The Untold Story of the Nintendo Entertainment System

📰 New article from RetroRGB

The Untold Story of the Nintendo Entertainment System

https://retrorgb.com/the-untold-story-of-the-nintendo-entertainment-system.html

You know how the NES changed gaming forever? Turns out, it almost didn’t make it to U.S. shelves at all.

Frank Cifaldi’s new Video Game History Foundation deep-dive reveals the wild, almost-comical journey of how Nintendo’s Famicom became the NES. In 1983, America was buried under the video game crash. Retailers hated consoles. So Nintendo? They didn’t call it a “console.” They called it an “Entertainment System” and sold it like a fancy VCR with cartridges. No joysticks—just two buttons. The Zapper? A bonus toy, not the main event.

And here’s the kicker: Nintendo shipped 100,000 units to New York as a test run… with no marketing. No ads. Just word-of-mouth and sheer stubbornness. It worked. Kids saw it in toy stores, begged their parents, and boom—8-bit magic exploded.

The real heroes? The unsung Nintendo employees who fought to keep the project alive, even when bosses said “no.” Watch the panel video—there’s footage of prototypes, handwritten notes, and stories you won’t find in any textbook.

If you’ve ever held an NES controller and thought, “Man, this thing changed my life,” now you know: it almost never made it off the shelf.

(And yes, the audio podcast is great too—just don’t miss the pics.)