Nintendo Story
This article is about how Nintendo transformed itself from it’s origins to a video games giant. It didn’t start as a tech company as many other companies. Well they had their history in games, but it was not in video games. Because in 1889 when the company was founded, the video games didn’t exist yet due to absence of television. Originally the company was named “Nintendo Koppai” and it was a small business based in Koyoto and it produced Hanafuda Cards. Hanafuda Cards are very similar to standard 52 playing card that we play Poker with. Nintendo’s cards back then where made my hand and quickly gained a lot of popularity.
In 1953 the company was run by the grandson of the Nintendo’s founder Hiroshi Yamauchi and was the first to produce plastic playing cards in Japan. The idea of plastic cards proved to be extremely popular and resulted in Nintendo dominating the industry. However, in 1956 he visited the United States and met with the largest card manufacturers and was very surprised by how small their offices were, so he came to the conclusion that card’s business is very limited and will not make it.
Innovation came in 1956 when Disney was found. Nintendo made a deal where they were able to print Disney characters on their cards. This opened them and entire new market. Up until that point, playing cards were used exclusively only for gambling. With this new target audience Nintendo created books that explained what games could be played with the new cards. It came to be very successful, around thousand cards were sold in the first year.
Unfortunately playing cards business came to a saturation point after a couple of years. Japanese stopped buying then and the Nintendo’s stock fell from 900 to 60 yen. In 1956 the company hired a new maintenance engineer. His name was Gunpei Yokoi and he would soon help turn Nintendo grow incredibly fast.
Nintendo was struggling to keep itself in the toy industry but their playing cards were not really helping. That was about to change though. In 1970, when Hiroshi made a tour in his company noticed the Gunpei Yokoi playing with an extended arm that he has made. Deciding to take a gamble, Hiroshi requested Gunpei Yokoi to develop his arm as a proper product and release it in time for Christmas.
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The product was so popular that over a million units were sold and it made a hit and Gunpei was immediately raised in position at product development. He was very successful thanks to his engineer background and invented many other electronic toys (including Love Tester)
This was significant because Nintendo was the only company that produced such type of toys so they were able to charge higher prices and made a great profit.
# Nintendo Console
In 1974 the company began to take more interest in video games when the Magnavox Odyssey console appeared. So Nintendo decided to make their own games for home and arcades. Their first release was in 1975 and was called EVR Race. In 1976 The company came with something that was never done in gaming - a story to motivate the action. And the game Stubborn Gorilla appeared which was also known as Donkey Kong. This games was also very popular, but mostly the characters where also popular, especially this one. So the company decided They wanted to make a game with this character, everyone new it but he needed a name and they called him Mario, when he got a new name, he also got a new job, as a plumber, along with his new brother called Luigi. And this to characters jumped into and arcade of games that are still popular today.
In 1983 Nintendo released a new home console named Famicom (short for Family Computer) which was released exclusively in Japan. At the beginning the product was successful and sold around half a million units in two months. Unfortunately costumers came with complaints about the console freezing. After the investigating it was revealed that the problem was in chips. All the remaining consoles were taken from the shelves.
In 1985 the company announced a world wide new release of the Famicom, but with a few changes, including the fixing of the original hardware. The design was also changed , the console also got a new name - Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. It became on of the most sold games consoles in the history.
GameBoy
Now this game in terms of addiction and global obsession. It was one of those classic “Why didn’t I think of this idea ? “ a game so simple no one in the world could resist playing, it was called Tetris, and next to cocaine it was the most addictive substance passed around. The idea came from Russia or the Soviet Union back then. The games was invented by Alexei Pajitnov, his profession mathematician, his hobby puzzles. But because this is Soviet Union, the country forced Alexei to sold his rights of the game all over the world, after some time this game was almost on every computer. Smelling a hit, Nintendo use Tetris to laughed the GameBoy in 1989. The Game Boy line sold extremely well, eventually amassing sales of 118 million. Later, Super Mario Land was also released for the Game Boy, which sold 14 million copies worldwide.
Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Color
After quite a long pause, the company decided to release some new versions of their previous consoles. So on June 23, 1996 there was release the Nintendo 64 exclusively in Japan breaking a new record by selling over 500,000 console from the first day of release. Smelling a big thing, Nintendo released it’s new console in North America by selling around 350,000 units. In North America they didn’t have that great success because there was a very serious concurrent, Playstation 1 which was released in 1995. Playstation 1 was the first ever console to sell 120 million units, that was really insane.
Nintendo Wii
In 2006 Nintendo introduced a new type of home console called Wii which competed with Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Wii came with remote controller that could be used as a handheld pointing device and that could detect hand’s movement in 3 dimensions. With that controller appeared a lot of great games that could take advantage of it’s features, for example you could use the remote as a tennis racket. This console brought a lot of interest, selling around 102 million units. In December 2009 the console broke the record in United States for a single month, beating the Playstation 3 and Xbox.
