Joust was released as an arcade title by Williams Electronics in 1982. It was one of the first games to popularize a 2-player cooperative mode. Joust was ported to several consoles by Atari. In a short-lived deal between Atari and Nintendo, the Famicom/NES port was the first commercially published game developed by Satoru Iwata, who also worked on games such as EarthBound and Kirby; he would later become the president and CEO of Nintendo.
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.