Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

After the 1983 crash left Western retailers deeply wary of video games, the NES, the international version of Japan's Famicom, did something remarkable: it brought the whole market back from the dead. Nintendo marketed it carefully, kept a tight grip on the quality of its games, and slowly rebuilt the trust that the flood of earlier rubbish had destroyed.

It worked spectacularly. The NES made consoles respectable again, and it did so on the strength of some of the finest games ever made, launching Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Metroid and setting design standards the industry still follows.

In reviving console gaming almost single-handedly, the NES put Nintendo back at the very centre of the business and set the stage for decades of dominance. It is hard to overstate its importance: without the NES, the modern games industry as we know it might look very different, if it existed at all.