Board Thread:Questions?/@comment-27928327-20140707233123/@comment-3448772-20140708002621

I'm not extremely familiar with Nintendo's early years, but here is my understanding of it. Nintendo originally started as a company making Hanafuda cards which are relatively similar to western playing cards (52 card deck, ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, etc.), however those, didn't really have characters as they were just playing cards. Then after realizing some of the restraints of the playing card market, Nintendo began to branch out into a bunch of different industries. Most of Nintendo's attempts to do so failed. Nintendo did manage to make a number of various cards and toys, however I'm not very familiar with them, and I don't know whether they really had characters per se or not.

Nintendo eventually started to get into the video game industry with the Laser Clay Shooting System they created. However, that also did not have any characters. In 1974, Nintendo released the game Wild Gunman for the arcade, which did include a (to my knowledge unamed) Wild West gunslinger character. That Wild West gunslinger was likely Nintendo's first character, but I may be wrong about that.

Nintendo's first very notable character, however, was certainly Donkey Kong. His similarity to King Kong triggered the US court case of Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. when Universal Studios sued Nintendo claiming that Donkey Kong violated their trademark on King Kong. However, the court ruled in favor of Nintendo, which helped to add greatly to Nintendo's notability.