In 1983 Japan released the Famicom, which changed gaming forever. Two years later, it was released in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), just in time for the console’s first true crown jewel release, Super Mario Bros. For gamers in the US, the two-year gap was a godsend. That gap gave Japanese developers time to work out some technical kinks and build up enough of a library to ensure that. by 1985, they definitely had a grasp on both the hardware and some crucial console game design principles. Of course, not all of those developers’ ideas made it to the West.
