A Japanese Toy Company Resurrected an Industry America Had Killed

By 1985, the American video game industry was a corpse. The crash of 1983 had wiped out billions in value, buried millions of unsold Atari cartridges in a New Mexico landfill, and convinced retailers that electronic games were a fad that had come and gone. Nintendo — a playing card company turned arcade maker from Kyoto — walked into this graveyard and said "watch this." The NES launched in New York test markets in October 1985, deliberately packaged to look like a toy rather than a game console, because the word "video game" was retail poison. It came with R.O.B., a plastic robot that served no real purpose other than getting the thing into toy stores. The strategy worked. Within two years, Super Mario Bros. had sold tens of millions of copies and the NES was in a third of American households. Nintendo didn't just revive the gaming industry. It rebuilt it from scratch, with quality control standards, iconic franchises, and a business model that would define entertainment for the next four decades.