Nintendo Entertainment System

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.

Nintendo released the NES in the aftermath of the video game crash of 1983. In Japan and North America, it quickly dominated and gave Nintendo a near-monopoly on the home console market. Unlike the previous market leader, Atari, Nintendo sought the support of third-party developers, such as Capcom, Hudson Soft, Konami, Namco, Enix, and Square. Its restrictive licensing terms, which included platform exclusivity and a five-game-per-year limit, led to accusations of antitrust violations in the US, culminating in a 1991 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. Nintendo sold 61.91 million consoles; though dominant in Japan and North America, the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Nintendo released a successor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, on November 21, 1990, but continued to support the NES into the 16-bit era. It discontinued the NES on August 14, 1995 and the Famicom on September 25, 2003. The NES is regarded as one of the most influential consoles, as it helped revitalize the American gaming industry following the 1983 crash and pioneered the now-standard business model of licensing third-party developers to produce and distribute games. Several NES games, including Super Mario Bros. (1985), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Dragon Quest (1986), and Final Fantasy (1987), became major franchises.