Nintendo Entertainment System

Also known as NES, Famicom, Family Computer, Nintendo 8 bit, Nintendo 8-bit, Nintendo Family Computer, Nintendo Famicom, Hyundai Comboy

home video game console

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The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is a home video game console that was released in the 1980s and became one of the most popular gaming platforms of its time. It matters because it played a significant role in revitalizing the video game industry after the market crash of the early 1980s and established Nintendo as a dominant force in gaming that continues today.

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The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released as the Family Computer (Famicom), in Japan on July 15, 1983, and as the NES in test markets in the United States on October 18, 1985, followed by a nationwide launch on September 27, 1986. The NES was distributed in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia throughout the 1980s. It was Nintendo's first programmable home console, succeeding the Color TV-Game line of dedicated consoles, and primarily competed with Sega's Master System in the third generation of video game consoles.

The engineer Masayuki Uemura designed the 8-bit Famicom after Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi called for a simple, cheap console that could run arcade games from cartridges. Its hardware was based on that of Nintendo's arcade game Donkey Kong (1981) and its controller design was reused from Nintendo's portable Game & Watch hardware. For Western markets, Lance Barr and Don James redesigned it as the NES to resemble a video cassette recorder. To aid its acceptance in stores, Nintendo released add-ons such as the Zapper, a light gun for shooting games, and R.O.B., a toy robot. In Japan, Nintendo released the Famicom Disk System add-on to distribute games on floppy disks, although it gradually reduced support for the peripheral due to hardware constraints.