Nintendo Entertainment System Review

Judged as hardware the NES is unremarkable, and the performance grade says so. The processor is slow, the palette is small, sprites flicker when more than a few share a line, and the Sega machine that followed beats it on every specification anyone can measure. The overall grade is not about that. In 1985 American retailers had stopped stocking games at all, and Nintendo got back onto the shelf by disguising a console as a toy, policing what was published on it, and putting Super Mario Bros. in the box.

Everything after it came from there: the directional pad and two button layout every controller still borrows, the idea that a platform holder guards quality, the licensing model the whole business runs on, and a library that reaches from Zelda and Metroid to Mega Man, Castlevania, Contra, Punch-Out and the role playing series that became Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The front loading cartridge mechanism is the real design failure, and the reason a generation learned to blow into a cartridge.