Nintendo History

Looking through Nintendo history, you'll find that the company hasn't always been connected to video games. The word "Nintendo" means "leave luck to heaven", which helped sell their very first product in 1889: hanafuda cards.

Hanafuda cards are basically the equivalent of playing cards, which are used to play many different types of games. The cards were handmade and very popular. In 1933, the president of the company teamed up with another company and merged into Marufuku Company, Ltd. Then, in 1951, the company was split into two companies: the first was the Nintendo Playing Card Company and the other was changed from the Marufuku Company to Nintendo Karuta Company, Limited. The cards were then made from plastic which boosted Nintendo to the number one playing card company in the East. Nintendo went public in 1962 when they were allowed to use Disney characters on their playing cards and sold them very successfully.

Nintendo was actually struggling to make money in the late 1960s and by accident Yamauchi, the president at the time, saw a mechanical arm being used to make playing cards and wanted that developed as a toy. It was a huge hit. Soon, other toys emerged from Nintendo: a Love Tester, the Ultra Machine (a toy that threw baseballs), and a popular puzzle. Their first video type game was actually the Beam Gun Game, which would be developed later as the NES Zapper.

For the second time in Nintendo history, they requested from another company the rights to distribute a product. In 1975, Magnavox gave them the rights to distribute the Odyssey in Japan. But this wasn't enough. Nintendo saw how popular the game became and quickly produced their first consoles, the Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15. Their first arcade game was Computer Othello" and was soon followed by Donkey Kong and Radar Scope. In 1977, Nintendo hired Shigeru Miyamoto and the video game industry would never be the same.

The 1980s pretty much shot Nintendo to the top of the gaming market. With the release of the Famicom in Japan in 1983 and the NES in the United States in 1985, Nintendo made and released hundreds of games of the next 5 years that would create video game addictions, huge collections, and a knowledge that would make almost every console after very successful.

In 1989, Nintendo history was supplemented with the release of the Game Boy. Bundled with the already addicting game Tetris, the Game Boy planted a foot in the gaming history and has never been dethroned as the handheld king.

Continuing the successful tradition of inexpensive consoles to compete with the other consoles, Nintendo released the SNES (Super Famicom in Japan) in 1991. It was a step up technically and still managed to play phenomenal and superb games.

There was a project in the works that eventually became the Nintendo 64 and on it was released some of the biggest games in Nintendo's history: Goldeneye, Conker's Bad Fur Day, The Legend of Zelda, and Starfox. Later in the decade, Nintendo released their first disc based console, the Gamecube.

In the 2000s, Nintendo released a few incarnations of the GameBoy, including the DS, the Micro, and the DS Lite. In 2005, Nintendo gave us a glimpse to what would released later as the Nintendo Wii, a console with a very different controller type: a Wii Remote and a Nunchuk that could hook together and play revolutionary games. On November 19, 2006, Nintendo released the Wii for $249, which undercut the PS3 and the Xbox 360 dramatically. They are currently outselling each competitor and consumers are still having issues in finding Wiis in stock even more than two years later.

Nintendo's history is a unique one, but if you follow what they do closely, you will notice that they learn quickly from their mistakes and that whatever has made them successful in the past is something they continue to do in the future. Let's hope they will continue the cheap console thought process.

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