The History of Nintendo

Origin as a Card Company

The travel of Nintendo began in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company and started producing Hanafuda cards (Japanese cards used to play several games). Nintendo's cards were handmade, and so they became popular pretty fast.

Yamauchi didn't have a boy to guide the family business, so he In 1929, Yamauchi left the company and accepted Sekiryo Yamauchi to take care of the firm as president. In 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi established a joint venture with another company and renamed the company Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.

In 1953, the company was being run by Hiroshi Yamauchi and became the first to produce plastic playing cards in Japan. But after visiting the most crucial card maker in the U.S. in 1956, he realized that the card company was limited. Before this occurred, cards were only viewed as a device for gaming. Nintendo and their cards became prosperous again, and they attained a new, wider audience.

With their recent public, Nintendo released books that described how to play their games. This procedure was surprisingly successful, and over 600,000 packs were sold only in the first year.

After their accomplishment and their increment in funding took them to Discover new business areas for the enterprise. Between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a cab company, a "love hotel" chain, a food company and a vacuum cleaner, Chiritory, which subsequently appeared as a two-player match in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ in 2003. All these industries failed, except toy making, where they had more understanding from selling playing cards. In 1964, while Japan was going through an economic growth due to the Tokyo Olympics, the playing card company stopped making money, and finally, the price of Nintendo stocks fell from 900 to 60 Yen.

In 1965, Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi as a maintenance engineer for the assembly line.

Nintendo tried to stay in the toy industry but their crippling debt was not helping. At this time, companies like Bandai and Tomy already dominated the business. The new era for Nintendo began here.

In 1966, while inspecting among his Hanafuda factories, Yamauchi Considered the maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi with an extending arm he had made, then Hiroshi asked Yokoi to develop his arm as a suitable product for the Christmas rush. This arm has been released as the "Ultra Hand," which helped to sell over a million units and earned Gunpei a job in product development. As a result of his engineering background, he managed to develop more toys such as the "Ten Billion Barrels" puzzle. This was crucial because Nintendo was one of the few companies developing such toys at that time.

Continuity as a Video Game Company

In 1972, Nintendo and the American Magnaxov agreed to develop and create guns for the Magnavox Odyssey, the first video game console. This was the first participation of Nintendo in video games. Then, they discovered how successful video games were and got into them.

After their success, they decided to develop games. They released Their first match in 1975, EVR Race. The famous Donkey Kong name followed it.
The famous ape game was the idea of Shigeru Miyamoto, a rising star in the gaming market. It was released in arcades and consoles like the Atari 2600.
In 1983, Nintendo chose to get into console development. The first games they developed was the Famicom, which was released solely in Japan. It was very successful, and it sold 500,000 units in the first two weeks. Later, users encountered a system freezing mistake, so Nintendo began to work and found an error in the chips. They tried to reach out to Atari for a partnership, but the Video Game Crash of 1983 did not let it happen, though Nintendo could survive, unlike many video game companies.

In 1985, Nintendo announced the worldwide release for the console, but they made a few modifications, fixed the hardware problem that caused the console to freeze and renamed it to Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Over the following decades, Nintendo has been releasing many home and handheld consoles, being Nintendo Switch (2017) the last one.