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 64
More than five years prior to the release of "Super Mario 64", producer and director Shigeru Miyamoto conceived a 3D "Mario" design during the development of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game "Star Fox" (1993), developed by Nintendo along with Argonaut Software. He considered using the Super FX chip to develop a SNES game which would have been called "Super Mario FX", with gameplay based on "an entire world in miniature, like miniature trains". Instead, he eventually reformulated the 3D "Mario" idea for the Nintendo 64 - not due to the next generation console's substantially greater power, but because its controller has more buttons for gameplay. According to former Argonaut engineer Dylan Cuthbert, no game titled "Super Mario FX" had ever entered development, but rather "Super Mario FX" was the internal code name of the Super FX chip itself. According to Argonaut founder Jez San, "Super Mario 64" was influenced by a prototype of a canceled Argonaut game starring the "Mario" character Yoshi, which later became the 1997 platform game "".