Comments on: Nintendo Famicom and the secret of Nintendo’s success

By: James

James — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:42:09 +0000

I still remember my brother and I got a NES for Christmas the year it came out, must have been 1986? We got the set that came with the robot, Gyromite, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. Up until that point I’d never really played video games and hadn’t yet gotten interested in computers. I have fond memories of playing SMB with my dad on my the console TV in my grandparents living room that Christmas and many, many hours over the coming years. Most of my friends also got a NES for Christmas that year and we used to swap game cartridges for a few days at a time with the kids that lived up the street. My family wasn’t wealthy so we never moved up to the SNES or other 16 bit systems and stuck with the NES until my younger brother eventually got a N64. I’ve played a lot of other systems over the years but nothing ever captured my attention like the NES.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:19:53 +0000

The NES was too expensive and too late to market to make much impact in Europe. I think the launch date here was 1987, two long years after the US, by which time if you wanted the latest and greatest in video games then the 16-bit home computers were a more obvious choice.

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:37:47 +0000

Hi Dave,

Although less sucessful in Europe, the NES did meet success in France and Benelux in the late 80’s and beginning of 90’s. In that area, the console we had was derived from your US NES, though downgraded to 50 Hz.

Now 42 yo, I know quite a bunch of french guys who have been offered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES bundle circa 90…and having lost their mind on that game so difficult -we now know it was hardly playable =)

Thank you so much for your stories !