History of the Nintendo Entertainment System

Nintendo's 8-bit video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), known in Japan as the Family Computer (Japanese: ファミリーコンピュータ, Hepburn: Famirī Konpyūta) or Famicom (ファミコン, Famikon), was introduced after the video game crash of 1983, and was instrumental in revitalizing the industry. It enjoyed a long lifespan and dominated the market during the rest of the decade. Facing obsolescence in 1990 with the advent of 16-bit consoles, it was supplanted by its successor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but support and production continued until 1995. After its discontinuation, interest in the NES has since been renewed by collectors and emulators, including Nintendo's own Virtual Console platform.

The video game market experienced a period of rapid growth and unprecedented popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consoles such as the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision proved to be wildly popular, and many third-party developers arose in their wake to exploit the growing industry. Nintendo was one such development studio, and, by 1982 had found success with a number of arcade games, such as Donkey Kong, which was in turn ported to, and packaged with the ColecoVision console in North America.

Led by Masayuki Uemura, Nintendo's R&D team had been secretly working on a system since 1980, ambitiously targeted to be less expensive than its competitors, yet with performance that could not be surpassed by its competitors for at least a year. Uemura initially thought of using a modern 16-bit CPU, but instead settled on the inexpensive MOS Technology 6502, supplementing it with a custom graphics chip (the Picture Processing Unit). To keep costs down, suggestions of including a keyboard, modem, and floppy disk drive were rejected, but expensive circuitry was added to provide a versatile 15-pin expansion port connection on the front of the console for future add-on functionality such as peripheral devices.

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