Nintendo

• 1. From Cards to Consoles

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  Nintendo was founded on the 23rd of September 1889, not as a game company, but as a playing card business. Craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi set up shop in Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto, producing handmade hanafuda cards by hand. The name Nintendo is commonly assumed to mean "leave luck to heaven," though even descendants of Yamauchi do not know the true intended meaning.

  Hanafuda had become popular in Japan partly because the government banned most forms of gambling in 1882 but tolerated the cards. Sales ran through yakuza-operated gaming parlors in Kyoto. Other card makers had walked away from that market, unwilling to be associated with its criminal connections. Yamauchi stayed, and within a few years became the primary producer in Japan.

  As demand grew, the business hired assistants to mass-produce the cards. But operating in a niche market with expensive production and cards durable enough to last years rather than months created persistent financial strain. Nintendo's solution was a cheaper secondary line called Tengu, sold across cities including Osaka where card profits ran high. By the time Sekiryo Kaneda inherited leadership in 1929, Nintendo was the largest playing card company in Japan.

  The path from cards to the children's market came through a 1959 partnership with Walt Disney Productions. Nintendo incorporated Disney characters into its card decks, which opened retail channels in toy stores. By 1961, the company had sold more than 1.5 million card packs and established a branch in Chiyoda, Tokyo. In 1962, it listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange, becoming a public company. That prosperity carried a hidden fragility: when Disney card sales began to fall and Japanese adults shifted toward pachinko and bowling, Nintendo found itself with no alternative. After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, its stock price fell to its lowest recorded level.

• 2. Yokoi, Miyamoto, and the Toy Years

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  In 1965, Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture playing cards. Yamauchi then moved him into a new research and development department in 1969 and put him in charge of games. What followed was a string of hits built from clever engineering rather than large budgets.

  Yokoi designed Japan's first electronic toy, the Beam Gun, an optoelectronic pistol released in 1970 that sold more than a million units. The Ultra Hand, also designed by Yokoi, sold more than 1.2 million units in Japan alone. Nintendo partnered with Magnavox to supply a light gun controller based on the Beam Gun for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1971. The Laser Clay Shooting System, released in 1973, briefly surpassed bowling in popularity across Japan.

  The 1973 oil crisis hit hard. Plastics costs spiked, consumer priorities shifted away from leisure, and Nintendo lost several billion yen. The subsidiary that developed its light gun products was closed. Yamauchi, watching Atari and Magnavox succeed with home video game consoles, acquired Japanese distribution rights for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1974 and negotiated an agreement with Mitsubishi Electric to develop similar technology.

  Shigeru Miyamoto joined the company during this period. He worked initially under Yokoi with the modest task of designing the casings for the Color TV-Game consoles. His sources of inspiration ranged from the natural environment of Sonobe to Westerns and detective fiction to folk Shinto. Those influences would eventually shape most of Nintendo's major franchises. By 1978, the research and development department split into two facilities: Nintendo R&D1, managed by Yokoi, and Nintendo R&D2, managed by Masayuki Uemura.

• 3. Donkey Kong and the NES

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  By the late 1970s, Nintendo of America was in financial trouble in New York City. The company had wagered a large order of 3,000 Radar Scope arcade cabinets on the American market. When the game failed, the overstock became a crisis. Arakawa, who ran the subsidiary, repeatedly asked Yamauchi for new game ideas. Because all top engineers were busy on Japanese projects, Yamauchi assigned Yokoi's young assistant who had no engineering background: Shigeru Miyamoto.

  Miyamoto's solution was Donkey Kong, released in 1981 and one of the first platform games to allow a player character to jump. NoA's staff were initially appalled at the sight of this debut work. The conversion kits for the unsold Radar Scope cabinets generated $280 million for Nintendo of America between 1981 and 1983. The game's main character, named Jumpman, was later renamed Mario after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo's Tukwila warehouse. Donkey Kong sold 4,000 new arcade units per month in America alone.

  The profits funded the $50 million launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. The American video game market had collapsed from over $3 billion in revenue to $100 million between 1983 and 1985, a crash driven in part by low-quality games flooding retail shelves. Nintendo addressed this directly: it redesigned the Famicom as a device resembling a VCR, renamed cartridges as Game Paks, and introduced a lockout chip that let it control third-party software. The NES launched alongside Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, both produced by Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Around 62 million Famicom and NES consoles were sold worldwide before production ended in 1995 and 2003 respectively.

• 4. Game Boy and the Handheld Market

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  Yokoi and his team at Nintendo R&D1 conceived the Game Boy in 1988. Released in 1989, it was the first handheld video game console Nintendo had produced. In Japan, the initial inventory of 300,000 units sold out within two weeks. In the United States, an additional 40,000 units were sold on its first day of distribution.

  The Game Boy launched in North America bundled with Tetris, a deal arranged after a difficult negotiation process with Elektronorgtechnica. Over its production period, the Game Boy generated 43.4 million units sold worldwide with 59 games made for Game & Watch, and became one of Nintendo's most durable successes. By 1989, more than 25% of homes in the United States had a Nintendo Entertainment System.

  Around this same period, Nintendo entered negotiations with Sony to develop a CD-ROM adapter for the upcoming Super Famicom. That collaboration collapsed when Yamauchi chose to continue working with Philips instead, a decision that led Sony to pursue its own console independently, resulting in the PlayStation.

  The Super Famicom launched in Japan in 1990. Its first batch of 300,000 consoles sold out within hours. Distributed in the United States as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, it launched with games including Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings. By mid-1992, over 46 million Super Famicom and Super NES units had been sold. The 1993 release of Star Fox marked an industry milestone as the first game to use the Super FX chip. In February 1996, Pocket Monsters Red and Green, developed by Game Freak, launched for the Game Boy in Japan, eventually selling 31.37 million units. The Pokémon video game series would go on to exceed 300 million units in total sales as of 2017.

• 5. Wii and the Broadened Audience

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  Nintendo's next home console after the GameCube was conceived in 2001 and entered active development in 2003. The GameCube had sold only 21.7 million units worldwide during its six-year production run, and the poor early results led Nintendo to post a first-half fiscal year loss in 2003, its first since going public in 1962. Rather than match the hardware power of Sony and Microsoft directly, Nintendo adopted what it called a "Blue Ocean Strategy," developing a reduced-performance console aimed at reaching people who did not ordinarily play games.

  The Wii launched in November 2006 with 33 games at launch and a $200 million advertising campaign behind it. Its main innovation was the Wii Remote, which used an accelerometer, infrared sensors, and a sensor bar to detect motion in three dimensions. The Nunchuk peripheral added an analog stick and another accelerometer. By 2016, more than 101 million Wii consoles had been sold worldwide, making it the best-selling console of its generation. Nintendo had not led its console generation since the Super NES in the 1990s.

  The Nintendo DS, released in 2004, brought a dual-screen design to handhelds, with one screen being a touchscreen, and wireless connectivity for multiplayer play. Throughout its lifetime, more than 154 million units were sold, making it the most successful handheld console and the second bestselling console in history. By 2009, Nintendo held a 68.3% share of the worldwide handheld gaming market.

  Satoru Iwata had become president in 2002 following Hiroshi Yamauchi's resignation after more than fifty years of family leadership at the helm. Iwata died of bile duct cancer on the 11th of July 2015. Tatsumi Kimishima was named his successor on the 16th of September 2015.

• 6. Nintendo Switch and Beyond

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  The Nintendo Switch launched in March 2017 as a hybrid device that functions both as a home console and a handheld. Its Joy-Con controllers each contain an accelerometer and gyroscope. Up to eight consoles can connect wirelessly at the same time. By February 2019, more than 1,800 Switch games had been released. The Switch has shipped over 150 million units worldwide, surpassing the Wii's 101.6 million to become Nintendo's most successful home console and the third-best-selling console of all time, behind the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS.

  Nintendo's expansion beyond games accelerated around the Switch era. Super Nintendo World, a theme park area, opened at Universal Studios Japan in 2021 and at Universal Studios Hollywood in early 2023. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, co-produced with Universal Pictures and Illumination and with Miyamoto and Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri serving as producers, was released on the 5th of April 2023. The film grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, setting box-office records for the biggest worldwide opening weekend for an animated film and becoming the highest-grossing film based on a video game.

  Nintendo acquired the CG company Dynamo Pictures in 2022 and renamed it Nintendo Pictures. In November 2024, the company gained full ownership of Monolith Soft, the developer behind Xenoblade Chronicles. In October 2024, Nintendo opened the Nintendo Museum on the site of its former Uji Ogura plant, where it had once manufactured playing and hanafuda cards.

  The Nintendo Switch 2 was released on the 5th of June 2025. By the 10th of June, Nintendo reported that the Switch 2 had sold more than 3.5 million units worldwide, making it the fastest-selling console in history, overtaking the previous record held by the PlayStation 2. As of May 2025, Nintendo's game consoles have sold over 860 million units worldwide, with more than 5.9 billion individual games sold.