The History of Nintendo 6

Executive Decisions


In 1984, the Famicom was more popular than ever thanks to well-executed advertising campaigns and Hiroshi’s crude decisions. If you wanted to make a licensed Nintendo game, you would have to abide by Nintendo’s strict rules and only make games for Nintendo. This meant that EVERY game that was being made for the Famicom was an exclusive! Soon Nintendo were forced to stop doing that after a lawsuit. You could also thank Hiroshi Yamauchi for predictions and telling whether a game would sell or not. He would make groups of people literally compete against each other to see who could make the best game or hardware. Hiroshi was infamous around the office for judging whether a game would go into production or not by merely looking at it, he never played the games. He would sometimes look at a team’s work that they had been laboring over for months and simply tell them to start over with something new. Hiroshi chose that instead of his engineers and artists and so on make many games that are okay, they would make just a couple of tremendously good games that would be considered the game of the year or something and would sell millions and millions of copies. This way, Nintendo could focus on advertising those few games extensively. Nintendo proved their executive genius once again by coming up with something that would make players buy 2 or 3 games when they only really wanted one. When stores ordered a shipment of the games that were hot, Nintendo would maybe only send them half of their order. All the customers would rush down to the store expecting there to be enough copies, but would be disappointed to find out they were fresh out. To meet with their gaming needs they would buy a mediocre game to have something to play while the next shipment arrived. This way Nintendo could sell multiple cartridges instead of just one! This method worked especially well with big hits like Mario or Zelda. To avoid this, many Japanese gamers camped outside of stores to make sure they got their copy.


Donkey Flop


Other things happening this year included the release of the ill-fated Donkey Kong 3. It did poorly in the charts, but in reality, it truly was a bad game. It had Donkey Kong going up and down some ropes and Mario’s cousin Stanley the Bugman (he was never heard of again) had to spray away bees while spraying Donkey Kong to keep him up. It was boring as an arcade game and a waste of money as a Famicom game. I think Shigeru was focusing his time and energy on the super stellar Super Mario Bros. which was supposed to be released next year, so he could have left Donkey Kong 3 for somebody else to do. People at Nintendo are still frantically searching for stores that will sell the Famicom overseas for the price Nintendo suggests. Finally, help is found and the planning for an American release of the Famicom is in progress.


NES Preview


It’s 1985 and American people are eager to find out more on the rumor that has been spreading like wildfire. A system that few people know about, which is graphically better than the Atari, has better sound, games to dream about, and all for a price many times better than other systems. At the Consumer Electronics Show, people get to see this revolutionary machine named the Famicom. They are told they can expect it in the summer (for some reason it was released a lot later) with 25 release games. Later that year it is announced that the Famicom’s name will be changed to Nintendo Entertainment System, known more as the NES, and will have 20 launch games. Stores still were ambivalent about the NES, so they test-launched it in New York and it sold a whopping estimate of 100,000 units.


The Side-Scroller Of Them All


At the same time half way around the world, Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan. With a worldwide sale of over 40 million copies, Super Mario Bros. is arguably one of the best games ever. At the time, most games were very simple and featured only one screen, while Super Mario Bros. shone under the light as the first side-scroller in history and one of the first to show multiple screens. This baby was also out as an arcade machine as well as a Famicom cartridge.