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.: The Lost Levels
The original "Super Mario Bros." was released in North America in October 1985. Within four months, it had sold tens of millions of Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom in Japan) video game consoles and signaled the end of the 1983 video game crash. When developing a version of the game for Nintendo's coin-operated arcade machine, the VS. System, the team experimented with new, challenging level designs. They enjoyed these new levels, and thought that "Super Mario" devotees would too. Shigeru Miyamoto, who created the "Mario" franchise and directed "Super Mario Bros.", no longer had time to design games by himself, given his responsibilities leading Nintendo's R&D4 division and their work on "The Legend of Zelda". Thus, the "Super Mario" sequel was delegated to its predecessor's assistant director, Takashi Tezuka, as his directorial debut. He worked with Miyamoto and the R&D4 team to develop a sequel based on the same underlying technology, including some levels directly from "Vs. Super Mario Bros."