retailed for much cheaper and could be taken to specific kiosks around Japan where they could be rewritten into a completely new game for a very small fee.

It sold relatively well in Japan and plans were being made for this addon to be brought over to the American market, but it was also around this time where improvements in semiconductor technology began the production of the aformentioned memory mapping or simply mapper chips, which for relatively cheap could expand the amount of allocated ROM data through the use of bank-switching (explained in the Atari 2600 article) progressively throughout the lifespan of the console from up to around 64kb to a whopping 512kb for games releasing a few years before discontinuation, some going even further.

Because of this, the release of the FDS internationally was canned, and many games initially released exclusively for the addon (Including titles like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania.) were reworked back into cartridge form in order to be released overseas, some also featuring a save system through the use of a battery powered SRAM or a rewriteable EEPROM in very few cases, leaving the FDS completely obsolete and discontinued by 1989.

Aside from a few weird-ass licensed Famicom variants done by Sharp, Nintendo developed an official redesign of the console in 1993 as the New Famicom or New Style NES, marketed at a reduced price as a sort of budget console and giving it an overall sleeker and more compact design with a top-loading cartridge slot and a new round controller that FUCKING SUCKS but still fits the aesthetic.

During the first few years of the Famicom, all games released for it were made in-house by Nintendo or any of their partner companies, initially releasing alongside 3 games, all of them Arcade ports, being Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye, when the NES released in the USA Nintendo launched alongside it what is now called the 'Black Box' series of games, with a list of about 30 titles thats just really too fucking long for me to want to list here, but you can see it in the image attached

Due to initial shortages during the release of the NES, a few of these games were actually just Famicom boards put on an adapter to fit them to the extra pins of the NES cartridges. With their boxart particularly being adapted depictions of the game's spritework in order to not make the mistake Atari did on that regard, since theirs was too realistic in comparison to the crude graphics of the Atari 2600.

The first third-party developed and published game for the Famicom would be Hudson Soft's Nuts & Milk from 1984, with other companies like Namco, Tose and Konami also reaching out to Nintendo to develop their own games for their system, which Nintendo gladly seeked out to make contracts with them and any companies wanting to make or publish games for the NES for as long as they didn't break any of their content guidelines (which were specially strict regarding political and violent content in the USA for obvious reasons.) and paid the respetive fees, which weren't cheap but hey, wtf were you going to do back then, make games for the SG-1000? Lmao.

This way to deal with third-party developers was also a way to not repeat Atari's major mistake regarding market saturation and quality, with Nintendo also limiting the amount of games a company could publish to 5 per year (Though Konami circumvented this through their Ultra Games and Palsoft subsidiaries in the US and Europe respectively) and placing a characteristic 'Nintendo Seal of Quality' on every officially licensed game. Protection for unlicensed games was also implemented in the form of the 10NES placed on every console and licensed cartridge, which through proprietary code would detect eachother to allow the company to properly function, though not really stopping companies like Tengen, Code Masters and Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree to tamper around with the chip in order to circumvent its protection, with the first of the three going as far as to illegally request the code for the 10NES chip through US Court to reverse engineer it, promptly getting them a lawsuit with Nintendo which ended up rather poorly. Though the two other companies were succesful both in the hardware and the legal court... kinda.

Out of the 10 best selling games for the console, all of them were developed inhouse by Nintendo, with Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2 and Super Mario Bros 3 occupying the first, fifth and third spot respectively. The best selling third-party game is Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was packed in along with the console in a Europe exclusive set.

The NES itself was a console that saw the initiations of many competent video game companies into the development of console games of their very own (Capcom, Konami, Namco, Rare, etc.), being also the birthplace of several well known franchises still popular to this day both from third-parties and Nintendo themselves (Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Mega Man, etc.), also getting the title of being the console where the popularity of JRPGs boomed in Japan with Chunsoft's quadrilogy of Dragon Quest games releasing between 1986 and 1990. With Square also joining in with their own Final Fantasy series, though it would see much greater success in the following console generations. Though it wouldn't be until the 5th generation of consoles (PSX, N64, Sega Saturn) that games of this genre would really catch on in the west.

Other noteworthy games include Nintendo's Metroid for pioneering in more open world exploration with platforming and less conventional RPG elements which would lay the groundwork for the Metroidvania subgenre, Capcom's Sweet Home for being the main inspiration to their later and much more popular Resident Evil series and of course none other than Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. which while it may have not been the very first platformer game out there, it was one that set quite a standard for games of the genre to come.

In terms of game size, the smallest NES games, usually releasing around the first few years since the console's release would often hold no more than 20 kilobytes of data, often due to them being more Arcade-y games that repeat the same short gameplay loop over and over. Most games released for the console tend to hold around 128 to 256 kilobytes of data with the largest ones holding up to 512, the largest NES game oficially released would be HAL Labs' Metal Slader Glory, a graphic adventure from 1991 released exclusively in Japan and with a rom size of a solid and respectable megabyte, allowing it to display plenty of graphics with gorgeously smooth and nice animations for the system. The largest NES game released internationally being Kirby's Adventure, also developed by HAL Labs and releasing in 1993 with a rom size of 768 kilobytes.