Nintendo video game consoles
Although the company had earlier released Color TV Game and Game & Watch, which were their first and second systems respectfully, they did not achieve worldwide success until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1983. The NES restarted the video game industry after the video game crash of 1983, and was an international success. In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, which became the first handheld console to sell in large numbers. In the early 1990s, Nintendo's market lead began to decrease; although the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was a strong seller, the Mega Drive/Genesis was a very strong contender. Nintendo and Sega would both lose a significant portion of the console market towards the end of the 1990s, as Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation became the most popular console, beating the Nintendo 64, though Nintendo managed to sell more than Sega Saturn.
History of the Nintendo Entertainment System
While the NES in its heyday was never officially released in the Soviet Union, an unlicensed Chinese hardware clone named the Dendy was produced in Russia in the early 1990s. Aesthetically, it is an exact duplicate of the original Famicom, with the color scheme and labels altered. In addition, the hardwired controllers of the original console were omitted in favor of removable controllers which connected to the front of the unit using DE-9 serial connectors, identical to those used in the Atari 2600 and the Atari 8-bit family of computers.
All games sold in Russia for "Dendy" are bootleg copies, not the original Nintendo cartridges.
In North America, the NES widely outsold its primary competitors, the Atari 7800 and the Sega Master System. The successful launch of the NES positioned Nintendo to dominate the home video game market for the remainder of the 1980s. Buoyed by the success of the system, NES Game Paks produced similarly appropriate sales records. Released in 1988 in Japan, "Super Mario Bros. 3" would gross well over US$500 million, selling over 7 million copies in America and 4 million copies in Japan, making it the most popular and fastest selling standalone home video game in history. The original "Super Mario Bros." actually outsold "Super Mario Bros. 3" by a margin of 40.24 million to 17.28 million. Many of the sales of the original game, however, were the result of the fact that it was packaged alongside the NES console itself.