Dear Reader:
NES Classic Edition almost didn't feature game boxes on the user interface
The following info comes from a dev team interview via Famitsu, as translated by NintendoEverything...
- very few staff believed that NES Classic Edition / Famicom Mini would be a hit
- with Switch coming out soon, most staff at the company weren’t really paying attention to the NES Classic
- Yamato, a former developer and now a manager of the sales department, said that it would make fans happy
- Yamato strongly suggested there should be a TV commercial
- since the product itself was met with stock shortages, they could barely air ads
- the original plan was only to show the title screen of the various games on the menu UI
- dealing with copyrights for game boxes would be difficult
- when they made the menu with game title screens, they noticed almost everything was black, as most title screens were black
- when this was seen by other devs at Nintendo, they asked why game boxes weren't shown
- Nintendo’s Kazuyoshi Nishi had a tough time convincing third-parties to work with Nintendo on adding game boxes
- everyone finally gave their permission to feature the original boxes in the end
- the game icons are square-shaped so that both American and Japanese boxart can fit
- when the NES Classic Edition was heading towards the end of development, Takao Shimizu from Nintendo’s planning and development department strongly suggested that there would be stock shortages
- by this point, Nintendo had already decided how much they were going to produce for launch