History of Nintendo
In 1889, Nintendo founder Fusajiro Yamauchi began manufacturing and selling hand-painted playing cards in Kyoto, Japan.
Over the next four decades, the cards were so popular in Japan that the company became the largest card-selling business in the country, eventually creating “durable plastic-coated playing cards” with Disney characters on them, which also brought success, and exporting them worldwide.
The playing cards were even used by some notorious gangs, including the crime syndicate the Yakuza. Nintendo, loosely translated, means putting your faith in the gods.
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1929-1949
In 1929, Fusajiro Yamauchi retired and deemed his successor to be Sekiryo Kaneda. In 1933, a joint venture with another, unknown company was established and Nintendo Koppai was renamed Yamauchi Nintendo & Company.
1949-1964
When Hiroshi Yamauchi took control of the company, he renamed it Nintendo Playing Card Co. and Marufuku Company Ltd. to Nintendo Karuta Company, Ltd. Hiroshi met with Walt Disney Productions in 1959 to strike a deal that allowed Nintendo to place Disney's properties on their cards. This resulted in cards that sported recognizable characters such as Mickey Mouse.
It was Hiroshi Yamauchi who expanded Nintendo into various industries outside of just games between 1963 and 1968, shortly after it went public, giving him financial flexibility. The first offshoot? A “love hotel” — where you could rent rooms by the hour.
Video game beginnings
1977-1979
Nintendo had gotten a taste of electronic video games with devices such as the Love Tester, the Magnavox Odyssey and Laser Clay Shooting. In 1974 Nintendo distributed the Odyssey in Japan, they would subsequently decide to create their own video game console via a joint venture with Mitsubishi Electric.
The games they created were Color TV-Game 6 in 1977 and Color TV-Game 15 in 1978. The games consisted of various adaptions of the Atari game known as Pong with minor alterations. Both iterations sold over a million copies and further cemented Nintendo's position in the industry.
1980-1982
Gunpei Yokoi was once travelling on a bullet train in Japan when he glanced over and saw a man messing around with a portable LCD calculator. The man seemed bored and was just playing around with it to pass the time. This caused Gunpei Yokoi to come up with the idea of a portable LCD video game, which soon gave birth to the Game & Watch. Game & Watch games did not contain interchangeable cartridges and thus when you bought the game, you bought an entire piece of hardware. The first Game & Watch game released, titled Ball, was distributed throughout the entire world.
Then along came Shigeru Miyamoto — a young developer who created one of Nintendo’s now-infamous games in 1980: "Donkey Kong."
The original game consisted of a single premise: Jumpman, who was a carpenter, needed to rescue his girlfriend, Pauline, from his "crazed" pet gorilla, who'd kidnapped her. The player would have to run, jump, and climb a series of obstacles in an attempt to save her. According to The New Yorker, Miyamoto based the creation of Jumpman on Popeye.
After years of selling its games made for devices designed by other companies, Nintendo released its own game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, worldwide in 1985.
According to the company, the NES sold over 60 million units.
In 1985, Mario got his big break. Miyamoto reinvented "Donkey Kong" for the Nintendo Entertainment System and made Mario the star. The objective of the game remained the same: Rescue the girl, this time Princess Peach, and save the Mushroom Kingdom.
"Super Mario Bros." went on to become one of the most iconic video games — as well as one of the most mass-produced — of all time. The game’s music, too, has in turn become a phenomenon of its own. In March, a rare copy of the game sold for $100,00, making it the most expensive video game ever sold.
In 1991, Nintendo released the Super Nintendo (SNES), and a year later, "Super Mario Kart" (its most popular game). Today, the company says it has sold 4.7 billion video games.
On the first day of the Nintendo 64 launch in Japan in 1996, more than 500,000 consoles were sold. It was introduced in America in September that same year and ended up selling more than 1.7 million consoles by December.
Nintendo has experienced sales fluctuations throughout the years, booms and plateaus, but it continues to successfully market its consoles and games to the child in us all. And it's paid off — Nintendo's net sales for 2020 amounted to nearly $12 billion.
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