Nintendo of America's strength was in recognizing that there was still a market to be claimed. People were fired over bum video game deals that resulted in shelves being crammed with five dollar clearance titles, and no matter how great these new Nintendo games may have looked, no one was about to take that risk again. Video games were dead and buried they were toy store poison. But American retail buyers, still burned by the video game industry crash of 1983, didn't care. The system was huge in its native Japan, where it was known as the Family Computer - it pushed 2.5 million units in 1984 alone, along with 15 million game cartridges.

So when it showed off a prototype of what would become the Nintendo Entertainment System at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show that January, buyers scoffed. knew the name, they associated it with Donkey Kong), the licensing of its properties to other companies, and its handheld Game & Watch LCD games. Read on to see just how difficult this search turned out to be.īack in 1985, Nintendo of America was a pretty small venture, dealing primarily in arcade game distribution (if anyone in the U.S. I wanted to put this whole embarrassing mess behind us so that the history books of the future could be properly informed, and so that places like Wikipedia would have a definitive source to cite.ĭid I find the answer? Well, sort of. I wanted to prove, once and for all, exactly when Super Mario Bros. I decided recently to try to set this right. This isn't Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we're talking about here: this is one of the highest grossing consumer entertainment products in history, introduced less than 30 years ago, and we can't seem to get the date right. In fact, talk to enough people and you'll come to find out that we can't even agree on the year the game came out, at least in the United States (in Japan, we know exactly when it shipped: September 13, 1985). And at over 40 million copies sold worldwide (not counting the various ports and reimaginings over the last couple decades), this is arguably the game that brought business back to an American home video game industry that had plummeted to next to nothing in the early '80s, the victim of an oversaturated market that left stores full of excess inventory that was practically given away.Īnd yet, we don't know exactly when the game came out.

Super mario bros arcade