Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System

The first production builds of the Famicom had different controllers. The original controllers featured rubber squares buttons. These controllers were reworked due to their weak lockout and soft buttons that could be worn down. Future Famicom controllers had buttons that were round and hard, instead of square and rubbery.

Nintendo had strict licensing policies for the NES as a way to encourage quality over quantity, in hopes of avoiding the fate of Atari during the video game crash of 1983. Third parties were limited to releasing 5 titles per year for the NES, all titles had to be reviewed by Nintendo before they would be licensed, and the console had a system to lock out unauthorized games that did not contain the necessary patented chip as a way to enforce Nintendo's control.

A combination of third-party developer pushback, legal challenges, and competition from other console manufacturers such as Sega eventually forced them to relax their policies.

Actor and martial artist Jackie Chan had once endorsed a Chinese Famicom (NES) clone console called the "Little Tyrant", produced by the company of the same name (known in English as Subor). The console was marketed as a "learning machine" to avoid China's ban on video game consoles at the time.

In the film Ghostbusters II, the Ghostbusters used a modified NES Advantage controller to guide the Statue of Liberty through New York.

Shortly after the Famicom's launch in 1983, Atari approached Nintendo offering to distribute the system outside of Japan as the Nintendo Enhanced Video System. Negotiations for the arrangement stalled when Atari saw a demonstration for the Coleco Adam home computer system that used the ColecoVision port of Donkey Kong as a demo title. Because Atari previously gained the exclusive PC port rights to the arcade game, they assumed that Nintendo was also working with Coleco behind their backs. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up, the North American video game industry had crashed and Ray Kassar had stepped down as CEO of Atari, causing the agreement to be called off entirely. The Famicom wouldn't reach international shores until 1985, when Nintendo began distributing a revised version in North America themselves as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Multiple early "black box" NES releases' cartridges produced during the console's US launch in Winter 1985 didn't use NES ROM chips, but rather Famicom ROM chips with a built-in converter. The 15 NES launch titles, and the only games known to have these chips, are:

•10-Yard Fight
•Baseball
•Clu Clu Land
•Duck Hunt
•Excitebike
•Golf
•Gyromite
•Hogan's Alley
•Ice Climber
•Kung Fu
•Pinball
•Stack-Up
•Tennis
•Wild Gunman
•Wrecking Crew

All of these games would eventually be reprinted with regular NES chips.

In a rough time span from 1987 to 1988, a commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System - often colloquially referred to as either "Scary Nintendo Commercial" or "We Are Nintendo, You Cannot Beat Us" - was aired on Australian television by Mattel, the region's Nintendo distributor at the time. The commercial featured primitive CGI renditions of antagonists from different NES games (Smick from Gyromite, Bowser and Lakitu from Super Mario Bros., and the laughing scent hound from Duck Hunt, led by an original character resembling Max Headroom, a dystopian TV character who was being used to market Coca-Cola at the time) mocking the viewer with the phrase "you cannot beat us", set to the ominous castle music from Super Mario Bros.

This commercial has sustained a decent viral popularity, often being featured on listicles and review videos related to bizarre 1980s or Nintendo commercials, but it is not as well known that the advert was part of a larger Nintendo campaign, and that "you cannot beat us" is a variation on another, more frequently-used Nintendo slogan from the country - "it can't be beaten!" This phrase was used in a series of significantly less frightening live-action commercials showing children playing the games while doing imitations of the voice from the CGI commercial, winning, shouting "Beat 'cha!", and then having a hazard from the game enter their room (a tennis ball while playing Tennis, a martial artist while playing Kung Fu, and a generic effect where their chair blasts into the sky for Super Mario Bros.) while a filtered voice announces "We are Nintendo, we do not like losing!"

Popular conceptions about Nintendo's release history in Europe claim that their hardware was never released in the former Eastern Bloc until the 21st century. Rather, these countries instead saw the proliferation of various clone consoles called "Famiclones", such as the Dendy (a Taiwanese-built bootleg that achieved widespread popularity in the Commonwealth of Independent States, made up of the ex-republics of the former Soviet Union) and the Pegasus (which became as popular in Poland as the Dendy did in Eastern Europe). However, while Famiclones did indeed dominate the Eastern European gaming market during the 1990s, Nintendo was not only aware of this, but actively attempted to halt the spread of bootlegs in these regions in favor of officially sanctioned products.

In 1994, Nintendo made a deal with Steepler, the Dendy's distributor in Eastern Europe, to permit continued sale of the Dendy in exchange for equal distribution of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy in the Commonwealth of Independent States; official Russian releases of these systems even included Dendy stickers on the packaging to reflect the arrangement. Meanwhile, in various other parts of the former Eastern Bloc, Nintendo made deals with other third-party distributors; among others, the NES, SNES, and Game Boy saw official releases in Poland, Hungary, and the former territories of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia during 1993–1994.

There are two different candidates for the video game console with the longest lifespan, from official introduction to discontinuation, and which one holds the distinction depends on one's metrics.

In terms of support from its original developer, the longest-lasting video game console is the Famicom, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Famicom was introduced in 1983 and remained on store shelves until 2003, lasting twenty years on the market.

However, when counting support from third party manufacturers, the distinction instead goes to the Sega Master System. While Sega incrementally discontinued the device between 1991 and 1994 depending on the region, Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy received a license from Sega to continue manufacturing clones of the Master System due to its high popularity in Brazil. These clone consoles continue to be manufactured in the present day, decades after the original Master System's launch in 1985.