Dear Reader:
NES designer explains the challenge of overcoming Atari's failure, how the NES got its name
Coming from a Mashable interview with NES designer, Masayuki Uemura...
"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, 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 .
...Atari was famous for their joystick. We were a little worried if it (the NES) 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.
...We decided to put Entertainment in the middle (of the name) 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. So that's how it became the NES..
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, 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."