Delve into the origins of the Famicom, and how it conquered Japan.
By Benjamin Turner & Christian Nutt

The company also experimented with coin-op game development. It didn't have many hits, and one game in particular, Radarscope, was seen as an abject failure. In 1980 Yamauchi ordered a fledgling but creative production artist, Shigeru Miyamoto, to create a game that all of the unwanted Radarscope cabinets could be converted into. Miyamoto jumped at the chance, and the end result was Donkey Kong: Nintendo's first video game megahit. Miyamoto had found his niche, and would prove invaluable to the company as it ventured further into video games.

Understatement.


At the same time, Yamauchi had his engineers working on what would prove to be a far more important project: a video game machine that supported interchangeable cartridges, a beast commonly referred to as a programmable console. Such a machine could always remain fresh due to an ever-expanding line-up of games, and Nintendo could make a killing on software sales. But machines were already appearing on the Japanese market, so Yamauchi instructed ex-Sharp staffer Masayuki Uemura's group, who were responsible for electronic game design for Nintendo, to design a system that could not be surpassed by competitors for at least a year. At the same time, it had to undercut them all in price. Needless to say, the challenge seemed daunting; the gauntlet had been thrown down.

With such rigid price requirements, Uemura realized that he had to pare his design down so that it only contained the very essence of a game machine. A relatively modern CPU (central processing unit) would have been nice, but only an old 8-bit CPU would prove cheap enough. After much research, Uemura and team settled on the 6502, an off-the-shelf component built by MOS Technology in 1975. That would be good enough to run the game code, but it had to be paired with what was essentially a graphical co-processor to generate the impressive graphics that Yamauchi desired. They dubbed this component the PPU, or picture processing unit. The resultant design could display more colors (16 out of 52), move more sprites (64, up to eight on a row) and had sixteen times more RAM (16Kb/2KB) than the most popular American console, the Atari 2600.

But without the necessary production facilities, Nintendo had to turn to outside companies to produce the chips it needed. Most were reluctant to create chips at the miniscule profit margins Nintendo demanded, but Ricoh finally agreed on the promise of three million chips ordered over only two years. It seemed an exorbitant amount, but Yamauchi knew he had to take a chance if Nintendo was to be more than a blip on the major manufacturers' radars. Its bet would pay off; in a few years some of these same companies would have special divisions devoted solely to meeting Nintendo's chip requirements, and by 1991 Nintendo products would consume more than three percent of Japan's semiconductor output.

... But that's getting ahead of ourselves.


Another important consideration was what the system should look like. While it had the heart of a computer, Yamauchi wanted to make it look like a toy. Kids would be the primary market, but an expansion port would give Nintendo the ability, should it so desire, to roll out more computer-like features and services in the future. To create this toy motif, red and white plastics were chosen, sharp corners were rounded, and small, permanently-wired control pads were designed. Computer-like accessories such as keyboards were nixed; there was to be no question that Nintendo's console was first and foremost a game-playing device.

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