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".
Nintendo Entertainment Analysis &amp; Development
In 1989, one year before the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released in Japan, the R&D4 department was spun-off and made its own division named "Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development" (commonly abbreviated as "Nintendo EAD"). The division was comprised into two departments: the "Software Development Department", which focused on video game development and was led by Miyamoto, and the Technology Development Department, which focused on programming and developing tools and was led by Takao Sawano. The technology department was born out of several R&D2 engineers that were assisting SRD with software libraries. After that, the same department later collaborated with Argonaut Games to develop the Super FX chip technology for the SNES, first used in "Star Fox" in 1993. This venture allowed the Technology Development Department to become more prominent in the 3D era, where they programmed several of Nintendo EAD's 3D games with SRD.