Nintendo was seeing a boom in the video game market in Japan, but the US game market was in disastrous shape. As Atari had no way to prevent unlicensed titles from being designed for their system, the Atari 2600, the US market was literally flooded with poor quality games, which caused the entire industry to suffer from a poor reputation. At first Nintendo approached Atari to distribute the Famicom in the US, but bad blood had formed during their competitive years so Nintendo turned to Sears who had originally helped the Atari 2600 establish itself in the market. With a video game sales slumping and a stockpile of unsellable 2600 units, Sears also passed. By the end of 1983, the US video game market crashed causing most of the major players to go out of business.
Convinced that their system could still make a splash in the US market, Nintendo made preparations to release the Famicom into the US themselves, taking special care to learn from Atari's failures. As US consumers were turned off by the connotation of a video game system, thinking of the low-quality titles previously released, Nintendo renamed the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) , and redesigned it to look more like an entertainment center component. To prevent other companies from releasing unauthorized and low quality games, Nintendo developed the 10NES lockout chip that prevented unlicensed games from working on the system. They also devised the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" to indicate authorized and officially licensed games as a mark of quality.
In 1985, Nintendo first test marketed the NES in New York, then expanded to the Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. These initial launches were a success and Nintendo expanded the release nationally across all of the United States. This move immediately reignited the video game market in the United States and instantly established Nintendo as the biggest brand name in the business.
