History of Nintendo
The history of Nintendo, a Japanese video game company based in Kyoto, starts in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Yamauchi Nintendo", a producer of playing cards. Sekiryo Kaneda was company president from 1929 to 1949. His successor Hiroshi Yamauchi had Nintendo producing toys like the Ultra Hand, and video games, including arcade games, the Color TV-Game series of home game consoles, and the Game & Watch series of handheld electronic games.
Shigeru Miyamoto designed Donkey Kong for arcades: Nintendo's first international hit game, and origin of the company's mascot, Mario. After the American video game crash of 1983, Nintendo filled a market gap there by releasing their Japanese Famicom home console as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka's innovative Famicom/NES titles, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, greatly influenced gaming. The Game Boy handheld console and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System home console were successful, yet Nintendo had an intense business rivalry with Sega's consoles. The Virtual Boy, a portable console with stereoscopic 3D graphics, was a critical and financial failure. With the Nintendo 64, Nintendo began making games with fully-3D computer graphics. The Pokémon media franchise, partially owned by Nintendo, has been a worldwide hit since 1996.
The Game Boy Advance was another success. The GameCube home console, while popular with Nintendo's fans, sold poorly compared to Sony and Microsoft's competing consoles. In 2002, Satoru Iwata became president, leading development of the Nintendo DS handheld with a touchscreen, and the Wii home console with a motion controller; both were extraordinarily successful. Wii Sports remains Nintendo's best-selling game. The Nintendo 3DS handheld successfully retried stereoscopic 3D. The Wii U home console sold poorly, putting Nintendo's future as a manufacturer in doubt, and influencing its entry into mobile gaming. Before dying in 2015, Iwata led development of the successful Nintendo Switch, a hybrid home/handheld console. Tatsumi Kimishima succeeded him, followed by Shuntaro Furukawa in 2018. The Nintendo Switch 2 released in 2025.
1889–1949: ''Hanafuda'' cards
Nintendo was founded as Yamauchi Nintendo by Fusajiro Yamauchi on September 23, 1889, though it was originally named Nintendo Koppai. Based in Kyoto, Japan, the business produced and marketed, a type of Japanese playing card. The name "Nintendo" is commonly assumed to mean "leave luck to heaven", but there are no historical records to validate this. Hanafuda cards were an alternative to Western-style playing cards which were banned in Japan at the time. Nintendo's cards gained popularity, so Yamauchi hired assistants to mass-produce them.Fusajiro Yamauchi did not have a son to take over the family business. Following the common Japanese tradition of mukoyōshi, he adopted his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda, who then legally took his wife's last name of Yamauchi. In 1929, Fusajiro Yamauchi retired and allowed Kaneda to take over as president. In 1933, Sekiryo Kaneda established a joint venture with another company and renamed it Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.
Nintendo's headquarters were almost destroyed in 1945, during World War II, when the United States military was preparing to use their newly invented nuclear bomb on a Japanese city; Kyoto was the top city considered by the military for an attack, but U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson removed it as a potential target due to his appreciation of the city.
In 1947, Sekiryo established a distribution company, Marufuku Co., Ltd., to distribute the and several other types of cards produced by Nintendo. Sekiryo Kaneda also had only daughters, so again his son-in-law was adopted into the family. Yamauchi later abandoned his family and did not become company president. Subsequently, his son Hiroshi Yamauchi was raised by his grandparents, and he later took over the company instead of his father.
1949–1966: Disney partnership and public listing
In 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi attended Waseda University in Tokyo. However, after his grandfather suffered a debilitating stroke, he left to take office as the president of Nintendo. In 1950, he renamed Marufuku Co. Ltd. to "Nintendo Kuruta". In 1953, Nintendo became the first company in Japan to produce playing cards from plastic.In 1956, Yamauchi visited the U.S., to engage in talks with the United States Playing Card Company, the dominant playing card manufacturer in the United States, based in Cincinnati. He was shocked to find that the world's biggest company in his business was relegated to using a small office. This was a turning point for Yamauchi, who then realized the limitations of the playing card business.
In 1958, Nintendo made a deal with Disney to allow the use of Disney's characters on Nintendo's playing cards. Previously, Western playing cards were regarded as something similar to and mahjong: a device for gambling. By tying playing cards to Disney and selling books explaining the different games playable with the cards, Nintendo could sell the product to Japanese households. The tie-in was a success and the company sold at least 600,000 card packs in one year. Due to this success, in 1962, Yamauchi took Nintendo public, listing the company in Osaka Stock Exchange Second division.
In 1963, Yamauchi shortened the company's name from "Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd." to "Nintendo." Following this name change, Nintendo started to begin experimenting in other areas of business using the newly injected capital. This included establishing a food company in partnership with two other firms, with a product line featuring instant rice, and a vacuum cleaner called Chiritory. All of these ventures eventually failed. Toymaking, however, succeeded based on prior experience in the playing card business. In 1964, while Japan was experiencing an economic boom due to the Tokyo Olympics, the playing card business reached saturation. Japanese households stopped buying playing cards, and the price of Nintendo stock fell from 900 yen to 60 yen.
In 1965, Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi as a Maintenance Engineer for the assembly line. However, Yokoi soon became famous for much more than his ability to repair conveyor belts.
1966–1972: Toy company and new ventures
During the 1960s, Nintendo struggled to survive in the Japanese toy industry, which was still small at this point, and already dominated by already well-established companies such as Bandai and Tomy. Because of the generally short product life cycle of toys, the company took the approach of introducing new products at a quicker rate, marking the beginning of a major new era for Nintendo.In 1966, Yamauchi, upon visiting one of the company's factories, noticed an extending arm-shaped toy, which had been made by one of its maintenance engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, for his own enjoyment. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. Released as the Ultra Hand, it became one of Nintendo's earliest toy blockbusters, selling over hundreds of thousands units. Seeing that Yokoi had potential, Yamauchi pulled him off assembly line work. Yokoi was soon moved from maintenance duty to product development.Due to his electrical engineering background, it soon became apparent that Yokoi was quite adept at developing electronic toys. These devices had a much higher novelty value than traditional toys, allowing Nintendo to charge a higher price margin for each product. Yokoi went on to develop many other toys, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a Love Tester.
Nintendo released the first solar-powered light gun, the Nintendo Beam Gun, in 1970; this was the first commercially available light-gun for home use, produced in partnership with Sharp.
In 1972, Nintendo released the Ele-Conga, one of the first programmable drum machines. It plays pre-programmed rhythms from disc-shaped punch cards, which can be altered or programmed by the user, to play different patterns.
1972–1983: Arcade, Color TV-Game, and Game & Watch
Entrance into video games
Released in 1972, the first commercially available video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, has a light gun accessory, the Shooting Gallery. This was the first involvement of Nintendo in video games. According to Martin Picard in the International Journal of Computer Game Research: "in 1971, Nintendo hadeven before the marketing of the first home console in the United Statesan alliance with the American pioneer Magnavox to develop and produce optoelectronic guns for the it was similar to what Nintendo was able to offer in the Japanese toy market in 1970s".In 1973, its focus shifted to family-friendly arcades with the Laser Clay Shooting System, using the same light gun technology used in Nintendo's Kousenjuu series of toys, and set up in abandoned bowling alleys. Gaining some success, Nintendo developed several more light gun machines for the emerging arcade scene. While the Laser Clay Shooting System ranges had to be shut down following excessive costs, Nintendo had founded a new market.
Color TV-Game consoles
In 1977, Nintendo released the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15, two consoles jointly developed with Mitsubishi Electric. The numbers in the console names indicate the number of games included in each. They were the start of the Color TV-Game line of console.Shigeru Miyamoto and ''Donkey Kong'' (1981)
In the early 1980s, Nintendo created some of its most famous arcade games. The massively popular Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and released in arcades in 1981. Home releases soon followed, made by Coleco for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision video game systems. Some of Nintendo's other arcade games were ported to home consoles by third parties, including Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros. Nintendo started to focus on the home game market. It stopped manufacturing and releasing arcade games in Japan in late 1985.The release of Donkey Kong caused Universal Studios, Inc. to take legal action and sue Nintendo for copyright infringement on their character King Kong, which was actually in the public domain. The court sided with Nintendo in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. Nintendo thanked their lawyer, John Kirby, by giving him a $30,000 boat called the Donkey Kong, along with "exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats," and named the character Kirby after him.