In 1983, American retailers treated home video games as a dead fad buried in a New Mexico landfill. This episode explains how Nintendo, a former playing card company, resurrected the industry with the Famicom and the NES. We follow Hiroshi Yamauchi's demand for a sub-9,800-yen console with a hidden expansion port, Masayuki Uemura's work with Ricoh to sidestep Commodore's 6502 patent by severing the binary-coded decimal circuitry, the red-and-white design borrowed from a DX Antenna billboard, and the risky 1983 recall of every faulty unit that forged consumer trust and set off the Famicom boom.

In America, the Atari distribution deal imploded over an unauthorized Coleco Donkey Kong port, so designers Lance Barr and Don James disguised the console as a VCR-like control deck with a front-loading slot, R.O.B. the robot, and game paks instead of ...