Best console of the 20th century

[h2ohno]

As others have pointed out, it wasn't just that the industry was in a slump after the 1983 crash in the US. Retailers did not want to stock videogame consoles. Nintendo had to do a ton of legwork just to get the system onto store shelves. Nintendo told stores that they would only pay for consoles which were sold to consumers and that the company would take back all unsold consoles at no cost to the store, taking all of the risk on itself so retailers would have 0 risk. That's what it took just to get a limited release and begin to restore some faith in the console market. In the pre-internet era, if you couldn't get a product on store shelves you couldn't sell it to consumers, and that was a hurdle every company which wanted to make a console would have to live with. Other companies would not only have to release a good product with good games. They would have had to convince retailers to stock their product the way Nintendo did, and that would have taken much more work than most would have been willing to do.

Nintendo got some retailers on board and the consoles sold thanks to great and revolutionary games like Super Mario Brothers that people enjoyed and wanted. That initial success convinced other retailers that the console market was not dead for good and things snowballed from there. It was that combination of getting retailers on board and the great software that brought the industry back from the dead. Without the retailers who went against the grain and stocked the system thanks to Nintendo's guarantees, even Super Mario Brothers wouldn't have had the chance to sell since there would have been nowhere to buy it. Without games like Super Mario Brothers, the system would not have sold even in those few retailers that agreed to stock it.

Saying another company could have done what Nintendo did ignores the simple fact that Nintendo had to do multiple things to get the NES off the ground, the absence of any one of which would have doomed the system. What other companies were willing to go to such lengths to restore both consumer and retailer confidence? It was not inevitable at all that the market would bounce back, and all the predictions and declarations at the time that the console market in the US was dead could very easily have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies.