The History of Nintendo

Nintendo has been around for a long time. 125 years, to be exact. This report will explain how Nintendo got so deeply rooted in our culture by examining the moves they made with their consoles, including both successes and failures.

Fusajiro Yamauchi was a skilled craftsman, he made karuta, playing cards. He would often make hanafuda cards, flower cards that people often used in various games. (Interesting tidbit, Nintendo offers hanafuda cards as a reward for a service called Club Nintendo to this day.) Once he sold the cards to shops in Kyoto, they became extremely popular. He sold them under the name of Nintendo Koppai.

Generations later, Hiroshi Yamauchi and Gunpei Yokoi added a Games division to Nintendo, after Yamauchi dropped the koppai, and started work on electronic toys. With the help of Masayuki Uemura, that evolved into making laser gun games for arcades. They became popular with 'laser shooting ranges', as they were called.

They also worked on the Color-TV Game 6. Never heard of it? Nintendo's history is very obscure before they made the NES, or Famicom in Japan. Based off Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey, another game console, the games were supposed to be various ball games, but they couldn't make circles, so the balls were square with two rectangles and plastic overlays for different games. They couldn't make it themselves, so they had it manufactured by Mitsubishi.

Yamauchi had the idea to make a small game from calculators, as they were becoming very popular, not to mention cheap. Similar inventions would later be known as handhelds. Uemura made the Game and Watch from this idea. It pretty much bombed in America. They tried to market it as a toy, which made many people not want to buy it.

Inspired by the Magnavox Od...

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...because Nintendo shaped many of our childhoods with its lovable characters, innovative systems, and child-friendly content. They house some of our favorite franchises and kick-started others. They saved the American video game market. Sure, it had some flops, but we still love the company to this day.

Works Cited

Cohen, D.S. "The History of Nintendo." Major Video Game History Makers and Milestones. 2 March 2014

Jones, Tegan. "The Surprisingly Long History of Nintendo." 2 March 2014

Sheff, David. Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped An American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children New York: Random House, 1993

"The History of Nintendo." Wikipedia 2 March 2014 Google.