In the early 80s, many people were creating video games and getting into the industry. This led to an oversaturation of the market, and a following crash. Following the video game crash of 1983, many companies considered video games to be on the decline. Nintendo had already sold many versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan, where it was called the Famicom. To bring it to America, they redesigned the system to be more similar to a home computer—named the Nintendo Advanced Video System (AVS), it came with all wireless accessories, such as a keyboard, controllers, and a joystick. When this prototype was displayed and able to be ordered, very few retailers placed any orders—they really thought video games were dead. 
Some popular games that were played on the NES include Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. As known today, these would become iconic franchises that are heavily played. Nintendo also handled third party video game developers well. As opposed to previous consoles such as Atari, Nintendo did not allow random developers to make games for their console. Instead, they had to be granted approval from Nintendo and have a chip installed with their cartridge to be able to be played on the NES.
The NES was a huge success. 34 million units were sold in America until it was discontinued in 1995. Competition would start with Sega’s consoles, and Nintendo would continue to release newer consoles as other companies tried to get into the video game console space.
Nice blog post Ethan. I loved how you talked about the retro games of the 80s such as The Legend of Zelda and Mario. In addition, it's super interesting to see how characters that were invented years ago are still an integral part of modern pop culture -- almost anyone knows who Mario is. In addition, new games of these franchises are still being released. For example, although the original Legend of Zelda was released in 1986, I grew up playing Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It was the same franchise but it was released over 20 years after the release of the original. All these old nintendo games are still super nostalgic for me to play. In addition, the Wii has sold over 100 million units showing how the home video console has exploded across recent decades.
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