NES Classic Edition

Lore & Background

The NES Classic Edition was first released on November 10, 2016, in Japan and Australia, and November 11 in North America and Europe. With limited supply, initial shipments sold out almost immediately. Nintendo produced about 2.3 million units over the next five months. On April 13, 2017, Nintendo announced it was ceasing production, with final shipments sent out within the next few days. The decision was met with criticism due to consumer lack of awareness of the limited availability. Following the announcement of the Super NES Classic Edition, Nintendo resumed production in 2018, bringing renewed shipments on June 29, 2018. Production was discontinued again in December 2018.

The console uses an Allwinner R16 system on a chip with four ARM Cortex-A7 cores and an ARM Mali 400 MP2 GPU, 512 MB of flash storage, and 256 MB of DDR3 memory. It runs the Linux operating system with a new NES emulation engine developed by Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD). The emulation included limited support for some memory management controllers used in NES cartridges, though not all known mappers were included. The emulation engine was regarded as superior in both visual and audio support compared to Virtual Console emulations.

The NES version features controllers with the Wii Nunchuk connector, allowing use with Wii Remote for Virtual Console games on Wii and Wii U. The Famicom version has hardwired controllers proportioned to the console's size, with a cosmetic microphone on the Player 2 controller that does not work. The console supports save states for all 30 games. A 320-page book called Playing with Power: Nintendo NES Classics was released the same day as the console.

Reader's Guide

The NES Classic Edition was one of many 'plug-n-play' consoles on the market, but its demand was notably large. Various retailers sold approximately 196,000 units in its first month, selling out within hours. Nintendo reported 1.5 million units sold by the end of 2016. Despite positive reception, journalists were confused about Nintendo's decision to discontinue the unit in April 2017, as Nintendo had not said at launch that the system was meant to be a limited run. Nintendo clarified that the NES Classic Edition was not intended to be an ongoing, long-term product. Nintendo of America's CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé stated that the company did not anticipate how incredible the response would be, and that they had to discontinue the unit due to limited resources. According to an April 2017 report by Eurogamer, the discontinuation was in part to transition the production line to a SNES Classic system. When the Super NES Classic Edition was announced, Nintendo said it would produce significantly more units to avoid a similar shortage. Upon its re-release in June 2018, the NES Classic Mini sold more units than the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In December 2018, Fils-Aimé affirmed that both the NES and SNES Classic Editions would not be restocked after the 2018 holiday season, nor did Nintendo anticipate producing any similar mini-console version of its other home consoles in the near future. Hackers discovered ways to unofficially add up to 700 titles to the system's library and enable emulation for other consoles, including Nintendo 64 and 32X games.