How did Nintendo revive video games after the 1983 crash?

Nintendo brought its Japanese Famicom to the United States in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System. It combined high-quality games, a clever way of persuading retailers to stock it, and a lock-out chip that let Nintendo control which games reached the console. Video game historian Frank Cifaldi argues that the focus on quality and customer satisfaction was the main reason the launch succeeded. [1] [2]

The American market had collapsed in 1983. According to the WNYC program On the Media, anyone could make games for Atari's console, and many outside businesses did, flooding the market with poor titles. The program says the industry's value fell from about three billion dollars to a few hundred million by 1985. Atari was also caught burying unsold games and consoles in a New Mexico landfill. Retailers had been burned by unsold stock. In Japan the crash was milder, and Nintendo saw an opening to expand with the Famicom. [3] [1]

Historian Steven Kent says retailers were not eager to see Nintendo's salespeople. One salesman told him he feared being marched out of Sears. Nintendo bundled the console with a robot toy called R.O.B. and pitched the package as a robot game rather than a video game, which got it onto shelves. The NES launched in America with 18 titles, and the number soon passed 100. Among them was Super Mario Brothers, which became a Nintendo mainstay. [3] [1]

Nintendo believed Atari had failed by not controlling the quality of its own or third-party games. Its answer was the 10NES chip. The console sent a signal to a chip in the cartridge, and if the correct response did not come back, the console stayed inoperable. This let Nintendo decide which games were released and how many. Publishers were limited to five games a year. Nintendo marketed the arrangement to shoppers as the Seal of Quality. Kent says the seal in practice meant paying Nintendo about ten dollars per cartridge, a new arrangement at the time, and Nintendo also enforced content rules against violence, sex, politics and religion. [4] [3]

Sources agree Nintendo came to dominate the US market from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. The author David Sheff, interviewed in the same radio program, describes it going from no share to 90 percent of a growing industry. Where accounts differ is in how to weigh the control. Cifaldi says the lock-out approach was probably what saved the industry, but that it may have stifled creative freedom. He notes that consoles could have been open like computers, and that for a long time console developers could not earn a living without giving the hardware maker a cut. Developers, as one account puts it, saw the system as total submission to Nintendo, but had little alternative. [3] [2] [4]