History of Nintendo

Nintendo started as a card company in 1889. The business produced and marketed playing cards called Hanafuda (flower cards) and became very popular. With high demand, assistants were hired to mass produce cards. Nintendo continues to manufacture playing cards in Japan and has its own “Nintendo Cup” tournament.

In around 1956, the dominating playing card manufacturer, which was in the US, only had a small office. Nintendo visited and realised the limitations of playing cards and had gained access to Disney characters and put them on cards to boost sales.

During this time the Nintendo Card Co. was renamed to Nintendo Co and the company expanded. Nintendo set up a taxi company, a love hotel chain, TV network, a food company selling instant rice and noodles, and several other things. These all eventually failed though and after 1964 Tokyo Olympics, playing card sales dropped also and Nintendo’s stock prices went down and down.

Nintendo then moved into Japanese toys and had a maintenance engineer become a product developer in the new “Nintendo Games” department.  With success in with toys and focus being shifted to family entertainment, Nintendo started to try and cater for the emerging arcade scene. Nintendo’s new market now became electronics.

Nintendo began to produce hardware for the colour TV. Nintendo launched FamiCom or Family Computer known outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. This video game console had many popular titles one most importantly being Super Mario Bros, one of the best-selling video games of all time.

After the NES, the Game Boy handheld game console was being developed, and then also came the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or SNES/Super Famicom. The SNES stepped forward from the NES being 8-bit 3^rd generation to 16-bit 4^th generation.

In hand held development from the Game Boy, came a smaller version, the Game Boy Pocket and then Game Boy Color. Game Boy led with strong demand of the different handheld games they released such as the Poke’mon games.

From the SNES, the next home console was the Nintendo 64, featuring many things such as 3D capabilities, multiplayer of 4 players, analog stick controllers, Rumble Pak for vibration feedback to the controller. This device became then to eventually be an industry standard.

Back to handheld, after the Game Boy Color came Game Boy Advanced which had similar specifications to SNES. Then the Game Boy Advance SP with lit up flip screen, introduced rechargeable built-in batteries.

Following the SNES came the GameCube, which was first for Nintendo to utilise optical discs instead of cartridges, then the Nintendo Wii, which uses motion sensing controllers and online capabilities.

The Nintendo DS handheld then had a double screen feature and then with DSi and DSi XL, came with a camera and expanded screen. Next up then in the DS series was the 3DS which had autostereoscopy to produce a stereoscopic three-dimensional effect without the need to wear glasses.

Nintendo now has the handheld audience and in-home entertainment they cater for and is strong in the market against competitors such as Mircosoft and Sony.