Exactly 30 years — and 42 million consoles sold — after its debut on American shores, it seems like the Nintendo Entertainment System was destined to be a success.

But in the early 1980s, things were quite a bit dicier. Nintendo was worried about the viability of home consoles; it wasn't sure how to escape the fate of other U.S. game-makers, who were crippled when market saturation led to a crash in 1983, which in turn left very little demand for home gaming consoles. (Things got so bad that thousands of game cartridges were sent be buried in a New Mexico landfill.)

In 1985, the shadow of Atari's failure in the U.S. loomed even across the Pacific Ocean.

The NES had been released in Japan two years earlier as the Famicom, a condensing of "Family Computer." On that side of the world, it wasn't a success out of the gate, selling just 440,000 consoles. Even so, the man in charge of creating the console's original hardware — Masayuki Uemura — tells Mashable that Nintendo's then-President Hiroshi Yamauchi believed that the company could sell at least a million consoles in the U.S. market.

Masayuki Uemura, lead architect of the Nintendo Entertainment System hardware.

"Our thoughts at the time were that the video game medium was something that had been born originally in America," Uemura told Mashable during a visit to New York to celebrate the NES's 30th anniversary. "Although we had made the Famicom, we were thinking it might not be well-suited to Japan."

So Nintendo's American office, already established thanks to the company's strong arcade game business, began researching the likelihood of bringing the Famicom to the States. That's when Nintendo's distributors, already burned by Atari's collapse and bankruptcy that unpurchased stock on the shelves, tried to frantically warn the company off.

Uemura recalled seeing advertisements at CES for the ColecoVision and the Commodore 64 console. Both included a keyboard, a precedent set by Atari when it insisted its consoles were "computer systems, and not toys."

"It was the opinion at the time that the age of video game consoles in America had passed and it had moved on to personal computing at home, and people using personal computers," Uemura explained.

Arcade cabinets, show us the way

Nintendo's arcade business was doing well in America, as restaurants and bars added arcade cabinets that featured plenty of Nintendo games. Aside from the wildly popular Donkey Kong, Nintendo's cabinets were unique in that some featured two screens that allowed a pair of players to compete head to head.

But what most people don't know, according to Uemura, is that this was actually the Famicom's secret debut in the United States. Two of those tiny game consoles were used to power the two-player arcade experience. Players could compete in Nintendo's Tennis, each controlling a player on a separate screen. To help generate more revenue, Nintendo of America even set up the cabinets so each side could play a separate game, including Pinball, Pole Position and Excitebike.

An advertisement for Nintendo's arcade cabinets, known as the Vs. System

These arcade cabinets became so popular that an early 1980s gaming publication called Play Meter ranked them as some of the most popular in the country. That's when Uemura said that Nintendo began to reconsider bringing the Famicom to America.

"We discovered the distributors that stood in between the game creators, which were us, and the players were an unnecessary piece. While some of the distributors weren't as big of a fan of these larger arcade cabinets, the users really liked what we were putting out, and we had that link to the player base," he said.

"This lead us to conclude, as we had seen with the arcade distributors, [that] if we were going to move into this space, we could appeal directly to the player and say, 'Hey, we have a system we think you'll like.' We had seen we could attract players directly and skip past the distributor step."

The Nintendo Entertainment System next to the Famicom Image: Wikimedia Commons Evan Amos

The specter of Atari

At the time, Uemura said, it was vital for Nintendo not to get mixed up in the bitter taste that Atari had left in American's mouths.

While that company had produced successful games, its image was tarnished by a gold rush of cheap products that were designed and programmed in just a few weeks. The most memorable example, E.T., was produced so quickly that the game itself was barely functional; thousands of unsold copies were eventually buried in a New Mexican landfill. "For our strategy, one of the things we thought was most important was to overcome this image that home gaming wasn't popular, which had unfortunately happened due to Atari's system," Uemura explained. "But we also realized [that] the moment people saw what we were bringing out and thought 'oh, this is just another Atari,' we would lose them."

So Nintendo's team went to work, using three strategies to differentiate the Famicom's American form from anything that remotely resembled an Atari game console.

The VCR had gained popularity in the early 1980s. Nintendo thought it could position the NES in a similar way: as companion technology to the television.

"That's one of the reasons you saw the front-loading in the NES originally — because that's how you put video tapes into a VCR. It was similar thing," Uemura said. It's also something Atari didn't do; consoles produced by Nintendo's rival were top-loading, just like the Japanese Famicom. (There were also concerns that in parts of the U.S. with dry climates, static electricity from the user's hand could short-circuit the NES when they were inserting and removing games.)

The Atari factor was also why, despite much deliberation, Nintendo decided to keep the plus-shaped directional pad on its controllers when it brought them to the U.S. That button formation is now ubiquitous for gamers.

The Famicom player 1 controller, with its plus-sign directional pad. Image: Flickr, NFGPhoto

"Atari was famous for their joystick," Uemura said. "We were a little worried if it would be a success or not, but we knew it was different from Atari — and we knew when people saw it they could see that difference immediately."

Formatting the controller like this wasn't just a way to look different. Games like Super Mario Bros. generally scrolled left and right, so the directional pad made sense — and as Uemura said, the game's precision jumps just couldn't be made on a joystick.

Finally, the name itself could help Nintendo define itself — while also learning from Atari's own strategy. Instead of going by "Family Computer" in the U.S., Nintendo elected to move in a different direction. It did, however, end its console's name with "system" — because that's what Atari had done.

"We decided to put Entertainment in the middle. We thought we could maybe piggyback a little bit [on] the naming idea Atari had had, but put something with a little more dynamism and attraction in the middle," Uemura explained. "So that's how it became the NES."

A legacy, 30 years later

It's been three decades since the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in New York, on Oct. 18, 1985. Uemura is shocked to see that three decades later, fans' passion for the console is stronger than ever. "I was so surprised to find that in Japan and, America as well, that over these 30 years, the interest in the history hasn't disappeared," he said.

He also spoke about his son and daughter, who were about 10 at the time of the Famicom's release and helped him debug games at home before it launched.

"This was something they cherish about being kids at that time, was going to school and that was everyone was talking about the Famicom," he said. "When they get together now, in their alumni groups or whatever, these are people who are 40 — the topics that are sure to come up are the Famicom and 'those times.'

"The fact the Famicom succeeded after the game market fell apart with the shock from Atari could be said by some to be a miracle," he concluded. "But this was something that we believed in and we created because we thought it would be a success. We went with that belief — and it stands as a testament that 30 years later, it's still being talked about. And I'm proud of that."