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# Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
- URL: https://averagetechnerds.com/nes/
- Published: 2026-10-21T20:41:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T09:10:00.000Z
- Description: The console that brought video games back to American stores by pretending to be a toy, from a robot called R.O.B. and the lockout chip to the blinking light, the VCR slot and the Mario that made it.
- Author: Victor
- Tags: Where We Came From, Retro Gaming

Victor’s note

I finally got a Nintendo after begging for a console as a little kid. I was in kindergarten or first grade, and my friends already had newer systems. The Super Nintendo was out and still fairly new, so the NES was already old by the time it reached me, but it was a big step up from the Atari, and I’d been asking for it for a long time. The jump in quality from the Atari to the Nintendo was phenomenal. Back then, every new generation felt like a leap. You don’t get that anymore. Gosh.

My favorite, for pure nostalgia, is Rampart. It’s not one of the famous ones; I’d call it a cult classic, one of those hidden gems. It was two-player, so I played it with my friends and my cousins. You built your castle walls, set up your cannons, then took turns firing to wreck the other player’s fortress. I just remember it being fun.

I played all three Marios. Mario 2 was the first one I owned, the weird one, which makes sense once you know it started life as a different Japanese game, Doki Doki Panic, with Mario swapped in. Then came 1 and 3\. There was Blades of Steel, whose intro I can still hear, where your hockey players could drop the gloves and fight. Batman. DuckTales. Then came the Genesis.

## So, the Nintendo

In the US it was the Nintendo Entertainment System, or just “the Nintendo”. In Japan it was the Family Computer, the Famicom, and it got there first: July 15, 1983, with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye. By the time it reached New York in October 1985, it had already sold a couple of million in Japan.

The whole thing started with one question. Masayuki Uemura, who ran Nintendo’s hardware development, told Satoru Iwata years later that Nintendo’s president wanted a cartridge machine “that wouldn’t have any competitors for three years”. Ricoh had a new chip plant running at 10% capacity and came looking for work, and Uemura asked them, “Can we make Donkey Kong?” That was the spec. The arcade, at home.

The early Famicoms had problems. The square buttons on the controller stuck, because kids pressed them harder than anyone at Nintendo expected, even after a one-million-press test. So Nintendo made them round. And it plugged into the TV’s antenna input, because only about 10% of Japanese TVs had a video input back then, which meant a bad hook-up could put your game on a neighbor’s TV.

![NES console with its controller](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-console-set.jpg)

The console with its controller. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## How it got to America

Here’s the thing: in 1985, American stores didn’t want video game consoles. The market had crashed in 1983, and US home video game sales fell by about 97% in a couple of years. Nintendo first showed up at the January 1985 CES with something called the Advanced Video System, which looked like a home computer, with wireless controllers, a keyboard and a tape drive. Retailers shrugged.

So Nintendo rebuilt it as a toy. By the summer show in June it had dropped the keyboard, added a robot called R.O.B., and renamed it the Nintendo Entertainment System. The console became the “Control Deck”, the cartridges became “Game Paks”, and the word “video game” stayed off the box. It went on sale in New York in October 1985 as a test, in a Deluxe Set with R.O.B., the Zapper, two controllers, Gyromite and Duck Hunt for $179.99\. Los Angeles got it in February 1986, the rest of the country that September.

R.O.B. worked. In Nintendo’s own survey from early 1986, the robot was the top reason kids wanted the system, ahead of the graphics and the games. Nintendo’s staff found it painfully slow, and it was gone by 1988, but it had done its job: it got a video game console onto toy store shelves that had sworn off video games. Historians like to call R.O.B. a Trojan horse. Nintendo never said that, so treat it as their reading.

## Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. came out in Japan on September 13, 1985, and it’s the game that made the console. Uemura says it “blew away the uncertainty” at a time when Japan’s parliament had been debating whether games were bad for children. It’s still Japan’s best-selling packaged game, by Nintendo’s count as of 2010, and worldwide it’s put at about 40 million copies, a lot of them in the box with the console. The exact US date for it is disputed, so the page stays out of that one.

![Grey NES game cartridge](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-cartridge.jpg)

An NES cartridge. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## The lock on the door

After the crash, Nintendo decided it would never let the shelves fill with junk the way Atari’s had. So it built the control into the hardware. Every NES has a lockout chip, and every licensed cartridge has a matching one. No match, and the console refuses to run the game. Nintendo also made every licensed cartridge itself and let each publisher release only five new NES games a year. That’s all in the court record, because Atari fought it.

Atari’s games arm tried to crack the chip, couldn’t, and in 1988 got the code from the US Copyright Office by falsely claiming it was already being sued over it. A federal appeals court laid that out in 1992 and ruled for Nintendo. The Seal of Quality on the box was the public face of the same system.

## The blinking light, and why you shouldn’t have blown on it

That blinking power light? That’s the lockout chip. When the console can’t talk to the cartridge, usually because the pins are dirty or bent, the chip resets the system once a second, and the light blinks with it. People blew on the cartridge, and Nintendo’s own support page said don’t: “The moisture in your breath can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors.”

The pins got dirty because of how the thing loads. Lance Barr, Nintendo of America’s designer, built the US case around a new low-force connector: the game slides in, then you press it down into place. That’s why it loads like a VCR, and why those pins wore out. The 1993 top-loading redesign has no lockout chip at all.

![NES console opened, showing the front-loading cartridge slot mechanism](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-console-open.jpg)

Inside the front-loading slot. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## Zelda, and the floppy disk you could refill

The Legend of Zelda launched in Japan on [February 21, 1986](https://averagetechnerds.com/zelda-40th-anniversary-switch-2-accessories/), on the Famicom Disk System, a floppy drive add-on, because the disk could save your game. When it came to the US on a cartridge, Nintendo put a battery inside to save instead. That’s also where “hold RESET while you turn it off” comes from: battery-save games needed it to protect the save.

The Disk System never left Japan, and it had one feature worth a minute: kiosks in stores where you could pay ¥500 to have a new game written onto a disk you already owned. Nintendo kept those running until September 2003\. Japan also got a Famicom network adapter in 1988 that let people trade stocks and buy horse-race tickets from the couch.

## How it was made

Skip this part if chips aren’t your thing. If they are, the NES is a study in doing a lot with a little.

![NES motherboard](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-motherboard.jpg)

The NES motherboard. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

**The brain.** The processor is a Ricoh 2A03, built around the same 6502 core as the Atari 2600 and the Apple II, with the sound circuits on the same chip and the decimal math mode removed. Nobody has published why Ricoh removed it. It runs at 1.79 MHz in the US. Uemura says one reason for picking the 6502 was that it “would be hard to analyze”. Namco worked it out anyway, about six months after launch.

**The memory.** 2 KB for the game to work in and 2 KB for the screen layout, in two chips. The graphics tiles themselves live on the cartridge, so a game can carry as much artwork as its cartridge holds. Standard program space was 32 KB, and the big games got past it with mapper chips on the cartridge that swap banks of memory in and out. Super Mario Bros. fits in 40 KB with no mapper at all. Mario 3 needed one, and the biggest games reached 1 MB.

**The picture.** The graphics chip draws a 256 by 240 picture and can track 64 moving sprites, but only 8 of them on any one line of the screen. Put more than 8 on a line and some drop out, which is why NES games flicker when things get busy. That flicker isn’t a bug in your console. It’s the chip hitting its limit.

**The controller.** The cross-shaped pad came from Nintendo’s Game & Watch Donkey Kong in 1982\. Gunpei Yokoi kept sending prototypes back until players could use it without looking at their hands, which is why the center dips. The US patent on it names an engineer called Ichiro Shirai, so it’s Yokoi’s team’s design, with Shirai’s name on the paper. It won Nintendo a Technology & Engineering Emmy in 2007\. Barr, who designed the NES version, said he never thought it would become the icon it did.

![NES rectangular controller with D-pad and A and B buttons](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-controller.jpg)

The controller: a D-pad, two buttons, Select and Start. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

**The Zapper.** Duck Hunt’s secret is simple once you know it. When you pull the trigger, the game blanks the screen to black for a frame and draws a white box where each duck is. The gun’s light sensor reports whether it’s looking at light. That’s also why it doesn’t work on a flat-screen TV: the sensor is tuned to how an old tube TV flickers, and modern TVs add delay.

**The slot.** NES cartridges have 72 pins, Famicom cartridges 60\. The US slot dropped the audio pins, which is why Japanese games with extra sound chips go quiet on an American NES.

![NES-101 top-loading model with its dogbone controller](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-nes-101-set.jpg)

The later top-loading NES-101 with the dogbone controller. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## It never really died

Nintendo’s own numbers put the Famicom and NES together at 61.91 million consoles and 500.01 million games. The NES retired in North America in 1995, with Wario’s Woods in December 1994 as the last licensed game. Japan kept buying tens of thousands of new Famicoms a year into 2003, and Nintendo repaired them until 2007, when the parts ran out.

Then in 2016 Nintendo sold a palm-sized NES Classic with 30 games built in for $59.99, and it was hard to find: 1.5 million by February 2017, by Nintendo’s own count, with an apology for the shortages. The NES library has been on Nintendo Switch Online since 2018\. And people still make new NES games on real cartridges, built on hardware documentation the homebrew community wrote itself.

What was the first NES game that came out of your box, and who was standing there when it did?

Based on Nintendo’s own Famicom history site, hardware page and investor data, Iwata Asks interviews with Masayuki Uemura and the Game & Watch team, the Video Game History Foundation’s NES Launch Collection, Lance Barr’s 2005 interview, the 1992 Atari Games v. Nintendo ruling, US Patents 4,687,200 and 4,799,635, Nintendo of America’s NES support pages, the NESdev wiki, Polygon on Nintendo’s 1986 launch documents, and Nintendo’s February 2017 results briefing, as of October 21, 2026\. Where the sources disagree, the page says so.