The High Score Contest

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.

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.

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.