Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) – From Quality to Quantity
After Atari’s fortune in the early 1980s, the market for home gaming stagnated from quickly produced but poor quality games, like Atari’s E.T. video game fiasco in 1982. But Atari’s bust was another’s boom. Nintendo, a century-old entertainment company in Japan, expanded into home gaming consoles. The 1985 introduction of the NES system in the North American market revived the industry. But unlike Atari, who allowed third party developers to create games without oversight, Nintendo kept tightly controlled game developers. Third party developers could release only two games a year and weren’t allowed to release games for other consoles. Nintendo oversaw content for years, prohibiting things like too much blood, sex, or blatant religious content. They turned blood to sweat in Mortal Kombat and changed a character from a drunk to an elderly coffee lover in Pokémon. As other home gaming console sales declined, Nintendo sold 62 million consoles.