Nintendo

For a list of games published by Nintendo, see List of Nintendo games

Nintendo (任天堂株式会社, Nintendō Kabushiki kaisha) is a video game developer, publisher, and home console and handheld manufacturer. They were founded in 1889 in Kyoto, Japan by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a manufacturer of hanafuda playing cards. Following the success of their cards, Nintendo attempted to jump into various other businesses with little to absolutely no success until their entry into the video game market. Translated to English, Nintendo means "Leave luck to heaven".

They entered the video game market with the permission to distribute the Odyssey to the Japanese audience. Soon enough they'd make their own consoles and handheld units such as the NES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance, among many others. They've developed quite the name for themselves for their multitude of video game series including but certainly not limited to Mario, Pokémon, ''The Legend of Zelda and various others.

At the moment they're statistically one of the most powerful video game companies in the business. Their current generation consoles, which consists of the Wii and Nintendo DS, soar to the top of the charts each week, something that hadn't occurred for quite some time.

History
Nintendo opened their doors in Kyoto, Japan in 1889 as a hanafuda card creator. Initially they were known as Nintendo Koppai, and throughout their history the name would change on various occasions, though at all times retaining Nintendo as the primary title. According to Nintendo's Touch Generations website, the name Nintendo translates to "leave luck to heaven", appropriate for a company that made playing cards.

Each card was handmade, which could be attributed to the success of the cards. Fusajiro Yamauchi, the president and founder of the company, was forced to hire more employees to keep up with the demand. To keep with Japanese tradition, Yamauchi's son in law, Sekiryo, became president after being formerly adopted by him and after he retired. During his reign as president, he brought the company through their first name change and called the company Nintendo & Company. Eventually he created Marufuku Company, Ltd, which would be used to distribute their cards.

A new direction
Sekiryo, like his father in law before him, didn't have any sons, so he chose to adopt his son in law, Shikanojo Inaba. Shikanojo left the family before taking control of the company, which resulted in his son, Hiroshi Yamauchi, to take control of the company at the befitting time. That time came when his grandfather, the president of the company, died. Hiroshi was only 21 - very young to run a company.

As president, Hiroshi changed the name once more to Nintendo Playing Card Company, Limited. Hiroshi's decision to create cards made out of plastic caused Nintendo to become the most successful company in the industry. Eventually Nintendo made a deal with Disney to create cards with their properties on them. This allowed Nintendo to sell the cards to standard families - whereas the prominent market were those who wanted to gamble with their cards. Following their outstanding success, Yamauchi took Nintendo public.

Nintendo eventually wanted to venture into other industries, which resulted in yet another name change, this time to Nintendo Company, Limited. They attempted to launch into the taxi cab business, make love hotels and rice, and even created a vacuum. None of these things, however, were successful, and were in fact downright failures. The only thing that was successful for them was the toy market, which they decided to focus on almost exclusively.

In the meantime, Nintendo's card business was doing horribly thanks to the economic boom in Japan. This was brought on by the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, which caused a dramatic alteration in Nintendo's stock from 900 yen to 60, but Nintendo had their ticket to success in an unusual location - an assembly line.

Gunpei Yokoi began working at Nintendo in 1965 as an engineer on assembly lines that produced hanafuda cards (by now the cards were no longer handmade). Hiroshi visited the factory he was working at and noticed an odd toy that Yokoi created himself that resembled an extending arm. Yamauchi loved the idea so much that he ordered Yokoi to create the product for the forthcoming Christmas. Nintendo managed to sell over a million units of their so called "Ultra Hand". Hiroshi promoted Yokoi so that he'd oversee product development, which was an intelligent move on his part.

Gunpei was quite advanced when it came to the electronic department, and thus was assigned to create electric devices. This was a plus for Nintendo, as they tended to cost much more for the consumer, resulting in more profit for Nintendo. These electric devices, which consisted of the likes of love testers to the Beam Gun Game (basically an early version of the NES Zapper) can be considered the predecessor to the video games Nintendo would soon release.

Soon enough in 1977, Nintendo hired the company's next living legend Shigeru Miyamoto, who would become crucial for the survival and the eventual success of the video game industry. He was hired thanks to a few toys and concepts that he constructed. Gunpei Yokoi taught Miyamoto in the R&D division of Nintendo, and would be very helpful to his creations early on.

The video game market
Meanwhile, video games were starting to become very successful worldwide. Nintendo wanted a piece of the pie and entered via permission to distribute the Magnavox Odyssey in Japanese territories in 1975. This occurred during a time when availability of consoles was at a bare minimum. In fact, at the time of its release, Atari's Pong console had yet to be released. This was a successful move, and influenced Nintendo to not only create their own console, but their own video games as well. The final result was the Color TV Game series, which consisted of a multitude of different units released at different times. They were best sellers, and caused Nintendo to unanimously be considered a part of the industry.

Later on their next move was on the arcade industry, which at the time was the most successful portion of the business. Their first foray onto this format was Computer Othello, though Nintendo would become more successful with other titles such as Shigeru Miyamoto's Donkey Kong.

The plumber (carpenter) and ape that started it all
Nintendo wished to enter the American market, and needed a huge game in order to do so. They attempted this by constructing Radarscope, though by the time it reached western shores it was already out of date. Nintendo had thousands of unused arcade units on their hands, and needed to fill them with a more advanced video game. They turned to Miyamoto, who was unfamiliar with video game development. They went to Miyamoto because they literally had no one else. Yokoi assisted him in creation of a title that has become one of the most noteworthy titles of all time. This game was Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong starred a plump protagonist named Jumpman (later Mario, and later a plumber) and a disgruntled ape named Donkey Kong who was simply tired of being controlled by the carpenter, and thus resorted to a course of villainy by kidnapping his beloved Pauline, Mario's original love interest. The game included, for a first, a plot in a video game, and the interesting platforming aspects put it on the top of retailers' lists. Nintendo placed their first unit in an American bar to see how well it went, and within a couple of days the machine was full of quarters. Nintendo had not only found their initial arcade success, though they also found the man who would become the driving force for Nintendo and the industry's triple A titles.

Donkey Kong was popular enough to be ported to various video game consoles, though Nintendo wasn't directly involved with them other than giving the developers permission to port. The game spawned a multitude of sequels for arcades, including Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, and Mario Bros., the latter a game which would introduce Mario's identical twin brother Luigi.

The introduction to handhelds
Nintendo's third pillar in video games were handheld units, which were introduced with the Game & Watch units. Like the Color TV Games, the Game & Watches did not feature interchangeable cartridges, an innovation that would be introduced later on in video games. Instead, players had to purchase each unit individually. It got its name from the fact that players can not only play their LSD handheld titles, though also view the time via a handy watch. The games ranged from early titles like Ball (the initial game) to later, more advanced titles that starred Nintendo, Disney and even Snoopy characters. Many of the games were huge successes, some selling over 2.5 million units. The Game & Watch series was the beginning of Nintendo's handheld market, which would soon consist of the Game Boy.

Family Computer...NES
Meanwhile in Japan, Nintendo decided to develop a cartridge based console that would eventually be called the Family Computer, or Famicom for short. The designer of the console was a man named Masayuki Uemura. The designer is noted for development of the console, though soon enough he would vanish from the company. Along with the console they also released ports of classic arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Popeye among many others. Distribution started with a rocky start - the initial chips were broken, thus resulting in a recall of all the units. With the second shipment, however, the Famicom soared to the top of the charts, quickly becoming the best selling console in Japan. Despite being the best selling console, it still wasn't nearly as successful as Nintendo had hoped. This changed, though, with the release of one particular game.

Over in America, things weren't looking entirely good. Video games were considered a fad, and the quality of each video game was decreasing. Atari was the cause of all of this mess, partly for releasing a terribly rotten version of Pac-Man on their consoles and a game based on E.T. that was rushed to the market because of the impending release of the movie. So it came to a surprise that Nintendo was eying the country in which the industry was doing so terribly in. Though they did, and they understandably had to do a lot of convincing to the distributors as well. One of the primary things they used to draw in companies was a device called R.O.B. This was considered a toy, and they hoped that they could convince everybody that rather than a home console, the Famicom, named NES in America, was a children's toy rather than a video game. Nintendo quickly came to find that children, coupled with the marketers, didn't appreciate R.O.B. very much, with one kid in product testing calling it complete "shit" and another saying that it "sucks". Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa, however, didn't seem to care to much for the kids' opinions and released it with the NES anyway.

While R.O.B. has become a cultural phenomenon among Nintendo gamers in the 21st century, appearing as a playable character or minor cameo in many video games such as Mario Kart DS and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it wasn't the robotic buddy that made the NES such a huge success, but was rather a side-scrolling platform video game that starred the hero from Donkey Kong. Shigeru Miyamoto once again headed the project, called Super Mario Bros., which was also released with the NES. To this day it is considered the best selling video game of all time, and brought in a whole new generation of video gamers. Miyamoto, Mario, and Nintendo had brought the industry back in the country that started it all, and best of all consumers were happy.

Back in Japan, Super Mario Bros. caused the Famicom to be entirely successful, carving the path for future video games to be released.

The beginning of a legend
Soon after Super Mario Bros. was released, Nintendo needed to come up with another hit, and to do so they turned once more to Shigeru Miyamoto. His next game was inspired by his adventures into mountains as a young kid. He called the game The Legend of Zelda, and it starred Nintendo's new protagonist Link. The game, which is argued to be the first game with an overworld, infused RPG elements with action adventure aspects as well.

Next Nintendo introduced to the world Metroid, Kid Icarus, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, and many others.

Systems
Nintendo's vidoe game systems consists of both home consoles and handhelds. They entered the market with the Color TV Game series, which quickly became a smash hit among consumers. Their first entry into the handheld market was the Game & Watch video games. Eventually Nintendo developed interchangeable consoles and handhelds with the release of the NES and Game Boy. Their next generation console included the SNES, followed by the Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii. In the handheld industry, following the Game Boy, Nintendo released, in the respective order, the Virtual Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. The Game Boy, Game Boy Advance and NIntendo DS all had redesigns, which included Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light, Game Boy Advance SP, Game Boy Micro, and DS Lite.

Famous People
This is a minor list of famous Nintendo people, for a bigger list, see Nintendo People.


 * Fasajiru Yamauchi - Founder
 * Hiroshi Yamauchi - Second president
 * Satoru Iwata - Third and current President NCL
 * Gunpei Yokoi - Game Boy engineer
 * Shigeru Miyamoto - Video game creator
 * Reggie Fils-Aime - President of Nintendo of America
 * Koji Kondo - Composer of music tracks in Nintendo games
 * Howard Phillips - Creator of Nintendo Power
 * Takashi Tezuka - Head of Ninte