In Japan during the early 80's, they had no such "video game crash". The Nintendo Famicom, Sega SC-1000 and Master System had been running the show over there, with some limited offerings by Atari (2800), Intellivision, and Coleco. Largely, Japan was in sort of a vacuum, and a bit ahead of us technologically by that point.

But long story short, in America. Atari was still the king surpreme of consoles, even if Coleco and Mattel's offerings were a little better in areas of consternation to other people. The infamous video game crash of 1983/1984 cannot be pinned on one single variable, it was a mish mash. Atari got sloppy with royalty based licenses from Namco and Speilberg (Pac-Man and E.T. - though their role in the crash is GROSSLY overstated), allowed 3rd party makers to make stuff for their system without any legal recompense (so we got a flooded market of all kinds of crazy shit like Tax Avoiders or (shudders) Custer's Revenge - ewww!). On top of it, Atari was making bad business decisions, so was Mattel, Coleco saved itself by moving focus from their Colecovision to Cabbage Patch Dolls, and by 1983-1984, Regan and his Conservative jackasses extolled the evils of most types of gaming popular at the time, driving parents - in a hunt for social acceptance, to buy their kids a COMPUTER rather than a game console, because it's "educational" (because keyboard=educational - but it still plays Pac-Man using only 5 keys!).

So how does an almost 100 year old Hanfuda card company from Japan get into the United States gaming market when nobody wants a game console and was tossing them out with their friendship bracelets and late 70's New Wave albums? Simple....you stretch the truth - just a little bit. Nintendo test marketed their new American Famicom dubbed the "Entertainment System" in New York in late 1985, and had full distribution in place by 1986. However, the "killer apps" that made the NES what it was were twofold - Duck Hunt, a game where you could point a gun facsimilie at your TV set, and shoot at ducks on screen and actually hit them, and of course, Super Mario Bros., a franchise that - to get you zoomers to understand - this was MY Generation's "Five Nights at Freddy's" - except we never knew Shigeru Miyamoto's name until about a decade later.

NES-001 - The NES-001 was designed specifically for the North American Market in 1984-1985 to not look like a traditional game console, but rather, like a sophisticated piece of hi-fi equipment. It's a boxy unit, somewhat setup to resemble a "VCR" (to the technophobic American masses of the time where a common joke was all VCR's show the time as midnight or 12:00am - because nobody could figure out how to program them even WITH the manual). Part of this "VCR-like" design was the cartridge slot that, paried with Nintendo's NES10 lockout chip, was a major part of the problem with this console. Sure, the first three to five years you had a NES (less if you played it a lot like I did) it'd work first try a treat, but once you got it up in it's years, that's when the whole "blowing on the cartridge" thing began. The true problem was twofold, the contacts would bend, and sometimes just a little too far due to incorrect PCB specs on 3rd party cartridges and devices like Galoob's Game Genie cheat/enhancer device - with the worst offenders being at the far ends of the cartridge port where the data lines for the NES10 chip are located, causing the blinking red light, brown/blue/white/tan screens flickering on and off, and sometimes corrupt startup screens or even corrupt and hard locks on the hardware mid-game (Arghhhh!). Of course, us being dumb little kids at the time, we would blow our humid breaths on those copper traces on the cartridges and they would make contact, at least for a time, through the conductive saliva we blew on them, only to break contact after awhile when the saliva evaporated....or ruin the cart when the traces started to corrode off the circuit board inside. Today, we are all the wiser, you can either buy cheap replacement slots on Amazon/e-bay/esleshere, or you can just do what I do and bend your own pins. This was sold in "control deck" "action set" "Challenge set" "Sports Set" "power Set" and "Deluxe Set" bundles.

NES-101 - The now famous top-loader NES released in 1995. This was Nintendos "the fun is back under $50" moment, a way to gasp some life out of the NES while liquidating unsold inventory I guess. It wasonly ever sold as a "control deck" set with separate games (or special in-store deals to get separate games with the unit at a major discount). The NES-101 lasted until 1999 and did not sell to terribly well, making them rather rare and much sought after. This versaion also came with a redesigned controller known as the "Dog Bone" for it's shape, which was intended to be more comfortable than the original, ubiqutous, rectangular gamepads.

PICTURE	SET NAME & CONTENTS	DESCRIPTION
	Control Deck (Old) (1985-1995) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) AC Adaptor RF Switch A/V Cable NES/Nintendo Documentation	The Control Deck set was the original "Base System" package for the NES, and probably retailed around $150.00. It seems this was later likely replaced by the "Challenge Set" below until they re-released it with the new style NES in 1995. There was no pack-in game as it was expected the buyer would purchase a game with it, usually Super Mario Bros. (standalone). It seems not a lot of people bought this particular set, and those that did may have just been replacing a NES that Nintendo would not honor the warranty on.
	Control Deck (New) (1995-1999) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) AC Adaptor RF Switch NES/Nintendo Documentation	This came out in 1995 and was on shelves as late as early 1999. This featured the NEW style NES-101 "Top Loader" unit and 2 of the new ergonomic "Dogbone" controllers. It sold for around $50, some going as low as $34.00 before being pulled completley. This likely was done as NES games were highly discounted by this point as the SNES had already been out 5 years, so it made little to no financial sense for Nintendo to be charging $45-80 a game cartridge for this system, likely meaning whoever bought these would probalby be buying multiple cartridges if they were not just replacing an aging NES-001 unit.
	Challenge Set (1989-1995) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) AC Adaptor RF Switch A/V Cable Super Mario Bros. 3 Cart NES/Nintendo Documentation	The Challenge Set appeared sometime around 1989-1990 and was heavily marketed until the Control Deck above was released in 1995 (and actually overlapped a little bit, I can imagine it was interesting to pick between the new $50 NES or this $99.99 package as it was usually sold retail for). You got the latest Mario game (Super Mario Bros. 3) and 2 gamepads for 2 player play. This was when the NES was entering the "hand-me-down-to-my-little-sibling" phase of it's lifecycle before "budget" and then "obsolescence". I knew a few people who got this set, but it was not particularly popular nor really uncommon either.
	Action Set (1987-1993) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) Zapper LightGun (new & old) AC Adaptor RF Switch 75/500ohm Adapter 500/75ohm Adapter A/V Cable Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt Multicart NES/Nintendo Documentation	Here's the most popular set Nintendo made, the Action Set. Everyone got this, this was even what my first NES came from, and it's the reason there are so many Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt carts floating around - more than standalone copies of those two titles. It sold for around $200 (later I think marked down around $160 or so), and came in both a version with the blue multicart and the Gray Zapper (1987-1988), and the later version I had with the black cart and the Orange Zapper (1988-1993) You can see it was also old enough for Nintendo to be giving you adapters for connecting it to older Antenna style TVs from the late 70's on back still. This was the box shape you looked for under the xmas tree XP.
	Power Set (1989-1993) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) Zapper LightGun (Orange) AC Adaptor RF Switch 75/500ohm Adapter 500/75ohm Adapter A/V Cable PowerPad Controller Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet Multicart NES/Nintendo Documentation	The Power Set was likely the second most popular and was an interesting set. It was basically the Action Set + a Power Mat controller - a large vinyl mat that sat on the floor and you stomped on it to play World Class Track Meet (so as long as you were under 150LBS). This was the first version of these titles I ever saw stateside that had actual drawn art instead of a pixel-art black-label style label. The problem with this set is as an adult it's almost impossible to use that power mat without breaking it, rendering WCTM practically useless.
	Sports Set (1987-1993) NES-001 Control Deck 4x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) NES Sattelite C-Cell Batteries AC Adaptor RF Switch 75/500ohm Adapter 500/75ohm Adapter A/V Cable Super Spike V.Ball/Nintendo World Cup multicart NES/Nintendo Documentation	The Sports Set seems it did not sell too well, and that's not to terribly surprising because video games, at the time, were seen more of as a "kid thing". But this was kind of the start of the whole "get together with your bros and play some sports games together over Nachos and Beer" - it just was not that commonplace back then (because if you were a respecting adult at the time,y ou were to be yelling at your kids to come to dinner and do their homework and not "waste their time" playing foolish Nintendo games). Man how things have changed since then. This makes the NES Sattelite a rare attachment, almost as rare as the C-Cells that go into it.
	Deluxe Set (1985-1987) NES-001 Control Deck 2x NES Gamepads (Rectangle) Zapper (Gray) R.O.B. Robot C-Cell Batteries 2x Gyromites 2x Gyro Hands Gyro Tray Gyro Stand FIlter Lens AC Adaptor RF Switch 75/500ohm Adapter 500/75ohm Adapter A/V Cable Gyromite & Duck Hunt Carts NES/Nintendo Documentation	This was the original big set you got, and the one used to "trojan horse" it's way into a once thought dead video game market. All because of that robot with so much "Gyro" around it you'd think you were getting a Falafel sandwhich with the console. This also is a hard set to get because it was only produced very early on with the Gray Zapper and early Black Label releases. That said, R.O.B. I have heard as being a lot like setting up a Mousetrap boardgame to set up due to all the little doodads and doohickeys you had to strategically put together just to play Gyromite. It was the set advertised in this early commercial...

NES-001 & 101 RF Switch - While people today constantly yammer on endlessly about BVMs and PVMs and using Composite, adding SCART, or COmponent, or RGB to their NES, THIS is what we used way back in the day - the good ole RF switch. By the time the NES came out, electronic engineers finally figured out a way to allow us to switch the TV/Game signal automatically via a injection of a small amount of voltage along the Coaxial wire. So no more reaching behind the dusty ol' Family TV to flick a janky switch on a project enclosure to switch from your UHF Antenna to your video games. Sure, it's not the cleanest signal, but for some of us - like myself - who have been unlucky enough to only find a TV with RF inputs on it of some kind, this is actually the most ACCURATE experience to what it really was like. We had minor amounts of fuzz, color anomalies, and other weirdness from RF, and we lived with it. There's no sin in connecting a Nintendo this way. That's how almost all of us did it before the proliferation of CRT Snobbery. If you have a top loader, this is your ONLY choice.

NES-001 AV - On the NES 001 you got an A/V cable port, in mono, on the side. One for video (Yellow) and one for audio (red). This gives the best quality (stock) Video. And to me, it's just fine, and the NES requires nothing else. Everything else I hold in the same regard as "Tone Woods" "Tubes are better than MOdeling" and other blues lawyer-level snobbery and gatekeeping that has been slowly seeping into video gaming from guitar-dom for the last 20 years. Who cares, it's an 8-bit Video Game from 1985. There's a limit to what to expect. A lot of people prefer the "quality" over Authenticity, but if you want quality AND Authenticity, get your hands on an NES-001 and use A/V, it's more than adequate, it looks great, it's not TOO crisp or choppy, or "jaggy" as people call it, and it's actually pretty vibrant. It's also what I use to record my YouTube videos. And if you want stereo, there are RCA male to dual Female "Y" cables you can buy that will split the single audio port to both sides so you don't feel like you are 1/2 deaf while playing.

PICTURE	DESCRIPTION
	NES Gamepads (Old Style) - The classic rectangular NES Gamepads that you can still buy today fro 3rd party suppliers who have copied the design outright. When most people say NES controller, this is what people think of. This is what most of us grew up with and used for playing NES games with, and about 90% of the library uses these controllers, only a small portion of the rest requires anything "special".
	NES Gamepads (Dogbone) - These were the later release with the "Top Loader" that were designed to somewhat mimic the look/feel of the Super Nintendo. They are less as common, less as commonly reproduced, but overall, just as good a choice as any. One thing I never got though was people clamoring over these because they don't "dig into your hands" like the old rectangle ones do, but I've never had that problem. But hey, some guitarists prefer a Telecaster (blocky body, no contours) to a Stratocaster so there's no accounting for taste or preference here.
	NES Zapper (Gray) - This is the original release of the Zapper introduced in 1985 and discontinued in 1988. There's a few reasons for this, firstly an urban legend of someone in california holding up a 7/11 with one of the Gray Zappers and terrifying the clerk with it somehow (seems a bit unlikely but ya' know). The more accurate reason was in 1988 the Federal Ty Gun Law was signed into United States law requiring that Toy guns be visually distinct from real firearms in a variety of ways, including colors. So in late 1988 or 1989, Nintendo changed the barrel/grip assembly of the Zapper from dark gray into bright orange, probably making it one of the most compliant firearm facsimilies for kids at the time.
	NES Zapper (Orange) - The later 1988+ release of the Zapper redesigned to comply with Federal toy gun laws (and prevent stick-ups on unsuspecting non-gamers). This is the one most of us probably had, as the gray one seems just a little less as common. Now the grip/muzzle assembly was orange, retaining the bright gray outside piece, and then the trigger was changed to black. This gave it more of a "Black & Decker" power tool vibe TBH. As for us kids, we did not care, it was a cool, life-sized facsimilie of a gun that actually worked (on a CRT Television) for shooting at video game characters with (now if only we could have shot that d*** dog!).
	NES Max Gamepad - Somewhereabouts 1989, the gaming industry got a weird obsession with 360 degree gamepads. The best known being the "Turbotouch 360" gamepads that were all over the gaming magazines at the time in bright neon colors. So Nintendo's response? The NES Max, a proto-PS1 style gamepad slightly smaller and more ergonomic than the original rectangles. The gamepad featured turbo buttons above the regular buttons, and it's piece-d' resistance here was the 2-method directional pad, which consisted of an outer-ring that worked like a regular gamepad, and then an inner piece with a sliding intended B/A Button style sliding thingy that would allow you to roll around 360 degree movements all around with the NES Max. I had a couple of these for awhile and found them awkward to use, hence why I sold them. The outer ring is just too goofey to use for regular 2D titles like Super Mario Bros, the inner slider kept getting hung up on me from dirt/lint, and it just felt too small for my ginormous hands.
	NES Advantage Joystick - This was the big mother you wanted. A full sized, Arcade style joystick in NES garb, complete with the novel idea of putting variable speed Turbo options on it, and the ability to flick a switch and share the same Joystick between 2 players. It actually was very nice and actually a great controller. The only reason I did not keep it was because it takes up a lot of space and is very heavy. If I find another one someday at a reasonable price MAYBE I'll pick it up, but honestly, it's just not a necessity. I prefer the traditional gamepads these days. That said thoug, this thing was built like the IBM Model "M" keyboards of the same era, a frickin TANK.
	NES PowerPad - A large 3'x5' vinyl pad with a gray box with "Nintendo" embossed in it that plugged into your NES. You and your sub-150LB friend would stand side to side and play World Class Track Meet with this thing if you got the Power Set.....all the while praying to dear god for your life that you don't slip, fall, knock the CRT TV on your head, and get shocked to death after getting shrapneled by the picture tube imploding. So a lot of us would resort to banging on the pad on the floor after awhile, either out of tiredness, or out of concern for our own life and limb that we don't end up wearing a 20" Magnavox for a helmut! There was also a "Side B" to it, IIRC this was either for 2 player Track Meet or Dance Aerobics (something probably like Dance Dance Revolution for hte NES...plus I have a theory Princess Lana from Captain N was the Pilates instructor running the show in that game, lol). Honestly, I think a funny life-sized sampler application comparable to the Atari 2600 synthcart would be hilarious using one of these, either that or a game of "Video Twister", lol.
	NES Sattelite - This was a "Wireless Transciever" for your NES Controllers. How it worked was an Infrared sensor attached to BOTH controller ports on the Nintendo, and then the sattelite allowed you to plug in up to 4 controllers into a "dock" of sorts that allowed you to play a longer distance from your television, and with up to 4 players.
	NES Four Score - This was a 4-port gamepad adapter for the NES. This was used with certain (mostly sports) titles to allow up to 4 players on a single NES console. It was not used very often but worked with certain games, and it's not a very common piece of hardware to find today.

Most people wanting to get into the actual NES hardware will at least want one game pad and one zapper. That's usually what I suggest starting otu with, unless you're against Duck Hunt and/or more into playing 2 player games with your friends/spouse/etc.

Picture	Description
	Galoob/Codemasters/Camerica Game Genie - The Game Genie was a "Cheat Device" developed around 1990 and released/published by Codemasters (England), Galoob (America), or Camerica (Canada), depending on where you lived at the time and when you got one. The device plugs in between your NES cartridges and the console, and basically uses a series of "codes" to "overwrite" certain memory addresses from the cartridge with a certain bit of "code". The most popular use for this device was to allow people to "cheat" by having infinite (or at least more) lives, jump higher, run faster, or have all the weapons and armor. Sort of a precursor to today's "God Mode" cheats. However, it was also fun to "make up" new codes for this device and draw out some pretty wacky effects from NIntendo Games. This became a very popular thing on early YouTube such as my own Game Genie Krazy Kodez series in which I would basically show off codes that caused NES games to do funny things.
	Aftermarket Gamepads - Aftermarket gamepads were a pretty common option. A lot of these did things like added "Turbo" or "Rapid Fire" support to the A and B buttons, sometimes with adjustable speed. The Turbotouch 360 was another one I saw advertised a lot back in the day, which was a 360 degree gamepad meant to make games with eight-way movement easier to control (how well this worked is anyone's guess). There was also the Acclaim Wireless Gamepads which were not all that popular, but seemed rather cool at the time because being able to control anything wirelessly other than your TV or VCR was quite a dream come true back in the good ole 80's and early 90's. Companies like Hudsonsoft, Beeshu, and Archer sold Famicom style gamepads for the NES Aftermarket as well, some with turbo support and additional options, and some without.
	Aftermarket Joysticks - Just like the 2600, the NES had some aftermarket Joystick options too, though most 3rd party developers preferred to make aftermarket Gamepads as opposed to Joysticks since they were cheaper to make, and the NES pretty much popularized that game controller concept (the game pad). One such aftermarket joystick is the InterAct joysticks, such as the one I had as a kid, which allowed for turbo, 2 player operation, and rapid-fire support. Most of these were designed to compete with the NES Advantage.

Picture	Description
	Modern NES Equivalents - These are basically reproduction/modern NES Game consoles aimed at the modern gamer using a modern television (in most cases). These include the Retron 5, Retron 1 HD, Retron 1 AV, The AVS (not sure if still available), and a wide pile of Famiclone-type NES copies out there in different names with different appearances. These newer units tend to improve quality of life by omitting the NES10 lockout hardware and the janky "toaster" style mechanism. And often by replacing the old, hard to find, 9VDC power supply with a more modern USB-based approach. At the lower end you have the Retron 1 series by Hyperkin, such as the Retron AV to the left. These consoles use a standard Micro-USB cable to run, so you can plug it into the USB port on your modern television for power rather than tying up another wall outlet. THey also often come with new gamepads so you don't need one, and they come in some cool colors, such as my Hyperkin Retron 1 AV to the left that came in that cool turquoise/pink/black color scheme with matching gamepad.
	Replacement & Upgrade Gamepads - Currently we have a lot of chinese manufacturers making clones of actual NES GamePads as we remember them, or at least making gamepads that LOOK like the original NES controllers. Hyperkin is probably the one I gravitage to the most due to their widespread availability, but there's everything from generic equivalents on Amazon.com and Temu, all the way to big, fancy, new upgrades, like the Hyperkin Cadet Wireless Bluetooth gamepad, which can both be used with Emulators on your PC, AND with your original NES game console or clone thereof. The aftermarket has gotten so cool these days you can even purchase your own parts to MAKE your own NES game controllers tailored to your own taste as a DIYer.