Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is an 8-bit third-generation home video game console produced by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan in 1983 as the Family Computer (FC), commonly referred to as Famicom. It was redesigned to become the NES, which was released in American test markets on October 18, 1985, and was soon fully launched in North America and other countries.
After developing several successful arcade games in the early 1980s such as Donkey Kong (1981), Nintendo planned to create a home video game console. Rejecting more complex proposals, the Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi called for a simple, cheap console with games stored on cartridges. The controller design was reused from Nintendo’s portable Game & Watch games. Nintendo released several add-ons, such as the NES Zapper light gun for shooting games like Duck Hunt.
The NES is one of the best-selling consoles of its time and helped revitalize the US gaming industry following the video game crash of 1983. It pioneered a now-standard business model of licensing third-party developers to produce and distribute games. The NES features a number of groundbreaking games, such as the 1985 platform game Super Mario Bros. and the 1986 action-adventure games The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, which became long-running franchises. It was succeeded in 1990 by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In 2011, IGN named the NES the greatest video game console of all time.
The Super NES is Nintendo’s second programmable home console, following the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The console introduced advanced graphics and sound capabilities compared with other systems at the time. It was designed to accommodate the ongoing development of a variety of enhancement chips integrated into game cartridges to be competitive into the next generation.
The Super NES received largely positive reviews and was a global success, becoming the bestselling console of the 16-bit era after launching relatively late and facing intense competition from Sega’s Genesis console in North America and Europe. Overlapping the NES’s 61.9 million unit sales, the Super NES remained popular well into the 32-bit era, with 49.1 million units sold worldwide by the time it was discontinued in 2003. It continues to be popular among collectors and retro gamers, with new homebrew games and Nintendo’s emulated rereleases, such as on the Virtual Console, the Super NES Classic Edition, Nintendo Switch Online; as well as several non-console emulators which operate on a desktop computer or mobile device, such as Snes9x.
