They literally saved the home console industry after the crash. No NES, then chances are great that we wouldn't be talking about game playing outside of an arcade nowadays....or at least it would've been a grip of time before interest would've come back towards implementing home consoles.

I even gotta give the title to the NES over the PS1. Yes, the PS1 was a game changer in its own right with aiming at an older crowd but one of the main reasons it was able to do that is because the NES had primed the older crowd to become gamers when they were younger. By the time the PS1 came out, NES consumers had grown up and were used to the idea of playing games. I doubt the PS1 would've had as much impact if it had came out years earlier and had tried to appeal to the adults who didn't grow up with or had limited exposure to video games.


Since 1976