NES Games with Famicom Adaptors

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On 9/28/2023 at 8:44 PM, Tanooki said:

not knowing if they'd fail they just made adapters in the factory and mounted the existing Japanese boards to it to minimize their costs if they took a loss.  At that rate they could toss the adapters and shells, and salvage the actual working games for more Japanese sales. 

While this is plausible on its face, I thought the reason was the opposite - they couldn't ramp up for the American market as much and as quickly as they wanted, so they created adapters to use existing stock in the new market which was rightfully expected to be very successful. I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure that is the commonly accepted story. I've never heard otherwise until right now.

 

Spoiler

citations... would like to see any info saying otherwise

https://famicomworld.com/workshop/articles/nes-cart-converters/

Way back in the early days of the NES, so the story goes, Nintendo Co., Ltd. had some trouble with their NES boards. It’s not clear exactly what happened, but there weren’t enough of them for the production and release of games in time for the Christmas shopping season. With sales expected to pick up, they were pressed with a question: Would young Timmy be without his Gyromite on Christmas morning? (Gently stir your hot cocoa…watch the steam rise.)

Nintendo had a solution to help Timmy get his Gyromite. Instead of using the regular 72-pin NES boards in games to be released in the United States, Nintendo combined 60-pins Famicom boards and 60-to-72 pins converters inside their gray NES game shells. And so, Nintendo saved Christmas for lots of eager NES children all across the land.

 

http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/odd/scans/adapter.html

for some reason (probably due to being rushed for the holiday season of 1985), Nintendo made cart production easier by not making new NES cart boards, but by using the same Famicom cart boards and simply fitting Famicom-to-NES adapters on them! Weird, eh?

et cetera

Most search results I found were selling adapters, amazon links and so on; not info about the events and company decisions of the day, but that's some relevant info. I believe David Sheff's book also corroborates the above, and afaik that's the most thoroughly researched and comprehensively cited contemporary record of this sort of matter.