History of the Nintendo Entertainment System
In the late 80s, Nintendo's dominance was threatened by newer, technologically superior consoles. 1987, NEC and Hudson Soft released the PC Engine, and a year later, Sega released the 16 bit Mega Drive. Both were introduced in North America in 1989, where they were respectively marketed as the "TurboGrafx-16" and the "Genesis." Facing new competition from the PC Engine in Japan, and the Genesis in North America, Nintendo's market share began to erode. Nintendo responded in the form of the Super Famicom ("Super Nintendo Entertainment System" in North America and Europe), the Famicom's 16-bit successor, in 1990. Although Nintendo announced their intention to continue to support the Famicom alongside their newer console, the success of the newer offering began to draw even more gamers and developers from the original NES, whose decline accelerated. However, Nintendo did continue support of the NES for about three years after the September 1991 release of the Super NES, with the NES's final first-party games being "" and "Wario's Woods".
Super Mario Bros. 2
Also that year, the young subsidiary Nintendo of America was just completing its test marketing of, and beginning its nationwide launch of, the new Nintendo Entertainment System and its flagship game, "Super Mario Bros." This American adaptation of the Famicom platform had been altogether deliberately delayed in the wake of the video game crash of 1983, a regional market disaster which the Japanese market had not directly experienced. The subsidiary did not want the increasingly popular "Mario" series to be known for maximal frustration and thus inaccessible to a recovering, transfiguring, and expanding market — nor to be stylistically outdated by the time the Japanese "Super Mario Bros. 2" could be eventually converted to the NES's cartridge format, localized, and mass-produced for America. Utilizing its considerable regional autonomy in order to avoid risking the franchise's popularity in this burgeoning market, Nintendo of America declined this game's American release and instead requested a newer and more player-friendly "Super Mario Bros." sequel for the non-Japanese world.