Nintendo Entertainment System: Difference between revisions

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released for around 179.99 U.S. dollars (roughly 511.73 American dollars in 2023) <ref>https://www.pricecharting.com/game/nes/nintendo-nes-console</ref> in late October, 1985. One of the first NES sales belonged to a man who purchased the NES system and all additional 15 launch titles at an FAO Schwartz while multiple NOA employees crouched behind a nearby pillar; he later turned out to be part of a Japanese competitor. <ref>https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/sad-but-true-we-can-t-prove-when-super-mario-bros-came-out</ref> Nonetheless, the NES system would go on to sell 50,000 units for the Christmas season: while it wasn't as many as Nintendo was expecting, it was still a start, largely due to the monumental efforts that the NOA "SWAT-team" gave. The NOA staff had a lonely Christmas themselves, as most of them could not journey back home to their families to celebrate as their plane flight back to {{wp|Seattle}} (NOA's headquarters) had been cancelled due to fog. Armed with their accomplishment, though, the team would go on to prepare a nation-wide launch in 1986, first starting with {{wp|Los Angeles}} in February (which was tougher than New York as February was a bad month for L.A. retailers), which was greeted with an enthusiastic response from retailers yet still maintained the gradual pace from before; then {{wp|Chicago}}, then {{wp|San Francisco}}, and then several Texan cities before finally unleashing the NES across the entire nation. NOA partnered up with fledgling company [[wikipedia:Worlds of Wonder (toy company)|Worlds of Wonder]] (formed by ex-Atari employees) with their hit products {{wp|Teddy Ruxpin}} and {{wp|Lazer Tag}} to distribute the NES throughout the states (Nintendo would end up hiring the sales force from Worlds of Wonder when the company faced bankruptcy later on due to an excess amount of unsold Teddy Ruxpins <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/Super_Mario/9_JvDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref>) while toy company {{wp|Mattel}} handled the distribution system in {{wp|Canada}} and some {{wp|European}} countries. <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/gxyXUi336egC?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj535fUuLGAAxWlMEQIHXLFBxYQre8FegQIAxAY</ref> <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System</ref> NOA's vice-president of marketing, [https://www.gamecubicle.com/news-nintendo_peter_main.htm Peter Main], also planned a full-out advertising, promotion, and distribution blitz that accompanied the rollout of the NES into stores nationwide, what he would later only describe as "Nintendo's  'storming of Normandy'." <ref>https://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-games-history/</ref> He would also infiltrate Wall Street and presented Nintendo's debt-free and successful history to the electronic and toy store's key analysts within Wall Street, causing the name and stories of Nintendo to spread like wildfire throughout Wall Street and bolstering Nintendo's image and popularity. This also caused multiple toy and electronic retailers to sign up to stock the NES including Sears, Babbages, Circuit City, Kmart, and Walmart (many of them the ones that initially turned down Nintendo's offer in 1985), which would generate a self-feeding fire by causing the various retailers to each stock more of Nintendo's products to try to compete with the other. "It became a fulfilling prophecy that something would happen", Main would later quote. <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/gxyXUi336egC?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj535fUuLGAAxWlMEQIHXLFBxYQre8FegQIAxAY</ref> New NES system bundles were created as well; A Control Deck set was released, with the deck and two controllers being included in the bundle, as well as a pack-in title: ''{{mw|Super Mario Bros.}}'', [[Shigeru Miyamoto]]'s hit Famicom title that was also released as one of the launch games for October 1985; the NES system bundle from 1985 was rebranded as the NES Deluxe Set, with the words "DELUXE SET" being added to the front of the box, along with new images as well; and a limited edition version of the NES Deluxe Set came with an additional pack-in title along with ''Duck Hunt'' and ''Gyromite'': ''Stack-Up'', the only other game that R.O.B. could play with you. Being the NES's trojan horse, R.O.B.'s only purpose was to get the NES into the homes of the U.S. children that were robot-obsessed, so R.O.B. was quickly fizzled out and he vanished from Nintendo's marketing plans and advertisements around mid-1987. But it didn't matter; once children across America got ahold of the system, "nobody missed R.O.B....once players realized that games played with the standard controller, like ''Super Mario Bros.'', were much more fun." <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/Power_Up/lD4fDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref> Perhaps the greatest example of this is the NES Action Set, a bundle released in 1987 consisting of the NES, two controllers, an NES Zapper (later versions had the gray color scheme changed to a neon-orange color as laws regarding toy guns became stricter <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/Power_Up/lD4fDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref>), and a combo cartridge containing both ''Duck Hunt'' and ''Super Mario Bros.''; this bundle would go on to be the best selling NES bundle in the console's history, almost certainly contributing to the cumulative sales of Miyamoto's ''Super Mario Bros.'' (more than 40 million copies worldwide <ref>https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Mario#Super_Mario_series</ref>). The NES would go on to sell 3 million systems by the end of 1986, with the NES selling 6 million more by 1987. <ref>https://www.google.com/books/edition/Super_Mario/9_JvDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref> At the end of its lifetime, the NES would go on selling over 34,000,000 systems in the U.S. alone, leading to a cumulative 61.91 million sales worldwide, with 19.32 million units being sold in Japan and 8.56 million additional units being sold in other regions. <ref>https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#:~:text=4%20References-,NES%20sales%20figures,8.56%20million%20in%20other%20regions</ref> The last officially licensed NES game in North America was ''{{mw|Wario's Woods}}'', released in 1994 (also the only NES title with an [[wikipedia:ESRB|ESRB rating]]), while the final officially licensed NES game ever to be released worldwide was ''[[wikipedia: The Lion King (video game)|The Lion King]]'', which released only in Europe. The NES officially halted production in the U.S. and Europe on August 14th, 1995, which replacement NES systems being made available for $25 until (at least) December 1996 through the Nintendo Power Swap program. <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System</ref>