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In 1983 Nintendo released its Family Computer, or Famicom, video game console into the world and changed the industry forever. By the early ’80s in North America, Atari and the other giants of the video game industry had ground console gaming into the dirt. Nintendo in Japan, meanwhile, was reinventing gaming with new titles like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Eventually, the Famicom would propagate around the world as the Nintendo Entertainment System, the gray and black box that so many fans today are familiar with. NES would reinvigorate video games and turn them into the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that it is today. However, none of that would have been possible if not for Famicom and its success in Japan.
In celebration of this momentous anniversary, Nintendo has launched a special website. It is a huge wealth of gaming history that any Nintendo fan owes it to themselves to check out. Sadly, the website is only in Japanese, but thankfully many web browser’s can translate it. There are all sorts of overviews of the software that made Famicom into a hit, hi-res images of the hardware itself, and even shots of the games and packaging themselves. You can access the website via this link or the one at the bottom if you’d like to see it all for yourself. One can only hope that Nintendo of America will do something similar for the 40th anniversary of NES in 2025, but only time will tell.
