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Nintendo Company, Limited. is an international corporation located in Kyoto, Japan and founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a handmade hanafuda card producer. Before they moved into the video game industry they had tried many business ventures, including a cab company and a love hotel. But video game development is the most successful, and now are one of the most influential companies in the video game industry and Japan's third biggest company[1], as well as the fifth largest software company worldwide[2] and have sold over 470 million consoles and 2.7 billion games (as of October 02, 2008)[3]. Nintendo are currently best known for there Wii and DS platforms, and their characters such as Mario. The name Nintendo translated into English means "Leave luck to Heaven".[4] Nintendo is currently the longest surviving console manufacturer in the world.

History[]

The card company[]

Nintendo Koppai was founded in 1889 in Kyoto and produced hanafuda cards. These soon became popular, and so owner Fusajiro Yamauchi had to hire assistants to help him mass produce the cards. Soon it was renamed Nintendo Playing Card Company Limited. Even to this day, Nintendo are still releasing cards in Japan. 67 years later and Fusajiro's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi and talked to the United States Playing Card Company, the biggest in the US, and realized the limitations of the playing card business,which would later make him move Nintendo into some new industries. Well in America, he also got permission to use Disney characters on his cards.

New ventures[]

In 1963, the company was renamed Nintendo Company, Limited. and started to try some new ventures. Between 1963 and 1968 Nintendo has launched a taxi company, a chain of love hotels, a TV network and an instant rice food company. None of these worked in Nintendo's favour, and all failed. After 1964 playing cards sales dropped due to the Tokyo Olympics. Soon Nintendo's stocks were down to just 60 yen (around 16 cents at the fixed rate of $1US to ¥360).

Toys[]

In 1966, maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi developed the Ultra Hand in his free time, and soon Nintendo became a toy company. With the new Nintendo Games department Gunpei managed to make many other popular toys such as the Ultra Machine, Love Tester and a series of light gun games. Nintendo had many successful products, but struggled to meet the feast development and manufactoring turnaround required from the toy industry, and were soon over taken by Bandai and Tomy.

In 1973 Nintendo launched the Laser Clay Shooting System, using light gun technology used in some of their earlier toys and set them up in abandoned bowling alleys. Like previous ventures, this too failed, due to excessive costs.

Nintendo and the video games[]

In 1974, Nintendo was distributing the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan, and three years later produced Color TV Games. These were basically game consoles which featured four variations on a single game.

In 1975 Nintendo produced thier first of many aracde games EVR Race. With many more games, Nintendo had a small success, but when student product developer Shigeru Miyamoto designed Donkey Kong in 1981 raised Nintendo's profits, and with ports of the games to many of the home consoles of the time, Nintendo finally found an industry they could be successful in. In 1980 they had released the Game & Watch series worldwide. Developed by Gunpei Yokoi, these were handheld units which each contained a different game. In 1983, Nintendo's first home console was released in Japan. The Family Computer, commonly named the Famicom, and to coincide with the release Nintendo ported over some of there more successful arcade games. When launching the console in North America as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, which would be the best selling game of all time before Wii Sports came in 2006 and helped end the video game crash of 1983. In 1989 the Game Boy, another one of Gunpei Yokoi's creations was released.

In 1990, the Super Famicom was released in Japan, and in the west in 1991 and 1992 as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, rivalling Sega's Mega Drive or . The victor of the console war was the SNES selling 49.10 million consoles.

Gaming on the move[]

A leap into 3D[]

Touch screens and motion sensing[]

Games Published by Nintendo[]

Note: These are only games Nintendo have published which are playable on the last 3 Nintendo consoles .For a full list, click here.

GameCube[]

1.Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

Wii[]

Wii U[]

Trivia[]

  • In the first episode of the second Super Sentai,1977's J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai, after the 4 heroes become cyborgs, Spade Ace gets an Ace of Spades thrown at him. When he catchs it, you can see that the manufactueur's name is Nintendo.
    Nintendo JAKQ card

    The Nintendo playing card in JAKQ Dengekitai

Employees[]

Some of the important people who work for Nintendo include:

References[]

  1. Kiyoshi Takenaka (October 15, 2007). UPDATE 2-Nintendo sets $85 bln high score, thanks to Wii, DS. Reuters. Retrieved on December 04, 2009.
  2. Software Top 100 2009 Edition. Software Top 100. Software Top 100 (August 04, 2009). Retrieved on December 04, 2009.
  3. Kiyoshi Takenaka (October 02, 2008). NINTENDO’S HOLIDAY 2008: Wii SPEAK CHANNEL, CLUB NINTENDO, MORE SURPRISES. Nintendo. Retrieved on December 05, 2009.
  4. WHAT NINTENDO MEANS. Touch Generations. Nintendo. Retrieved on December 05, 2009.

External links[]

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