Nintendo · 1985 · Nintendo Entertainment System
"Now you're playing with power"
Nintendo's NES launch campaign used the word "power" to attach technological authority to a toy-category product, helping convince retailers and parents that the NES was a different kind of product from the discredited Atari era.
The NES launched in North America in 1985 — two years after the video game crash had collapsed the market and made retailers deeply reluctant to stock game hardware. Nintendo's marketing team, led by Minoru Arakawa and Peter Main, designed the campaign specifically to distance the NES from the crash's associations. The product was packaged with R.O.B. the Robotic Operating Buddy and the Zapper lightgun to position it as a "home entertainment system" rather than a video game console in retail categories. The "Now You're Playing with Power" tagline anchored the television campaign, presenting the NES as technology product with authoritative hardware rather than the entertainment gimmick that had collapsed in 1983. Nintendo returned to the idea of 'power' again and again — not least in the name of its magazine, Nintendo Power.