Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [24]
The Famicon was released in Japan on July 13, 1983. Two controllers were hardwired into the white and maroon system, with vertical holding slots built into the console to store them when not in use. Player one had a start and select button, with the power cord sticking out from the left. Player two, with the power cord to the right, had an internal microphone instead. The Famicon accepted sixty-pin game cartridges from a top-down slot, and could be expanded to accept certain discs and allow modem support. (Yes: modem support in 1983. America Online started in 1983 as well, as Gameline, a service offering modem support for the Atari 2600.)
The Famicon launched with three games, all ports of Nintendo’s arcade hits: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. A dozen more games were in the works. This wasn’t a mere arcade game, rigged to play just one game, or a rinky-dink piece of LCD electronics. This was a full-fledged computer! Yamauchi didn’t get his wish of a price under ¥10,000, but the retail price of ¥14,800 was still on the low side for a console, and helped it gain market penetration.
Then the Famicons started to break. Computers were indeed difficult to make: one little mistake on one little chip could cause players’ games to freeze or crash midsession. Reports trickled in of this happening with multiple consoles all over Japan. The batch of chips used in production, it turned out, was shoddy. Nintendo had put out a product with a bad component. When retailers found out, they would pull the Famicon off their shelves.
Nintendo had never made bad products, and it wasn’t going to start now. In a move that echoed Tylenol’s voluntary recall after a tampering scare, Yamauchi ordered a product recall of every single Famicon, even those without the bad component. Those who had bought one could send it in and have it repaired free of charge. Nintendo would rip out the entire motherboard, not just the bad chip, and replace the whole system. Yamauchi knew Nintendo had the money to essentially rebuild each Famicon manufactured or sold. The question was whether anyone would buy them, or let them back on shelves, once the recall was completed. Recalls done wrong tainted the brand forever. Done right, though, they could be a blessing in disguise.
Erring on the side of caution paid off. Japanese retailers liked that one high-tech company finally took responsibility for its errors and fixed them for free. (Nintendo continues to do so today, to the point of reapplying kids’ stickers onto a new console if the old one has to be replaced instead of repaired.) Sales were great for the rest of 1983: Nintendo moved half a million consoles, and Sharp started production of a TV set with a built-in Famicon. And as those new games from Miyamoto came out, the Famicon became Japan’s biggest-selling game console, selling three million consoles by 1984. Yamauchi even found a cheap way to drum up new arcade games: convert existing Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. cabinets to Nintendo Vs. machines, which played a series of beefed-up Famicon titles. Replacing it with new games would be as easy as restocking a vending machine. The same idea was reused for the Play Choice arcade games.
Miyamoto wasn’t the only producer generating new games for the nascent Famicon. Yamauchi ran his R&D team with three divisions, run by three daimyos. (Daimyos were the medieval