This is an Object of the Week post from the newsletter, originally posted November 13, 2023. I believe one of the lab members owned a Famicon at the time, but I do not think we have one inventoried.
The Famicon, the shortened nickname given to the Nintendo Family Computer and more famously known in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the NES), was one of Nintendo’s first video game consoles.
However, as you might notice, the Famicon is strikingly different in appearance from the NES. Despite being the same console as the NES, it has a completely different design. Why is that? During the Famicon’s initial release in Japan, the video game industry in the US was actually undergoing a massive recession.
This Wikipedia article and this article have more information, but during 1983, the US video game market was severely struggling. There were too many video game consoles on the market and most of the games for them were awful. Additionally, while this was happening, the Famicon was not meeting immediate success in Japan; its launch was riddled with a few critical issues, and so it had to be recalled and revised before it started meeting demand. As a result of both of these things, initially, Nintendo did not plan to release the Famicon to American audiences at all. However, after the Famicon’s technical issues were resolved and it became a hit in Japan, Nintendo started slowly releasing versions of it in American arcades and, seeing its success there, started thinking once more of a US release. They eventually decided to release a completely re-designed version of the Famicon as the NES, to smashing success.