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".
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.