10 Atari Games that caused the Crash of 1984.

[A Black Falcon]

The name and marketing execution worked perfectly. People saw this new "Nintendo" thing as the future of computer gaming just as the TV commercials which starting airing nationwide during the '85 holiday season suggested. By the end of '85, word got around that NES' limited release was a SMASH hit. Atari was xenophobic at the time and didn't think a foreign game company had even a chance in hell of reviving the damaged NA market. Atari was also oblivious to their growing reputation and over rapidly dwindling consumer base. When Atari tried to revive its aging line with 7800 in the summer of 1986, they were met with another surprise: Another Japanese contender and STRONGER Arcade brand named Service Games "SE-GA", who Atari saw jump start Japan's home game market was preparing its own new technically superior cutting edge 8-bit system the newly dubbed "Sega Master System". By the Summer of 1986, Atari was completely stymied and its brand name was in shambles.

Interesting stuff, all of it, but on this part, even though this is probably true, the Atari 7800 outsold the SMS in North America, remember, so things weren't quite as bad as this suggests... sure, Atari was now a bit player thanks to Nintendo's dominance, but in the US at least they were in second, as the SMS did even worse than the 7800.

Of course that would completely change after the Genesis's release, but that was years later.

[gamevet]

From every source I've read and checked, Atari postponed the 7800(which was originally going to be launch in September 1984) because of the Crash. Atari launched the 2600 Jr during the Winter '85 CES around the same time Nintendo was approaching Atari for distribution of the NAVS "Nintendo Advance Video System" which Nintendo planned on launching in May of 1985. So Atari had already launched 2600Jr about 10 months before "NES fever" begin to infect America in the Autumn of 1985

Attachment 5901


Throughout late 1985, when Nintendo begin a limited release of the "Nintendo Entertainment System" in Select regions across the US, Atari heard and saw "word-of-mouth" after NES' impressive Mid Atlantic debut reporting 10,000 units sold the first Week of October 18-25, Atari also learned that newspapers,TVs,and telephone surveys by consumers having tested out and played it were causing alot of hoopla over this "Japanese contender"'s cutting edge new "Computer Game System". The word-of-mouth and By the time the NES reached West Coast shores(which was Atari's territory) by the mid fall of '85, Atari FINALLY realized that its aging and limping CPU line had some SERIOUS new competition. (several sources I've found including a NES history book published in 1990 confirm the youtube user's claims that NES had a limited North American release in populated "select cities and select test markets during the fall of 1985" before hitting ALL retailers nationwide in early '86 as indeed accurate).


By its first month, 90,000 units had been sold in its availability, when SEGA heard this, they realized that the North America home game market still had life left in it and set out to give their BRAND NEW 8-bit powerhouse the SEGA "SG-1000 Mark III" or "Sega Mark III" a face life and preparation for its very own US test market set for the mid-late Summer of 1986. By Christmas 1985, the "Nintendo Entertainment System" was the most talked about Electronic of the season ahead of "Compact Disc" Players and "High Quality 4 Head VHS players". Atari also learned that consumers were learning about the NES through word-of-mouth and that retailers in major cities were getting phone calls and letters from people asking about the system which in turn had retailers calling Nintendo's Seattle office ordering more units shipped.

.

You need to post sources, because the way I'm seeing it, you're just posting made up drivel that didn't happen. I implore you to read the book Game Over (or Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames), which clearly talks about the struggles Nintendo encountered to get the NES in stores. It started in NYC in 1985. There was no other region that was getting NES decks in 1985 and there was no Super Mario during the 1985 holiday season.


http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2...-nes-launches/

1985: Nintendo releases a limited batch of Nintendo Entertainment Systems in New York City, quietly launching the most influential videogame platform of all time.

On this day in 1985, the American videogame market was in shambles. Sales of game machines by Atari, Mattel and Coleco had risen to dizzying heights, then collapsed even more quickly.

Retailers didn’t want to listen to the little startup Nintendo of America talk about how its Japanese parent company had a huge hit with the Famicom (the 1983 Asian release of what became NES). In America, videogames were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future, and anything that just played games but couldn’t do your taxes was hopelessly backwards.

But Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi, whose grandfather had started Nintendo as a playing-card company almost a century earlier, believed strongly in the quality of the NES. So he told his American executives to launch it in the most difficult market: New York City. If they could make it there, Yamauchi thought, they could make it anywhere.

They couldn’t make it there. Retailers wouldn’t take the NES. So Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi’s son-in-law, took a huge gamble that he didn’t share with the president. He told stores that Nintendo would provide them with product and set up all the displays, and they only had to pay for the ones that sold and could return everything else. For the stores, it was a no-risk proposition, and a few agreed to sell NES.

Nintendo knew it had to get away from the term videogame. So it took its marketing emphasis off of the traditional games played with a controller — even though these comprised the vast majority of Nintendo Entertainment System games — and focused on two accessories that it had released for Famicom in Japan.

The Zapper light gun played the target-shooting game Duck Hunt. And R.O.B. the Robot Operating Buddy whirred and spun around, taking commands from the television, helping you play complex games like Gyromite.

This was light-years ahead of Atari, went the message: It has a robot!

The stench of Atari’s collapse wasn’t the only thing working against Nintendo. In 1985, Japan was not seen as the purveyors of cultural cool. They were the invaders, swallowing up good old homemade American technology with their cheap knockoffs.

“You’re working for the Japs? I hope you fall flat on your ass,” said a security guard to a Nintendo employee as he loaded Nintendo Entertainment System bundles into a store late at night.

Nintendo launched the system with 17 games:

•Duck Hunt (included with console)
•Gyromite (included with console)
•10-Yard Fight
•Baseball
•Clu Clu Land
•Donkey Kong Jr. Math
•Excitebike
•Golf
•Hogan’s Alley
•Ice Climber
•Kung Fu
•Mach Rider
•Pinball
•Stack-Up
•Tennis
•Wild Gunman
•Wrecking Crew

What it didn’t have was its trump card: Super Mario Bros., although it had just been released in Japan, was not yet ready for America.

The games were in some cases assembled so hastily that many of them were simply the Japanese circuit boards slapped into an American case: Put a copy of Stack-Up into an NES and the first screen just displays the Japanese title Robot Block.

At this point in the story, you’re expecting to hear that the Nintendo Entertainment System was a huge surprise hit, flew off the shelves and sent retailers into a frenzy begging for more. But that’s not quite what happened. In fact, Nintendo only sold about 50,000 consoles that holiday season — half of what it had manufactured.

But it was enough to convince Arakawa to soldier on, and to convince retailers that Nintendo had a viable product. In early 1986, Nintendo expanded into Los Angeles, then Chicago, then San Francisco.

At the end of that year, Nintendo Entertainment System went national, with Mario leading the charge. Videogames were back.

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9010293

The November 4, 1985 issue of New York Magazine printed what I believe to be the very first advertisement for the NES, which was launched in a limited New York test market about three weeks earlier. The two-page spread is an interesting snapshot of Nintendo's marketing at the time - as no retailer was interested in carrying the burden of another failed video game console, the NES was advertised as a high tech "entertainment system" that was built for the entire family. Nintendo's advertising campaign put extra emphasis on the system's unique accessories, especially the Robotic Operating Buddy attachment, seen here bursting out of some kind of strange robo-egg.


The actual text is interesting as well, you can almost feel the writer struggling desperately to talk about every single feature of the Nintendo Entertainment System except those damned video games. A reader of this advertisement would first learn about the system's family-friendly value, R.O.B. the robot, the Zapper light gun, the amount of colors displayable on the screen, and even the system's internal components ("you won't find microchips like these anywhere else!") before games are even mentioned. And even then, you don't get any descriptions, or even titles!


From the very start, Nintendo's Minoru Arakawa kept focus away from the games. When the NES was first shown at the 1985 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (under the working title of "Advanced Video System," or AVS), its components included keyboards (both of the text and music variety), infrared wireless controlles, a programmable BASIC cartridge, and even a cassette deck.


There was little interest at the time from retailers. "Everybody thought we were crazy or dumb," Arakawa said of the show. The AVS was planned for a Summer release, but instead of moving forward with that plan, Nintendo went back to the drawing board and redesigned the system.

The NES as we know it was first shown at the Summer CES in Chicago that year. In its report on the show, the Chicago Tribune called it the "best new system that doesn't have a chance."

The New York test market launch happened in October, followed by a general release early in 1986. Sadly, the Tribune was right, and the Nintendo Entertainment System today is seen as a strange relic of that long-dead "video game" fad that kids today only know about from VH1 specials about the 1980s. Oh, what could have been.

[A Black Falcon]

You need to post sources, because the way I'm seeing it, you're just posting made up drivel that didn't happen. I implore you to read the book Game Over (or Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames), which clearly talks about the struggles Nintendo encountered to get the NES in stores. It started in NYC in 1985. There was no other region that was getting NES decks in 1985 and there was no Super Mario during the 1985 holiday season.


http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2...-nes-launches/





http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9010293

Basically you've got some sources and Nintendo saying one thing (that is, that it launched in 1985 in stages, and that SMB was a 1985 release), and Game Over saying something else (1985 only in NY/NJ, no SMB until '86). Who's right? Only one can be, but who knows which one it is; there just doesn't seem to be enough information to say for sure one way or the other...

[gamevet]

Basically you've got some sources and Nintendo saying one thing (that is, that it launched in 1985 in stages, and that SMB was a 1985 release), and Game Over saying something else (1985 only in NY/NJ, no SMB until '86). Who's right? Only one can be, but who knows which one it is; there just doesn't seem to be enough information to say for sure one way or the other...

They are based on personal interviews with the people that were involved, including quotes. Mr.Sega has been pretty much making stuff up, like launches in regions that make no sense from a logistical standpoint. It started in NYC and then they moved on to Los Angeles to establish sales at those stores in February of 1986. Do you think Toys R' Us would have had a national television ad for the C-64 in 1986, if the NES was really a big seller by then?

The link I posted from 1up, showed the first advertisement for the NES in NYC. The ad was placed in New York Magazine on November 5th, 1985. If Nintendo was truly launched on a regional level in 1985, they wouldn't have spent money to advertise in a magazine that only catered to New York.

Mr.Sega said that he had asked a guy on Youtube (from a supposed 1985 ad I had posted here) about the NES and then came up with some extravagant story. I went back to the poster's video, and there was only 1 question that was asked and answered and it barely matched anything that Mr.Sega had said. You can google the NES launch and you'll find that most of it matches up with what Kent and Sheff had written. There was no overnight explosion of interest in the NES in 1985 and it was not being sold outside of NYC. Toy R' Us turned Nintendo away. Arakawa and company pretty much set up the sales displays and marketing for each store and had to offer to buy back any merchandise they could not sell.

And here's another one that says no!

http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/16...n_.php?print=1

Super Mario Bros. is one of video game history's greatest treasures. Its massive world full of colorful characters and hidden secrets informed the design of just about every action-adventure game that came after it. It spawned numerous sequels, television shows, comic books, merchandising, and even a feature film.

And at over 40 million copies sold worldwide (not counting the various ports and reimaginings over the last couple decades), this is arguably the game that brought business back to an American home video game industry that had plummeted to next to nothing in the early '80s, the victim of an oversaturated market that left stores full of excess inventory that was practically given away.

And yet, we don't know exactly when the game came out. In fact, talk to enough people and you'll come to find out that we can't even agree on the year the game came out, at least in the United States (in Japan, we know exactly when it shipped: September 13, 1985).

This isn't Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we're talking about here: this is one of the highest grossing consumer entertainment products in history, introduced less than 30 years ago, and we can't seem to get the date right.

I decided recently to try to set this right. I wanted to prove, once and for all, exactly when Super Mario Bros. invaded North America. I wanted to put this whole embarrassing mess behind us so that the history books of the future could be properly informed, and so that places like Wikipedia would have a definitive source to cite.

Did I find the answer? Well, sort of. Read on to see just how difficult this search turned out to be.

Back in 1985, Nintendo of America was a pretty small venture, dealing primarily in arcade game distribution (if anyone in the U.S. knew the name, they associated it with Donkey Kong), the licensing of its properties to other companies, and its handheld Game & Watch LCD games. So when it showed off a prototype of what would become the Nintendo Entertainment System at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show that January, buyers scoffed.

The system was huge in its native Japan, where it was known as the Family Computer -- it pushed 2.5 million units in 1984 alone, along with 15 million game cartridges. But American retail buyers, still burned by the video game industry crash of 1983, didn't care. Video games were dead and buried; they were toy store poison. People were fired over bum video game deals that resulted in shelves being crammed with five dollar clearance titles, and no matter how great these new Nintendo games may have looked, no one was about to take that risk again.

Nintendo of America's strength was in recognizing that there was still a market to be claimed. It wasn't as if the crash caused kids to stop buying games -- in fact, 1983 was a record year for cartridge sales, and quarters were still piling up in arcade machines around the country, too. The problem was that the home games paled in comparison to those in the arcade.

The NES, meanwhile, actually offered something resembling the arcade experience at home, or at least a reasonable facsimile. In the case of many of Nintendo's own games, the hardware was literally the same as what was powering their arcade counterparts, meaning they were truly arcade-perfect. A common theme in talking to Nintendo employees of the time is that if players just got their hands on the system, they'd be sold.

"We had a pretty strong belief that if we could get the consumer to try the product or experience the product, they would believe it was a new form of entertainment that they wanted to participate in," Gail Tilden, who was in charge of the company's PR and marketing at the time, once told me.

So instead of waiting for buyers to warm up to the idea, Nintendo risked everything by offering stores an unbelievably sweet deal: rather than being stuck with unsold inventory, Nintendo would buy back any unsold merchandise. They would even come in and set up the displays and demonstrate the games. All a store would have to sacrifice would be shelf space.

This all culminated in a test market launch limited to the areas surrounding New York City lasting from October of 1985 through Christmas Eve. A sort of "SWAT team" of Nintendo employees worked out of a rundown rented warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, delivering inventory and decorations by hand, setting up and tearing down displays, and showing off the games to any shoppers who would listen. Even company president Minoru Arakawa himself could occasionally be seen running a TV set up a flight of stairs.

Most of our history books -- and there just aren't that many yet, sadly -- tell us that Super Mario Bros. did not come to America until 1986. Most famously, Steven Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games specifically calls out that the game "had not been introduced" when the system debuted in New York. Chris Kohler in his book Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life says that game "arrived in 1986." Tristan Donovan, in Replay: The History of Video Games (a personal favorite) goes as far as to say the game came out in the United States very specifically in March, 1986.

I had never questioned that the game came out in 1986, even using the date myself in an article I published back in 2010 reflecting on this test market launch. It was only in response to my mistake that I was alerted to this article on Super Mario Bros. fan site The Mushroom Kingdom, which as far as I know was the first to question that date and attempt to do any research to fix it. The article does an admirable job of digging up a paper trail to try and show that the game, despite what historians have said, actually did launch with the system.

Kent himself was asked to clarify, and blogged that his interviews with Nintendo alumni Howard Lincoln, Minoru Arakawa and Howard Philips all told him that the game was not available at launch, and did not come out until the nationwide launch in 1986.

Kent also says that "an arcade version of the game predates the NES version and the well-known VS version," and that this original arcade version shipped in 1984. This is interesting given that there is no historical record of this earlier arcade game ever existing, and even more interesting considering that game director Shigeru Miyamoto himself has said that full development on Super Mario Bros. did not start until 1985.

It wasn't just Kent, though. Digging through my own notes, Nintendo's Don James -- who is still with the company to this day -- told me in 2010 that the game came out "about four months later" than the test market launch.

But as any detective or historian will tell you, human memory should not be considered a primary source where possible. Memory's faulty. You need documentation.

We have people that say they bought the NES bundled with Super Mario Bros. when they'd bought it, but according to sources that bundle didn't exist during the holiday of 1985.

[NeoZeedeater]

It blows my mind that there isn't 100% proof of a release date for SMB. I guess that's the whole point of the gamasutra article.

I'm always a bit wary of info from Sheff's Game Over. Errors in the first edition (like saying Sonic wasn't developed by Sega but by an outside company and saying Pac-Man's creator left the industry disgusted back in the day even though he was still at Namco decades later) weren't fixed for the second edition. It makes me wonder what other things they might have gotten wrong.

[gamevet]

It blows my mind that there isn't 100% proof of a release date for SMB. I guess that's the whole point of the gamasutra article.

I'm always a bit wary of info from Sheff's Game Over. Errors in the first edition (like saying Sonic wasn't developed by Sega but by an outside company and saying Pac-Man's creator left the industry disgusted back in the day even though he was still at Namco decades later) weren't fixed for the second edition. It makes me wonder what other things they might have gotten wrong.

There's a lot backlash from the Atariage members, against Kent and Sheff, for what was written about the demise of Atari. Sheff borrowed a lot of that information from Kent, who got most of that info from Bushnell. Atari-age would later get information from Al Alcorn and others the disputed what Bushnell had said, but you can't really put the blame on Kent, since some of those Atari people refused to be interviewed.

I do know that there were direct quotes from Lincoln and others from that Nintendo launch that confirmed when the system was debuted and where it first appeared. The NYC test market campaign ended in December of 1985, before the system was introduced anywhere else in North America.

[NeoZeedeater]

I think a lot of the Atari history also comes from the book Zap! I forget who it was now but I remember someone from Atari (maybe Warshaw) saying it wasn't very accurate.

[gamevet]

I think a lot of the Atari history also comes from the book Zap! I forget who it was now but I remember someone from Atari (maybe Warshaw) saying it wasn't very accurate.

I know that the story of Bushnell using his daughter's bedroom for a lab was wrong. It was Ted Dabney's home that was invaded. I think it was just a matter of Bushnell wanting to sensationalize the story, to better promote his involvement in the creation of those early products. I guess it didn't blow over too well with the other Atari guys though, so it did create some tension between the people involved.

[Zz Badnusty]

Kent also says that "an arcade version of the game predates the NES version and the well-known VS version," and that this original arcade version shipped in 1984. This is interesting given that there is no historical record of this earlier arcade game ever existing, and even more interesting considering that game director Shigeru Miyamoto himself has said that full development on Super Mario Bros. did not start until 1985.

I've always contended that that I first saw SMB in a generic conversion type cabinet in a department store cafeteria arcade well before anyone had the home version.
A couple of friends and I once compared recollections about that arcade and we agreed SMB was there before the home version, but we really weren't playing the home version until summer of '86, so the arcade game we saw was probably in that arcade in '85, not '84. Without any doubt it was not the VS version, but we just decided it was a pirate version. That's interesting to think perhaps Nintendo did distribute some arcade units before the home version.

[gamevet]

I've always contended that that I first saw SMB in a generic conversion type cabinet in a department store cafeteria arcade well before anyone had the home version.
A couple of friends and I once compared recollections about that arcade and we agreed SMB was there before the home version, but we really weren't playing the home version until summer of '86, so the arcade game we saw was probably in that arcade in '85, not '84. Without any doubt it was not the VS version, but we just decided it was a pirate version. That's interesting to think perhaps Nintendo did distribute some arcade units before the home version.

I was thinking the same thing, after I had heard that the VS arcade machine had came out after the cart. I remember playing the arcade game at a Pizza joint in Phoenix, before seeing the game on display at a department store in the fall of 86. I didn't recall seeing Vs. on the Marquee of the cabinet, or having 2 players either.

[tz101]

I emailed Nintendo about the NES and SMB release dates. Here is the reply I received.

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. It's great to hear that you're such a long-time supporter of Nintendo and I can certainly understand your interest in finding out the original release date of that particular bundle; however, while we don't have the exact bundle information you're looking for, I can confirm that the original NES came out in October of 1985. I know this isn't what you were hoping to hear, but I'm unable to confirm whether or not this included the Super Mario Bros. game that you mentioned. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

Colleen Duffy
Nintendo of America Inc.

Notice that she says NES 'came out in October 1985', and no disclaimer about it being a trial release. No amount of making up release dates by Mr. Sega can account for this email I received.

[Drakon]

I emailed Nintendo about the NES and SMB release dates. Here is the reply I received.

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. It's great to hear that you're such a long-time supporter of Nintendo and I can certainly understand your interest in finding out the original release date of that particular bundle; however, while we don't have the exact bundle information you're looking for, I can confirm that the original NES came out in October of 1985. I know this isn't what you were hoping to hear, but I'm unable to confirm whether or not this included the Super Mario Bros. game that you mentioned. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

Colleen Duffy
Nintendo of America Inc.

Notice that she says NES 'came out in October 1985', and no disclaimer about it being a trial release. No amount of making up release dates by Mr. Sega can account for this email I received.

Take that mr. sega. I wonder if he'll accuse this of being a fake now, or maybe he'll say she's wrong (I think he'll say she's wrong).

[gamevet]

I emailed Nintendo about the NES and SMB release dates. Here is the reply I received.

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. It's great to hear that you're such a long-time supporter of Nintendo and I can certainly understand your interest in finding out the original release date of that particular bundle; however, while we don't have the exact bundle information you're looking for, I can confirm that the original NES came out in October of 1985. I know this isn't what you were hoping to hear, but I'm unable to confirm whether or not this included the Super Mario Bros. game that you mentioned. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

Colleen Duffy
Nintendo of America Inc.

Notice that she says NES 'came out in October 1985', and no disclaimer about it being a trial release. No amount of making up release dates by Mr. Sega can account for this email I received.

That was already covered in the article that I'd posted from Gamasutra.

Nintendo's official release date is marked October 18th, 1985. The test market NES had a registration card with SMB on the check list. The release date became questionable, when Nintendo's own North American team stated that it came out later. But, there also were games listed by Nintendo, that never saw the light of day. What is most definite, is that there was not a SMB bundle available during the fall of 1985.

http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_release.shtml

While researching Copyright Office listings, another interesting fact came to our attention: while most of the 15 NES launch titles have October 18, 1985 listed as their date of publication (generally, the first day the article in question was available for sale to a wholesale retailer and/or the general public), the manual for Super Mario Bros. has a given publication date of October 31, 1985. (The game itself has a publication date of September 14, 1985.) In theory, the Copyright Office's date of publication data should be correct, but there are occasional discrepancies between when a title is regarded to have been released to retailers and when it is actually available to the public.

Of course, there is still the chance that the game was never released at all during the NYC run, even though it was planned for it. However, there is evidence to suggest that the NES versions were being produced, at the latest, in mid-October. A poster over on the Nintendoage forums managed to find a SMB cartridge with chips marked as being produced during the 42nd week of 1985.10 These cartridges should have been available for the L.A. launch in early 1986, but there is a strong possibility they would also have been available during the Christmas season in NYC.

Thank You Mario! But...

By this point, we thought we had worn out our available research. No new information seemed available anywhere, but it did seem safe to assert that Kent's statement of the game being unavailable until the national launch was clearly incorrect. Naturally, it was just as I was about to write up our findings that someone stumbled across a blog entry by Kent in which he states that:

"According [to] Howard Lincoln, Minoru Arakawa, and Howard Philips [sic], the game was not available during the limited trial launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the winter of 1985. It was available the following year as Nintendo took the product nationwide."11

At first, this appeared to deal a crushing blow to all our research, but it seems difficult to reconcile this statement with two different print ads listing the game for sale, a preview article specifically listing it in the upcoming launch, and Tilden's memory of 15 launch titles. It's possible that the trio were either referring to the game not being available at launch (but a few weeks afterwards), or not being available until 1986 (during the L.A. launch). There is also a chance, however slim, that some confusion was made between Super Mario Bros. and Mario Bros., which certainly wasn't available until the 1986 launch (along with Donkey Kong and other classic arcade ports).

After all of this investigation, there are a limited number of possibilities remaining:
•The game was released on October 18, 1985, along with the other launch titles and the system in a limited number of NYC stores. However, this appears to be contradicted by the copyright office's DOP.
•The game was released on October 31, 1985, the date of the manual's publication.
•The game was planned for a launch release, but not actually available until some unknown point between October 18th and mid (to late) November 1985, as seen in the Macy's ad.
•The game simply wasn't available until the L.A. launch in 1986.

While the actual launch date of the game remains an open question, it seems most likely that it was released during the NYC launch, between October 18th and November 17th of 1985. While we can't be certain of a release date prior to the Macy's advertisement on November 17th, I'm inclined to accept October 31st as the most likely release date of the title, given the Copyright Office's DOP for the SMB manual and Tilden's memory of SMB being present during the NYC launch.

The investigation will continue, but feel free to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. for the next 30 days!

Take that mr. sega. I wonder if he'll accuse this of being a fake now, or maybe he'll say she's wrong (I think he'll say she's wrong).

See above

Mario is not the main focus of his misinformed post. It's stuff like saying it was selling in regions (Mid-West) outside of NYC in 1985 and reaching the West Coast shores in the same year that are totally wrong. Howard Lincoln stated that after NYC, they focused on Los Angeles as their next market in February of 1986. The NES was not in the national spotlight until late 1986, when it was finally a nation-wide product.

So Atari had already launched 2600Jr about 10 months before "NES fever" begin to infect America in the Autumn of 1985




Throughout late 1985, when Nintendo begin a limited release of the "Nintendo Entertainment System" in Select regions across the US, Atari heard and saw "word-of-mouth" after NES' impressive Mid Atlantic debut reporting 10,000 units sold the first Week of October 18-25, Atari also learned that newspapers,TVs,and telephone surveys by consumers having tested out and played it were causing alot of hoopla over this "Japanese contender"'s cutting edge new "Computer Game System". The word-of-mouth and By the time the NES reached West Coast shores(which was Atari's territory) by the mid fall of '85, Atari FINALLY realized that its aging and limping CPU line had some SERIOUS new competition. (several sources I've found including a NES history book published in 1990 confirm the youtube user's claims that NES had a limited North American release in populated "select cities and select test markets during the fall of 1985" before hitting ALL retailers nationwide in early '86 as indeed accurate).


By its first month, 90,000 units had been sold in its availability,.

[MrSega]

Basically you've got some sources and Nintendo saying one thing (that is, that it launched in 1985 in stages, and that SMB was a 1985 release), and Game Over saying something else (1985 only in NY/NJ, no SMB until '86). Who's right? Only one can be, but who knows which one it is; there just doesn't seem to be enough information to say for sure one way or the other...

http://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer...20061023083937

The term "Interstate Commerce" means that its availability gradually spread across America. Its possible that there were still smaller less populated areas of the United States that didn't get NES until '86.

This "Super Mario Bros" trademark shows that it was available during Christmas of '85 due to the first use date of 19851018:

http://trademarks.justia.com/757/20/...-75720625.html

This of course is the GBC re-release of "Super Mario Bros. DX" but the document states its first use in Commerce as 19851018 which confirms the fact that Super Mario Bros DID hit in October of 1985.


This other document shows Nintendo also started displaying Super Mario Bros. in an NES10 Arcade Cabinet in early 1986 from what I theorize to sell the game to smaller less populated areas only carrying Arcade machines in Diners and General Stores:

http://trademarks.justia.com/735/94/...-73594455.html

[MrSega]

Take that mr. sega. I wonder if he'll accuse this of being a fake now, or maybe he'll say she's wrong (I think he'll say she's wrong).

According the official Trademark document for it, she probably is:

http://trademarks.justia.com/757/20/...-75720625.html

This of course is the GBC re-release of "Super Mario Bros. DX" but the document states its first use in Commerce as 19851018.

Nintendo of America did not get established in 1986. Nintendo of Japan was in charge of all management and distribution of NES during the fall of 1985.