While the Japanese toy market was already dominated by well-established companies such as Tomy Co. These electronic toys, all conceived by Yokoi, were extremely popular and allowed Nintendo to carve out their own niche in the toy market. Soon, Nintendo formed a joint venture with the Sony Corporation to develop electronic games, the first of which was called the Nintendo Beam Gun Game , a home version of the popular arcade light gun games. In , the U.
Seeing the potential for the next steps in electronic games, Nintendo made their first foray into the world of video games in by acquiring the Odyssey's distribution rights for Japan.
This new and exciting market was growing in popularity and with the moderate success of the Odyssey, Nintendo started developing its own games and consoles with the Color TV-Game systems. The Color TV-Game line of home consoles started in with the Color TV-Game 6 , a dedicated console containing six pre-programmed games designed in the same vein as the mega-hit Pong.
Developed with a small limited run, the system showed signs of promise, and in Nintendo followed it up with the Color TV-Game 15 , another dedicated console.
This one had a more comfortable design and nine additional games all variations of Pong. This same year, Nintendo released its first video game designed for arcades called Computer Othello. Although a success, it was never released outside of Japan. Also in , a newly graduated art student, Shigeru Miyamoto, was hired as a staff artist for Nintendo's planning department thanks to his father's friendship with Hiroshi Yamauchi.
Miyamoto was soon mentored by Gunpei Yokoi and eventually became one of the most important players in the video game industry, creating some of Nintendo's most popular properties and hailed as " The Father of Modern Video Games.
By the s, the business was growing at an alarming rate for Nintendo both domestically and internationally. The Color TV Games system was a steady seller, as was the company's coin-op arcade catalog. The business grew to the point where it began opening offices in its second-biggest market, the United States, calling it Nintendo of America NOA.
One of Nintendo's more popular coin-op arcade games in Japan, titled Radar Scope , showed quite a bit of promise in the United States based on pre-tests, so an enormous number of units were manufactured for Nintendo of America.
When the game fully released, it was an enormous flop, forcing an overstock of unwanted units and a potentially disastrous loss in inventory costs.
Desperate to prove his talents for game design, Miyamoto was given the assignment to develop a game using the Radar Scope engine and tech that could easily be converted from the overstock units with little additional cost. With an extremely small budget, Miyamoto created Donkey Kong. The units were quickly switched over to Kong and it became an instant, historic success.
This made Miyamoto into Nintendo's top game producer and the dominant force in the coin-op arcade market. This eventually becomes a distant relative to the GameBoy , which comes later. These handheld LCD games featured the same display technology as calculators, only with the graphics forming characters and objects instead of numbers.
With pre-printed stationery foregrounds and backgrounds, the limited animated graphics could be moved by the player via controller buttons on opposite sides of the screen. The movement button design eventually evolved into the Emmy Award-winning D-Pad which you might know as a game controller. After seeing the success and potential of a console system with interchangeable cartridges, Nintendo developed its first multi-cartridge gaming system in , the 8-bit Famicom which translates to Family Computer , which delivered near-arcade quality games with far more power and memory than any previous console on the market.
At first, the system released in Japan with failing results, but quickly caught on when Miyamoto produced a game taking his popular Mario Bros. The game was such a huge success that Nintendo quickly bundled it with the Famicom system, which drove sales of the console as consumers bought it just to play the game.
This also started Nintendo's long history of packaging their most popular games along with their latest consoles.
Nintendo was seeing a boom in the video game market in Japan, but the U. As Atari had no way to prevent unlicensed titles from being designed for its system, the Atari , the U. That caused the entire industry to suffer from a poor reputation. At first, Nintendo approached Atari to distribute the Famicom in the U.
With video game sales slumping and a stockpile of unsellable Atari units, Sears also passed. By the end of , the U. Convinced that its system could still make a splash in the U. As American consumers were turned off by the connotation of a video game system, thinking of the low-quality titles previously released, Nintendo renamed the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System NES and redesigned it to look more like an entertainment center component.
To prevent other companies from releasing unauthorized and low-quality games, Nintendo developed the 10NES lockout chip that prevented unlicensed games from working on the system. They also devised the Nintendo Seal of Quality to indicate authorized and officially licensed games. These initial launches were a success and Nintendo expanded the release nationally across all of the United States. This move immediately reignited the video game market in the U. Throughout the '80s, Nintendo continued its hold on the video game market by not only releasing quality self-published games, including a continual stream of innovative titles created by Shigeru Miyamoto, but also by requiring third-party titles to go through a strict approval process before allowing a release on the NES.
This showed the public Nintendo's commitment to quality over quantity. As its reputation and brand recognition grew, Nintendo became so integrated into the minds of the public it eventually released its own self-published magazine in , Nintendo Power.
Another system launch occurred in early September when Nintendo introduced the Game Boy Pocket, a sleeker, percent-smaller version of the world's most popular handheld. Super Mario 64 was proclaimed by many as "the greatest video game of all time.
In March, Nintendo 64 launched in Europe and sold 2. Nintendo introduced the Rumble Pak, which enabled players to feel the realistic vibrations contained in the game. Nintendo introduced Game Boy Color and the innovative devices Game Boy Camera and Printer, bringing new life to the longest-running hit in the history of interactive entertainment. Game Boy Color systems were cased in two brand-new colours: purple and clear purple. The highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 was released, setting new standards and breaking pre-order records for any videogame to date.
Also, during the summer, the range of Game Boy Color coloured casings expanded with red, green, yellow and blue added to the collection. The Nintendo Game Boy became the most popular selling console ever as sales surpassed million. The Nintendo of the Netherlands office became responsible for both Belgium and the Netherlands market and changed its name to Nintendo Benelux.
Meanwhile, the headquarters of Nintendo Co. It set the mark as the fastest selling console ever with , units being sold within the first week in Europe. In all, 2. Melee marked both popular games as flagship titles for the console. Game Boy Advance e-Reader hardware launched in Japan on 1 December and brought a new meaning to portable gameplay.
Different game information stored on e-Reader cards could be swiped through the e-Reader and transferred onto the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo Italia was established on 2 January and opened an office in Milan. Game Boy Advance - now available in new Black and Platinum editions - smashed the 5 million hardware units barrier across Europe.
Since that time, it's been joined on the shelves by spectacular new Mario adventure Super Mario Sunshine, revolutionary wireless controller Nintendo WaveBird, and over titles of every genre and description.
At the end of May, after 52 years at the helm of the company, Nintendo Co. By the end of , more than 25 million Game Boy Advance units were in homes around the world. The new system was an instant success. March also saw the release of the stunning Metroid Prime, hailed by fans and critics alike as one of the best games for Nintendo GameCube. In May, to celebrate the first birthday of Nintendo GameCube, the eagerly awaited The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker arrived, bringing one of Nintendo's flagship characters to the system in striking, cel-shaded style.
October saw the return of a well-loved franchise in the form of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! The new dual-screened system also featured wireless multiplayer, Touch Screen technology and backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance titles. By June the system had sold a million units throughout Europe.
Meanwhile, Nintendo introduced the Game Boy Micro. Measuring just 4 inches wide by 2 inches tall, the ultra-stylish Game Boy Micro featured a backlit screen. In , Nintendo DS rose to the top of the gaming world as the most popular portable console, thanks to games suitable for everyone. Nintendogs ushered in the Touch! Generations brand of games, a range of titles that let people play like never before. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training - the top Touch! Generations title - became a huge hit even among people who never played before.
The year ended with the launch of Wii. The new home console with its innovative control system found an audience with both Nintendo fans and those who don't traditionally play videogames.
Prior to the launch of Wii, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata conducted a series of internal interviews with Nintendo staff as well as external developers providing an in-depth look behind the scenes of the company and the process of bringing new hardware and software to market.
Games like WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Endless Ocean and Big Brain Academy for Wii invited everyone to dive into the fun regardless of previous experience, while the arrival of Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption brought cherished Nintendo franchises back into being with the addition of new features only possible on Wii.
Fans of classic games rejoiced in September when the first Hanabi Festival was celebrated on Virtual Console. The Mii Contest Channel launched on Wii in November, allowing players to enter Mii characters of their own creation in themed competitions. The Channel resides in an ongoing tradition of providing players with tools to allow them to express their creativity and get more actively involved with Nintendo products, further highlighting the shift from passive playing to active involvement.
Generations range of software and continued to attract new users, a feat also achieved by the newest instalment in the Legend of Zelda series, Phantom Hourglass - which invited players to control all the exploration and action on the Nintendo DS Touch Screen. Building on the growing number of people discovering videogames for the first time through Wii and Nintendo DS whilst continuing to cater to long-time Nintendo fans, saw the release of more software that quickly scored a direct hit with public affections.
He remained at the helm of Nintendo for the next 50 years and ushered the "transition from traditional playing-card maker to video game giant" after a trip to America made him think about the long-term growth for the family business. But there would be many trials, errors, and business pivots in that half century. According to the book Nintendo: The Company and Its Founders by Mary Firestone, Yamauchi was known for his affairs, and since other hotels in Japan at that time only booked rooms for a night, he decided to open his own, one where he was also a frequent guest.
Nintendo's decision to go all-in on the gaming industry wasn't exactly at the right time either. According to Gizmodo, the playing card business — where Nintendo was once a stronghold — was fully saturated and consumers were looking for the next big thing. The "Beam Gun," similar to other toy guns of the era, fit perfectly in the arcade space, which set off Nintendo's lead in the gaming industry.
Sources: Gizmodo , Business Insider. The Magnavox Odyssey video game unit was conceived 13 years before Nintendo bought it, but it was after the company got it hands on it that more Nintendo video games starting hitting the shelves.
That same year, Nintendo had started a division for coin-operated games in Arakawa later took up shop in Seattle, where he oversaw product development. The original game consisted of a single premise: Jumpman, who was a carpenter, needed to rescue his girlfriend, Pauline, from his "crazed" pet gorilla, who'd kidnapped her.
The player would have to run, jump, and climb a series of obstacles in an attempt to save her. Sources: The New Yorker , Nintendo. Executives even wondered whether the name would sit well. In Japanese, "kong" means gorilla, and "donkey" was a word Miyamoto found in an English dictionary that meant stupid.
As we know today, "Donkey Kong" ended up doing very well. Nintendo bet big when it decided to make gaming consoles for at home use — and it paid off. According to the company, the NES sold over 60 million units. The New York Times called the buzz for the gaming system a "teen-age cultural phenomenon" in According to Nintendo's website, "Studies at the time showed that children were as or more familiar with Mario as they were with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
This worked, because Mario and his brother Luigi, turned out to be a full-blown sensation. Sources: Business Insider. The game is also a cult favorite among those who grew up playing it, typically Gen X and millennials. According to some fan sites, the original game has sold nearly 8 million copies throughout its lifetime. Source: The Atlantic , Business Insider. According to Nintendo , "Since its introduction in , Game Boy has sold well over million systems worldwide.
Nintendo is a gaming giant today. But it has also helped create an entire culture around it that any child of the s, 80s, and 90s still fondly remembers. Here we explore the origins and early days of the company and track its rise to global gaming dominance.
The company that would eventually become Nintendo was first founded in by a year-old Japanese man called Fusajiro Yamauchi. Originally called Nintendo Koppai Koppai meaning "cards" or "playing cards" in Japanese , the company started out manufacturing a card game called Hanafuda. These playing cards consisted of pictures painted on cards made from the bark of the mulberry tree.
Over time, Yamauchi managed to open two Nintendo stores selling the game. In fact, Nintendo still makes a limited range of playing cards today. One of their most popular is their Daitouryou variant which features the portrait of Napoleon. Yamauchi took great pride in his company's card game's quality and design which brought the early Nintendo great popularity with its patrons. Nintendo soon built a reputation for quality and soon become the top game company in Japan.
The reason Nintendo decided to produce playing cards as its main product had deep roots in Japan's history. During the 17th Century, the country had effectively cut itself off from the Western world. The import and distribution of playing cards had led to a serious gambling problem in the country and measures were taken to curb this addiction. Japanese authorities duly decided to ban all imports of playing cards in an attempt to combat gambling amongst the populace.
It wasn't long before home-grown card games were developed in the country to facilitate more novel ways to gamble.
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