Nintendo

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (任天堂株式会社) is a video game console manufacturer and software company. Before the Dreamcast was discontinued, Sega was one of Nintendo's largest competitors.

Pre-video game History
Nintendo was founded as a playing card company by Fusajiro Yamauchi (山内 房治郎) on September 23, 1889. Based in Kyoto, the business produced and marketed Hanafuda cards. The handmade cards soon became popular, and Yamauchi hired assistants to mass-produce cards to satisfy demand. Fusajiro departed from the company in 1929, leaving Sekiryo Kaneda (金田 積良) in charge. Sekiryo was married to Fusajiro's daughter, Tei Yamauchi, and the two had a daughter named Kimi Yamauchi (山内 君).

In 1949, the company adopted the name Nintendo Karuta Co., Ltd. (任天堂骨牌株式会社). The company did business as The Nintendo Playing Card Co. outside Japan. Hiroshi Yamauchi (山内 溥) took over the company after his father, Shikanojo Inaba (稲葉 鹿之丞), left him and his mother Kimi.

In 1956, Hiroshi visited the U.S. to talk with the United States Playing Card Company, the dominant playing card manufacturer there. He found that the biggest playing card company in the world was using only a small office. Yamauchi's realization that the playing card business had limited potential was a turning point. He then acquired the license to use Disney characters on playing cards to drive sales.

In 1963, Yamauchi renamed Nintendo Karuta Co., Ltd. to Nintendo Co., Ltd. The company then began to experiment in other areas of business using newly injected capital during the period of time between 1963 and 1968. Nintendo set up a taxi company called Daiya. This business was initially successful. However, Nintendo was forced to sell it because problems with the labor unions were making it too expensive to run the service. It also set up a love hotel chain, a TV network, a food company (selling instant rice) and several other ventures. All of these ventures eventually failed, and after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, playing card sales dropped, and Nintendo's stock price plummeted to its lowest recorded level of ¥60.

The toy and game market
In 1966, Nintendo moved into the Japanese toy industry with the Ultra Hand, an extendable arm developed by its maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi in his free time. Yokoi was moved from maintenance to the new "Nintendo Games" department as a product developer. Nintendo continued to produce toys, including the Ultra Machine, Love Tester and several light gun games. Despite some successful products, Nintendo struggled to meet the fast development and manufacturing turnaround required in the toy market. In 1973, its focus shifted to family entertainment venues 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. Following 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 found a new market.

Nintendo's first venture into the video gaming industry was securing rights to distribute the Magnavox Odyssey video game console in Japan in 1974. Nintendo began to produce its own hardware in 1977, with the Color TV-Game home video game consoles. Four versions of these consoles were produced, each including variations of a single game (for example, Color TV Game 6 featured six versions of Light Tennis).

A student product developer named Shigeru Miyamoto was hired by Nintendo at this time. He worked for Yokoi, and one of his first tasks was to design the casing for several of the Color TV-Game consoles. Miyamoto went on to create, direct and produce some of Nintendo's most recognizable video games.

In 1975, Nintendo moved into the video arcade game industry with EVR Race, designed by their first game designer, Genyo Takeda, and several more games followed. Nintendo had some small success with this venture, but the release of Donkey Kong in 1981, designed by Miyamoto, changed Nintendo's fortunes dramatically. The success of the game and many licensing opportunities gave Nintendo a huge boost in profit and in addition, the game was the first to include Mario.

The home console market
On July 15, 1983, Nintendo launched the Family Computer (Famicom) game console in Japan, alongside ports of Donkey Kong, Popeye, and Donkey Kong Jr. In 1985, a cosmetically reworked version of the system known outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, launched in North America.

In 1988, Gunpei Yokoi and his team at Nintendo R&D1 conceived the new Game Boy handheld system, with the purpose of merging the two very successful ideas of the Game & Watch's portability along with the NES's cartridge interchangeability. Nintendo released the Game Boy in Japan on April 21, 1989, and in North America on July 31, 1989. Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa managed a deal to bundle the popular third-party game Tetris along with the Game Boy, and the pair launched as an instant success.

In 1989, Nintendo announced plans to release the successor to the Famicom, the Super Famicom. Based on a 16-bit processor, Nintendo boasted significantly superior hardware specifications of graphics, sound, and game speed over the original 8-bit Famicom. The Super Famicom was finally released relatively late to the market in Japan on November 21, 1990, and released as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in North America on August 23, 1991 and in Europe in 1992. It was rivaled Sega's Mega Drive, which had been advertised aggressively against the 8-bit NES. A console war between Sega and Nintendo ensued during the early 1990s.

In August 1993, Nintendo announced the SNES's successor, codenamed Project Reality. Featuring 64-bit graphics, the new system was developed as a joint venture between Nintendo and North-American-based technology company Silicon Graphics. The system was announced to be released by the end of 1995, but was subsequently delayed. Nintendo also announced a CD drive peripheral called the Super NES CD-ROM Adapter, which was co-developed first by Sony with the name "Play Station" and then by Philips. Bearing prototypes and joint announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show, it was on track for a 1994 release, but it ended up getting cancelled.

In 1995, Nintendo announced that it had sold one billion game cartridges worldwide, ten percent of those being from the Mario franchise. Nintendo deemed 1994 the "Year of the Cartridge". To further their support for cartridges, Nintendo announced that Project Reality, which had now been renamed the Ultra 64, would not use a CD format as expected, but would rather use cartridges as its primary media format.

In September 1994, Nintendo, Sega, Electronic Arts, Atari, Acclaim, Philips, and 3DO approached the United States Senate and demanded a ratings system for video games to be enforced, which prompted the decision to create the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Aiming to produce an affordable virtual reality console, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995, designed by Gunpei Yokoi. The console consists of a head-mounted semi-portable system with one red-colored screen for each of the user's eyes, featuring stereoscopic graphics. Games are viewed through a binocular eyepiece and controlled using an affixed gamepad. Critics were generally disappointed with the quality of the games and the red-colored graphics, and complained of gameplay-induced headaches. The system sold poorly and was quietly discontinued. Amid the system's failure, Yokoi retired from Nintendo. Yokoi later died in a car crash on October 4, 1997.

New systems
In 1996, Nintendo released the Ultra 64 as the Nintendo 64 in Japan and North America. The console was later released in Europe and Australia in 1997. The Nintendo 64 continued what had become a Nintendo tradition of hardware design which is focused less on high performance specifications than on design innovations intended to inspire game development. With its market shares slipping to the Sega Saturn and partner-turned-rival Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo revitalized its brand by launching a $185 million marketing campaign centered around the "Play it Loud" slogan.

In 1998, the successor to the Game Boy, the Game Boy Color, was released. The system had improved technical specifications allowing it to run games made specifically for the system as well as games released for the Game Boy, albeit with added color. The Game Boy Camera and Printer were also released as accessories.

Newer systems
On March 21, 2001, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance. Sega's Chu-Chu Rocket would be one of the system's launch titles. The GameCube was released on September 14, 2001, and Sega's Super Monkey Ball would be one of the system's launch titles. When Yamauchi retired on May 24, 2002, Satoru Iwata became first Nintendo president who was unrelated to the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage.

In 2003, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance SP, a redesign of the Game Boy Advance that featured a clamshell design that would later be used in Nintendo's DS and 3DS handheld video game systems.

Nintendo software with Sega content

 * Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (co-developed with Sega)
 * Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Internal links

 * Entry on the Nintendo wiki