It was originally released on July 15th, 1983, in Japan, in it's original incarnation that featured a few things that would be removed from the next iteration. The marketing name was Home-Cassette Type Video Game: Family Computer with an initial price of ¥14,800 (yen). These issues included a problematic chipset, and square buttons on the gamepad which were square and prone to sticking. This was revised and reissued in 1984 with the now better known round buttons, and an improved motherboard with a more stable circuit.

That same year, Nintendo started to look to producing the NES in the states, which needed confidence rebuilt in the video game market after the Video Game Crash of 1983/1984. So at first they looked to commission Atari, then went about it themselves, first with an idea known as the AVS.

The Nintendo Famicom is a much smaller unit, looking more like a strange battleship type toy made of red and white plastic (inspired by a DX Antenna ad Hiroshi Yamuchi saw using the colors around the time it was being designed), with HARD WIRED controllers to save cost, with the second controller lacking select/start buttons and containing a microphone, and gold stickers on the game-pads which have a more rudimentary looking design. It's also RF only, and designed for NTSC Japan funcftionality - which means on American US TVs, it requires being on channel 96 to work with our system over analog wire.

The cartriadges were different too. Originally, Nintendo wanted them to be the size of a cassette tape, but they ended up being about 1/6th wider, and twice as thick to house all the pin-through-hole electronics required to make the more complex cartridges required.

There is no NES10 lockout chip as found on the NES systems. The reason for this was because Japan did not endure the kind of market crash (or any market crash for that matter) in the video game industry. So 3rd parties making their own cartridges, boards, and whatnot, was far less of a concern for Japan than it was for the United States, where many nefarious "fly by night" operations were making strange titles for American consoles that lead to the crash of 1984.

Because of this, Famicom games look VERY different from their 72 pin American NES counterparts. Shells were made by Nintendo, or their own maker, and came in a rainbow of assorted colors. By contrast, we in the United States and elsewhere using the NES iteration, got only regular Gray cartridges from Nintendo (or gold plated black ones for the Zelda games) that all looked the same regardless of publisher.

This lack of a lockout also lead to the world at large - in less protected countries at least such as China, Russia, and elsewhere - producing their own localized bootlegs, pirates, and unlicensed releases of the Famicom known as Famiclones. Which I believe ulitmatley is what lead to Nintendo region-locking ALL of their products. This makes collecting Famicom related items a very interesting hobby for us.

Unlike the American NES, which was produced from 1985 till 1995, the Nintendo Family Computer was on the market in Japan for over 20 years - until 2003! Support for both continued by Nintendo until 2007 when available repair parts became difficult to source.

Keep in mind, almost ALL of the NES stuff we got was released in Japan on the Family Computer. All three Super Mario Bros (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. (2) USA, Super Mario Bros. 3), Kirby's Adventure, all 4 Dragon Quest games (called Dragon Warrior here). The only exceptions might be some LJN Licenced games (not too surprising, total garbage).

What we did NOT Get was a lot of esoteric and interesting stuff....let's explore these...

TITLE/PICTURE	DESCRIPTION
SASA (Astro Robo Sasa)	This is a Japanese Exclusive released in 1985 by ASCII entertainment (never heard of em', neither did I until I started messing with Famiclone bootleg stuff). Basically you play as a robot in a space suit propelling himself around with bullets to collect Energy cans located all over the playfield.
F1 Race	Someone's answer to the Namco classic, Pole Position, and it's a darned good port, about the closest thing you'll ever get to the original Pole Position or Pole Position II on a Nintendo product.
Star Luster	Someone in Japan loved Starmaster for the Atari 2600, because that's basically what this is, a space simulator complete with a radar map (except now you don't need the console dead in front of you the whole time to flick the Difficulty A/B switches to get to your star map, instead it's the select button). Funny enough, what makes this one great is this is one of the underrated Japanese Famicom releases because even Japanese kids found this game "too complex" to play due to the usage of menus and whatnot.
Parodius	Here's a popular one, Parodius Da, a "Cute-Em' Up" (a cutened up Shoot-Em-Up) where you fly as one of three space ship/alien thingies, shooting at a whole array of cute things on screen, including a pirate ship with a sentient masthead that's the head of a Cat and manned by a pirate parrot! The gameplay is top notch! The music is awesome, and hilarious (and changes to the situation), and
Recca (Summer Carnival 92')	Recca is a game programmed by KID Software and released by NaxatSoft in Japan and was a subject of a Summer Carnival event that took place on July 17th 1992. It's said to push the Famicom to it's absolute limits, showing a lot of incredible detail, speed, and high levels of processed sprites. Seriously, I have this on my Pocketgames 150-in-1 Multicart and it's one of my FAVORITE Games on that cartridge. It's basically a top-down shooter but it's bloody AMAZING!
Rockboard: Now That's Paradise	In Japan, Rockman is basically the name of Mega Man. And in 1993, they released a friggin addictive board game known as "Rockboard: Now That's Paradise". In Rockboard, you pick from one of four characters from the Capcom franchise to play against others or the computer. You roll the dice, land on spaces on the board and purchase them, and grow them, kidn of like monopoly, with different spaces giving different effects at times including turning you into robot masters, losing turns, or winning big money. I got this on the 150-in-1 cart and it's super addictive.

Another thing of interest are differences in the variations of various titles from Japan vs. their American counterparts. Super Mario Bros. 3, all 4 Dragon Quest games, The Legend of Zelda (actually anything Famicom Disk System), or anything Konami with VRC expansion chips are what makes this interesting.

And a final piece of the Famicom pie of interest, are all the bizzare Chinese clones and copies and unauthorized hacks that exist. The Famicom, being as it had no region lockouts (as that was not really a problem in the early 1980's), was often copied by the Chinese, the Russians, and various Middle Eastern territories under a number of names ranging from 300-in-1 Supersystem to the infamous "Dendy" consoles from Europe and Russia. Along with them are some pretty funky games. Here's some examples below....

So, what options do you have though if these are too expensive? Well, there's always emulation, but right now, the "reproduction" and "translation" scenes are very hot right now, especially on hot commodities such as Holy Diver, or Parodius Da!

Very early on was the original "Square Button" version which ahd a buggy motherboard. There's not a lot of these out there because the bug was bad enough with the motherboard that Nintendo would exchange with the newer version free of charge. These were all made in 1983. Another problem was the rubber square buttons on the gamepad were not that reliable or felt that good to player's hands, so they were changed with the precursor to the orange fire buttons we got in the USA.

The second version of the Famicom came out sometime in 1984 and was produced until sometime into the early 1990's. The main changes being the motherboard and the game controllers used now had plastic buttons with rubber domes underneaht that did not jam up and get stuck down like the previous version.

The last version, like America's "Top Loader NES", was a new style Famicom sometime in the early 1990's. It looks almost IDENTICAL to a 1995+ NIntendo NES-101 game unit except it takes 60 pin FAmicom cartridges instead of the 72 pin region-locked NES cartridges.

The first thing most people notice is the 2nd controller lacks a start or select button, and has a microphone. The start and select were only controlled from the first conroller, but the second player could use the Microphone with certain games, most notably, the Famicom Disk System version of "The Legend of Zelda" - where a enemy called the "Pols Voice" did not like loud noises, so by making racket into the microphone, you could influence the in-game actions.

A fun fact is one of the hardware designers, I think it was Gunpei Yokoi who came up with the Game and Watch and Game Boy products, said to put an Eject button on it because kids like pressing buttons on the console, lol.

There was a full blown computer add-on that added more RAM, a keyboard, and allowed you to program simple NES games in BASIC. We never had anything like this in the United States, maybe the closest would be that Miracle Piano add on.

Let's talk about that Famicom Disk System by the way. Starting around 1987-1988, Nintendo was wanting to make larger games, and the prices of memory chips were starting to go sky high as demand was struggling poor ole' supply. So Nintendo devised an actual friggin FLOPPY DRIVE for the Family Computer, which allowed for cheaper production of much larger games. Another nice thing about this is, a player could go to Kiosks all over Japan and PURCHASE games and use a pre-existing Famicom Disk to write them to. I think there was even a source for blank diskettes if I'm not mistaken. However, this also had an unwanted Side Effect of piracy as well. One nice feature of this also, was pre-battery-backed-saving of savegames on the disks. Thif eature was leveraged by The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, as well as Metroid (which had it's save feature removed for the US Produced version we got in 1987).