The console that revived the industry was sold as a VCR

In 1983 the American home video game market was worth roughly three billion dollars. Two years later, about a hundred million was left. There were many causes: the market was flooded with interchangeable cartridges, anyone could call themselves a publisher, and Atari produced the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial disaster and hauled the unsold copies to a landfill in Alamogordo. But the consequence was single and very concrete. Buyers at American retail chains struck the whole category off the list.

This is worth taking literally. Nintendo's problem in 1985 was not that customers did not want a console. The problem was that there was nowhere to put one: retail treated the video game shelf as dead space that had lost money two years running.

A vocabulary with one word removed

The Famicom — Family Computer — had been selling well in Japan since July 1983. It arrived in America under a different name and with a different vocabulary. Not a console, a Control Deck. Not a cartridge, a Game Pak. Not the Famicom, the Nintendo Entertainment System: the word game does not appear at all, only an entertainment system, a category retail had no complaints about.

The casing was rebuilt to support the same story. The Japanese Famicom is a red and white plastic box with the cartridge sticking out of the top, plainly a toy. The NES is a rectangular grey slab with a front-loading door: on the outside it is consumer AV equipment, something that belongs in the rack next to the VCR. The cartridge slides in and down like a VHS tape. That is not an aesthetic. It is an argument aimed at a buyer.

Then the bundle. R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy: a small robot that turned its head tracking flashes on the screen and worked with exactly two games, Gyromite and Stack-Up. As a gaming device it was obsolete almost immediately. As an argument it was flawless: with a robot in the box, the set landed in the toy aisle rather than on the cursed shelf. The Zapper light gun with Duck Hunt did the same job — a thing visible through a shop window.

On 18 October 1985 the NES went on test sale in New York: a hundred thousand units, eighteen games. Nintendo also promised to buy back whatever did not sell, taking the retailer's risk onto itself. The combination worked. In 1986 the system went nationwide, and by the end of the decade it stood in one American home in three.

The bill for front loading

Now the irony. To let the cartridge slide in gently from the front, the engineers used a ZIF connector — zero insertion force. In the Japanese Famicom the contacts gripped the cartridge as it dropped in vertically. In the NES the seventy-two contacts do not grip, they press, and with every hundred insertions they press a little worse: the metal loses its spring and oxide builds on the pads.

Separately, the board carried the 10NES lockout chip, which authenticated the cartridge. When contact is poor, authentication fails and the chip resets the console. Again and again. That is the anatomy of the famous blinking screen: not a broken game, but a machine answering several times a second that it does not recognise the cartridge.

A whole generation derived a ritual from this: pull the cartridge, blow into the slot, push it back in.

The ritual worked, but not because of the breath. What helped was the repeated motion itself, reseating the contacts. The moisture in an exhalation did the opposite and accelerated corrosion, so the cure slowly killed the patient.

The loop closes neatly. The decision taken so the console would not look like a console saved its sales, and the same decision became its defining defect. The NES would not have had an old age of blinking screens without a youth spent impersonating a VCR.