Donkey Kong was the first game designed by legendary Nintendo desinger Shigeru Miomoto. It was released as an arcade title in 1981.

The Donkey Kong franchise was partially inspired by the Popeye comic strip and the 1934 animated short "A Dream Walking". Nintendo had previously licensed Popeye for a number of products, but they opted to save the license for future projects and instead create new characters for this game. Mario, Donkey Kong, and Pauline would replace Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyle. Mario and Donkey Kong would go on to become some of Nintendo's most iconic characters. Donkey Kong's success established Nintendo as an industry leader.

The game was ported to the Famicom as one of the three launch titles in 1986. In fact, the architecture of the Famicom was specifically designed to ensure it could faithfully recreate the experience of Donkey Kong in the arcade.

Nintendo Famicom

Two years before it came to North America as the NES, Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan in July 1983. Arguably the first true 8-bit system, the Famicom was the beginning of the console wars.

The Famicom popularized many of the features that would define this era of gaming including the D-Pad controller, which Nintendo had introduced with the portable Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong.

While the North American NES was only a gaming console, the Japanese Famicom could be be expanded with various peripheral devices, including keyboards and disk drives, which turned the Famicom into a full fledged home computer. This helped keep the Famicom relevant for much longer, outliving its American counterpart by more than half a decade.

Galaga is a Japanese fixed-shooter arcade game developed and published by Namco in Japan and by Midway in North America in 1981. It is the sequel to 1979's Galaxian and introduces new features from its predecessor.

Galaxian had been a leading arcade title, competing head-to-head with games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Galaga expanded on this success and became one of the popular games of the Golden Era of gaming. It is still often listed among the best games of all time.

Following its arcade success, Galaga recieved a number of home console ports. The 1985 port to Famicom and NES was praised for its faithfulness to the original arcade version.

NES Toaster

For its US release, Nintendo wanted to differentiate the NES from previous game consoles, which had developed a poor reputation following the video game crash of 1983.

The new design featured glossy plastic more reminiscent of modern A/V equipment, rather than the beige and wood-grain of previous consoles.

The NES featured a new front-loading system which was designed to resemble contemporary VCRs. The mechanism, which would later be known as the "toaster", used a so-called zero-insertion-force slot, which would theoretically reduce wear on the cartridge contacts.

Unfortunately, this mechanism proved unreliable. As the systems aged, connector failures became more frequent. For later consoles, Nintendo would return to top-loading slots with industry standard card-edge connecotrs.

Joust was released as an arcade title by Williams Electronics in 1982. It was one of the first games to popularize a 2-player cooperative mode. Joust was ported to several consoles by Atari. In a short-lived deal between Atari and Nintendo, the Famicom/NES port was the first commercially published game developed by Satoru Iwata, who also worked on games such as EarthBound and Kirby; he would later become the president and CEO of Nintendo.

NES Top Loader

After years of responding to service requests due to the failing “toaster” mechanism, Nintendo redesigned the NES in 1993. The new design borrowed from the new Super NES. The result was the Model 101, commonly known as the “Top Loader”.

The Model 101 was a cost-reduced version of the NES. It had a smaller form factor, omitted the composite video output port, and eliminated the lockout chip which was designed to prevent the use of unlicensed cartridges. This model also shipped with a redesigned controller, known as the "Dog Bone", with rounded ends resembling the SNES controllers.

But, of course, the most obvious change was the cartidge slot. To resolve the poor reliability of the Toaster's zero-insertion-force mechanism, the Model 101 uses a top-loading slot with a simple card-edge connector. The card-edge connector was a tried-and-true technology dating back to the earliest computers. It had been used on almost all previous game consoles, and Nintendo would use it on all of their future cartridge based consoles.