One score ago, Nintendo set forth on the nation of Japan its first video game console, the Family Computer, which forever changed the way we play video games.

Despite beginning with only a small handful of the company's own arcade ports and a massive hardware recall during the busy Christmas season that year, the Famicom made possible for the first time fantastic new worlds which captured players' hearts and imaginations around the world. Rather than merely hitting and blasting highly abstract objects on a single screen -- blobs of pixels, really -- the Famicom was powerful enough to generate vivid characters and scrolling worlds. Unlocking the imagination of a development community, we players were able to travel to the Mushroom Kingdom and Hyrule. We took on ninjas, Dracula, and Mike Tyson. We explored not only extraterrestrial planets in deep space, but also the microscopic world of viruses and the very subconscious mind itself. Such a wide array of digital experiences had never before been possible.

Had the Famicom not come to pass, the way we play video games today would obviously be very different, if they still existed at all. The video game market in the West crumbled to pieces in 1983 when the several consoles available at the time were flooded with sub-par games that no one would buy. It took a bold Nintendo to release the NES at a time when retailers failed to trust in any electronic toys, with the horrific memories of truckloads of cartridges being dumped into landfills still fresh in their minds. Nintendo won the day with solid hardware and software innovations that would soon make "Nintendo" synonymous with the term "video games."

Please join us in celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Famicom's release in Japan. The living memory of its games will surely never perish from the Earth.