Nintendo

Lore & Background

The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in 1889 to produce handmade hanafuda playing cards. After venturing into various lines of business and becoming a public company, Nintendo began producing toys in the 1960s, and later video games. Nintendo developed its first arcade games in the 1970s, and distributed its first system, the Color TV-Game in 1977. The company became internationally dominant in the 1980s after the arcade release of Donkey Kong (1981) and the Nintendo Entertainment System, which launched outside of Japan alongside Super Mario Bros. in 1985. Since then, Nintendo has produced some of the most successful consoles in the video game industry, including the Game Boy (1989), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1991), the Game Boy Advance (2001), the Nintendo DS (2004), the Wii (2006), and the Nintendo Switch (2017). It has created or published numerous major franchises, including Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Super Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Metroid, Kirby, and Star Fox. The company's mascot, Mario, is among the most famous fictional characters. Nintendo's game consoles have sold over 860 million units worldwide as of May 2025, for which more than 5.9 billion individual games have been sold.

In Their Own Story

The screen glowed green in the dim light of a bedroom. A child's thumb pressed the D-pad, rotating a falling L-block into place. The Game Boy's speaker chirped the familiar Korobeiniki melody. Four lines cleared at once—a Tetris—and the machine rewarded with a satisfying jingle. Outside, the world kept turning, but here, in the palm of a hand, a perfect, endless puzzle unfolded. This was Nintendo's gift: a game that fit anywhere, demanded everything, and never ended.

Reader's Guide

The source does not provide a guide for playing Nintendo games or using its consoles.

Did You Know?

• Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company.
• The name 'Nintendo' is commonly assumed to mean 'leave luck to heaven', but the assumption lacks historical validation.
• Nintendo's first western-style card deck was put on the market in 1902 or 1907, according to different documents.
• Nintendo became a public company in 1962.
• Gunpei Yokoi was hired in 1965 to maintain assembly-line machines for playing cards.