In Japan, Nintendo had released its Famicom (Family Computer) console in 1983, one of the first consoles of the third generation or the "8-bit" generation. Japan did not have a similar third-party development system in place, and Nintendo maintained control on the manufacturing of game cartridges for the Famicom using a licensing model to limit which third-party games were published on it. The Famicom did launch with a technical fault that Nintendo scrambled to fix, but by the end of 1984, the Famicom was the best-selling console in Japan.[7] Nintendo looked to release the unit in the United States, but recognized that the market was still struggling from the 1983 crash.