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Wyrdness on 12 July 2025
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SvennoJ said:

"Games like Super Mario Bros and Zelda created a paradigm shift in the industry away from the standard home/arcade gaming model of just beating the highest score"

Err what? Commodore 64 already did that, as well as MSX. 

Home gaming was going fine and well before the NES in Europe. NES was actually not all that popular since the games were expensive and couldn't be copied unlike cassette tapes that C64 and MSX were using. (MSX had both cartridges and tape deck)

Sure they were sold as 'computer models' but their primary function was games: 5,667 video games were released on Commodore 64 from 1982 through 2025. https://www.mobygames.com/platform/c64/ (NES had 1,367 games total)

I see this narrative a lot about how gaming was fine in Europe and so on yet I have doubts that without the mass market force that NA brought and powered that the gaming market would have sustained itself especially with the insane piracy issues that would go on to plague the computer markets throughout the 90s and 00s to the point that even EA a once staunch anti-console supporter of home computers in the 80s declared the non-console market dead. The issue with consoles in Europe wasn't popularity it was just a complex and problematic market to get set up in at the time for non European entities, the companies had no infrastructure and multiple nations each with their own regulations so console manufacturers couldn't push their platforms while home computer companies like commodore were based in UK as much as they'd like early until Sony and PS1 showed how to go about it hence why it sold well in Europe.

It's also not really about who did something first it's also about the execution for example Nintendo as far as I'm aware where the first to utilize the cartridge itself as additional hardware if needed so that certain games could overcome hardware limitations for example putting additional ram and chips in the carts of certain games, C64 had a price of $595 back on release MSX was $400 while NES/FCM had a price of $180 so while the games were more expensive the hardware was much cheaper. Consoles were straight forward plug and play and easy to find home computers not so much, accessories like the light gun and ROB, NES/FCM also introduced the license fee model for platform holders which is a solid business model to be sustainable an example of a paradigm shift, different approach to development and coding due to the being no cross development tools in Japan at the time they literally came up with a digital interface utilizing LEDs that allowed graphical design something unheard of at the time.

Ironically the NES was actually meant to release in NA in 1983 but Atari cocked up the publishing deal with Nintendo leading to the latter deciding to go it alone.