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archbrix on 14 July 2025
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SvennoJ said:
archbrix said:

Both.

Seems more like a confluence of circumstances rather than groundbreaking.

Famicon launches in 1983 in Japan.
MSX fails to gain traction in the US.
Atari bungles up the release of Famicon in the US and starts a decline / video game crash in the US by poor quality management.
Nintendo parts ways with Atari and relaunches the Famion as the NES in the USA with "Nintendo seal of quality" marketing.
Full release in 1986 after 2 limited test markets in 1985.
Since Famicon launched in 1983 already, Mario and Zelda had time to be developed to accompany the US launch.

I don't see the groundbreaking part of the console...

Nintendo's marketing strategy was though, the "Nintendo seal of quality" was genius and as effective as Sony's "This is how you share your games on PS4" that killed the XBox One launch. That doesn't make the PS4 groundbreaking though.


"I don't see the groundbreaking part of the console..."

... and many of us do.

Game design alone on the NES was groundbreaking, as you've failed to come up with anything prior that guided the industry and its games the way SMB, Zelda and Metroid were able to do.  And those games were able to achieve these results thanks to hardware that allowed them to exist like they did.  So the NES and its timing/marketing were groundbreaking.  The Odyssey was the first home games console and preceded the Atari 2600 by several years but lacked the intuitive controller and titles like Pong, Space Invaders and Pitfall that the industry hadn't experienced before at home.  Again, groundbreaking.

The Sony Playstation wasn't the first console to use the CD format, it wasn't the first to use clever advertising against a competitor and it wasn't the first to have a Final Fantasy game but it was an amalgamation of said factors that made it groundbreaking too.  This is why many, including me, list the NES, Playstation and the 2600 as groundbreaking achievements in console gaming, and not the Commodore 64 or the MSX.