The High Score Contest

Dr. Mario is a falling-block puzzle game developed and published by Nintendo, building on the Mario franchise. It was released simultaneously for the GameBoy and the NES in 1990; it also got arcade releases on both the PlayChoice-10 and Nintodo VS. System. Initial reviews were mostly positive; however, some reviewers criticized it as unoriginal, considering it derivative of Tetris and Connect Four. It was a commercial success and would receive several sequels and remakes for later Nintendo systems.

Nintendo Famicom

Two years before it came to North America as the NES, Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan in July 1983. Arguably the first true 8-bit system, the Famicom was the beginning of the console wars.

The Famicom popularized many of the features that would define this era of gaming including the D-Pad controller, which Nintendo had introduced with the portable Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong.

While the North American NES was only a gaming console, the Japanese Famicom could be be expanded with various peripheral devices, including keyboards and disk drives, which turned the Famicom into a full fledged home computer. This helped keep the Famicom relevant for much longer, outliving its American counterpart by more than half a decade.

Arkanoid is an arcade game released by Taito in 1986. It was a block-breaking game which expanded upon Atari's Breakout games of the 1970s by adding power-ups, different types of bricks, a variety of level layouts, and visual layering and depth. It was highly successful worldwide and was among Taito’s highest grossing arcade tables. It was widely ported to contemporary systems, including many 8-bit home computers. It revived the Breakout concept for a new generation of hardware, resulting in many clones and similar games, even decades later. The NES port was packaged with a custom paddle controller.

NES Toaster

For its US release, Nintendo wanted to differentiate the NES from previous game consoles, which had developed a poor reputation following the video game crash of 1983.

The new design featured glossy plastic more reminiscent of modern A/V equipment, rather than the beige and wood-grain of previous consoles.

The NES featured a new front-loading system which was designed to resemble contemporary VCRs. The mechanism, which would later be known as the "toaster", used a so-called zero-insertion-force slot, which would theoretically reduce wear on the cartridge contacts.

Unfortunately, this mechanism proved unreliable. As the systems aged, connector failures became more frequent. For later consoles, Nintendo would return to top-loading slots with industry standard card-edge connecotrs.

BurgerTime is an arcade title released by Data East in 1982 and licensed by Bally Midway for North America. It’s a fixed-screen platformer in which the player assembles giant hamburgers while avoiding enemies represented by anthropomorphic foods. BurgerTime was ported to a number of home systems, beginning with the Intellivision in 1983. The NES got one of the later ports in 1987; this version benefited from improved graphics and crisp gameplay enabled by the newer hardware.

NES Top Loader

After years of responding to service requests due to the failing “toaster” mechanism, Nintendo redesigned the NES in 1993. The new design borrowed from the new Super NES. The result was the Model 101, commonly known as the “Top Loader”.

The Model 101 was a cost-reduced version of the NES. It had a smaller form factor, omitted the composite video output port, and eliminated the lockout chip which was designed to prevent the use of unlicensed cartridges. This model also shipped with a redesigned controller, known as the "Dog Bone", with rounded ends resembling the SNES controllers.

But, of course, the most obvious change was the cartidge slot. To resolve the poor reliability of the Toaster's zero-insertion-force mechanism, the Model 101 uses a top-loading slot with a simple card-edge connector. The card-edge connector was a tried-and-true technology dating back to the earliest computers. It had been used on almost all previous game consoles, and Nintendo would use it on all of their future cartridge based consoles.