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 System
To differentiate Nintendo's new home platform from the perception of a troubled and shallow video game market still reeling from the crash, the company freshened its product nomenclature and established a strict product approval and licensing policy. The overall system was referred to as an "Entertainment System" instead of a "video game system", which was centered upon a machine called a "Control Deck" instead of a "console", and which featured software cartridges called "Game Paks" instead of "video games". This allowed Nintendo to gain more traction in selling the system in toy stores. To deter production of games which had not been licensed by Nintendo, and to prevent copying, the 10NES lockout chip system acted as a lock-and-key coupling of each Game Pak and Control Deck. The packaging of the launch lineup of NES games bore pictures of close representations of actual onscreen graphics. To reduce consumer confusion, symbols on the games' packaging clearly indicated the genre of the game. A 'seal of quality' was printed on all licensed game and accessory packaging. The initial seal stated, "This seal is your assurance that Nintendo has approved and guaranteed the quality of this product". This text was later changed to "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality".
Unlike with the Famicom, Nintendo of America marketed the console primarily to children, instituting a strict policy of censoring profanity, sexual, religious, or political content. The most famous example was Lucasfilm's attempts to port the comedy-horror game "Maniac Mansion" to the NES, which Nintendo insisted be considerably watered down. Nintendo of America continued their censorship policy until 1994 with the advent of the Entertainment Software Rating Board system, coinciding with criticism stemming from the cuts made to the Super NES port of "Mortal Kombat" compared to the Sega Genesis'.