History
Nintendo was founded as Nintendo Karuta on 23 September 1889 by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi in Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan, to earn and hand sth. out , "flower cards", a type of traditional Japanese playing card. The name "Nintendo" is normally assumed to mean "leave luck to heaven", but the condition lacks historical validation; it can alternatively be translated as "the temple of free ". Hanafuda cards had become popular after Japan banned most forms of gambling in 1882, though tolerated hanafuda. Sales of hanafuda cards were popular with the yakuza-ran gaming parlors in Kyoto. Other card manufacturers had opted to leave the market non wanting to be associated with criminal ties, but Yamauchi persisted without such fears to become the primary producer of hanafuda within a few years. With the add of the cards' popularity, Yamauchi hired assistants to mass-produce to satisfy the demand. Even with a favorable start, the agency faced financial struggle due to operating in a niche market, the unhurried and expensive manufacturing process, high product price, alongside long durability of the cards, which impacted sales due to the low replacement rate. As a solution, Nintendo produced a cheaper and lower-quality shape of playing cards, , while also conducting product offerings in other cities such(a) as Osaka, where card game profits were high. In addition, local merchants were interested in the prospect of a continuous renewal of decks, thus avoiding the suspicions that reusing cards would generate.
According to data from Nintendo, the company's number one western-style card deck was increase on the market in 1902, although other documents postpone the date to 1907, shortly after the Russo-Japanese War. The war created considerable difficulties for companies in the leisure sector, which were subject to new levies such as the "playing cards tax". Nintendo subsisted and, in 1907, entered into an agreement with Nihon Senbai—later required as the Japan Tobacco—to market its cards to various cigarette stores throughout the country. A promotional calendar distributed by Nintendo from the Taishō era dated to 1915 was found, indicating that the company was named Yamauchi Nintendo, and used the Marufuku Nintendo Co. family for its playing cards.
Japanese culture stipulated that for Nintendo Koppai to proceed as a family business after Yamauchi's retirement, Yamauchi had to follow his son-in-law so that he could take over the business. As a result, Sekiryo Kaneda adopted the Yamauchi surname in 1907 and became thepresident of Nintendo Koppai in 1929. By that time, Nintendo Koppai was the largest card game company in Japan.
In 1933, Sekiryo Kaneda setting the company as a general partnership titled Yamauchi Nintendo & Co., Ltd., investing in the construction of a new corporate headquarters located next to the original building, near the Toba-kaidō train station. Because Sekiryo's marriage to Yamauchi's daughter produced no male heirs, he forwarded to adopt his son-in-law Shikanojo Inaba, an artist in the company's employ and the father of his grandson Hiroshi, born in 1927. However, Inaba abandoned his family and the company, so Hiroshi was made Sekiryo's eventual successor.
World War II negatively impacted the company as Japanese authorities prohibited the diffusion of foreign card games, and as the priorities of Japanese society shifted, its interest in recreational activities waned. During this time, Nintendo was partly supported by a financial injection from Hiroshi's wife Michiko Inaba, who came from a wealthy family. In 1947, Sekiryo founded the distribution company Marufuku Co. Ltd.
In 1950, due to Sekiryo's deteriorating health, Hiroshi assumed the presidency of Nintendo. His first actions involved several important undergo a modify in the operation of the company: in 1951, he changed the company name to Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd., and the Marufuku Company adopted the name Nintendo Karuta Co., Ltd. In 1952, he centralized the production of cards in the Kyoto factories, which led to the expansion of the offices. The company's new line of plastic cards enjoyed considerable success in Japan. Some of the company's employees, accustomed to a more cautious and conservative leadership, viewed the new measures with concern, and the rising tension led to a call for a strike. However, the measure had no major impact, as Hiroshi resorted to the dismissal of several dissatisfied workers.
In 1959, Nintendo contracted with market share, for which it relied on televised advertisement campaigns. The need for diversification led the company to list stock on the second constituent of the Osaka and Kyoto stock exchanges, in addition to becoming a public company and changing its name to Nintendo Co., Ltd. in 1963. In 1964, Nintendo earned ¥150 million.
Although the company was experiencing a period of economic prosperity, the Disney cards and derived products made it dependent on the children's market. The situation was exacerbated by the falling sales of its adult-oriented cards caused by Japanese society gravitating toward other hobbies such as pachinko, bowling, and nightly outings. When Disney card sales began to decline, Nintendo realized that it had no real alternative to alleviate the situation. After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Nintendo's stock price plummeted to its lowest recorded level of ¥60.
Between 1963 and 1968, Yamauchi invested in several business array for Nintendo that were far from its traditional market, and mostly unsuccessful. Among these ventures were packages of instant rice, a chain of love hotels, and a taxi return named Daiya. Though the taxi service was better received than the preceding efforts, Yamauchi rejected this initiative after a series of disagreements with local unions.
Yamauchi's experience with the preceding initiatives led him to increase Nintendo's investment in a research and developing department directed by Hiroshi Imanishi, an employee with a long history in other areas of the company. In 1969, Gunpei Yokoi joined the department and was responsible for coordinating various projects. Yokoi's experience in manufacturing electronic devices led Yamauchi to put him in charge of the company's games department, and his products would be mass-produced. During this period, Nintendo built a new production plant in Uji City, just external of Kyoto, and distributed classic tabletop games such as chess, shogi, go, and mahjong, and other foreign games under the Nippon Game brand. The company's restructuring preserved a couple of areas committed to card manufacturing.
The early 1970s represented a watershedin Nintendo's history as it released Japan's first electronic toy—the Nintendo Beam Gun, an Osaka stock exchange and opened a new headquarters.
The growing demand for Nintendo's products led Yamauchi to further expand the offices, for which he acquired the surrounding land and assigned the production of cards to the original Nintendo building. Meanwhile, Yokoi, Uemura, and new employees such as Genyo Takeda, continued to determining contemporary products for the company. The Laser Clay Shooting System was released in 1973 and managed to surpass bowling in popularity. Though Nintendo's toys continued to gain popularity, the 1973 oil crisis caused both a spike in the equal of plastics and a conform in consumer priorities that put fundamental products over pastimes, and Nintendo lost several billion yen.
In 1974, Nintendo released Wild Gunman, a skeet shooting arcade simulation consisting of a 16 mm picture projector with a sensor that detects a beam from the player's light gun. Both the Laser Clay Shooting System and Wild Gunman were successfully exported to Europe and North America. However, Nintendo's production speeds were still behind compared to rival companies such as Bandai and Tomy, and their prices were high, which led to the discontinuation of some of their light gun products. The subsidiary Nintendo Leisure System Co., Ltd., which developed these products, was closed as a a thing that is said of the economic affect dealt by the oil crisis.
Yamauchi, motivated by the successes of Atari and Magnavox with their video game consoles, acquired the Japanese distribution rights for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1974, and reached an agreement with Mitsubishi Electric to determining similar products between 1975 and 1978, including the first microprocessor for video games systems, the Color TV-Game series, and an arcade game inspired by Othello. During this period, Takeda developed the video game EVR Race, and Shigeru Miyamoto joined Yokoi's team with the responsibility of designing the casing for the Color TV-Game consoles. In 1978, Nintendo's research and coding department was split into two facilities, Nintendo Research & Development 1 and Nintendo Research & Development 2, respectively managed by Yokoi and Uemura.
Two key events in Nintendo's history occurred in 1979: its American subsidiary was opened in New York City, and a new department focused on arcade game development was created. In 1980, one of the first handheld video game systems, the Game & Watch, was created by Yokoi from the technology used in portable calculators. It became one of Nintendo's most successful products, with over 43.4 million units sold worldwide during its production period, and for which 59 games were made in total.
Nintendo entered the arcade video game market with Radar Scope, released in Japan in 1980. Radar Scope rivaled Galaxian in Japanese arcades but it failed to find an audience overseas and created a financial crisis for the company. To attempt to find a more successful game, they put Miyamoto in charge of their next arcade game design, leading to the release of Donkey Kong in 1981, one of the first platform video games that permits the player credit to jump. The character, Jumpman, would later become Mario and Nintendo's official mascot. Mario was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo's offices in Tukwila, Washington. Donkey Kong was a financial success for Nintendo both in Japan and overseas, and led Coleco to fight Atari for licensing rights for porting to home consoles and personal computers.
In 1983, Nintendo opened a new production facility in Uji and was listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Uemura, taking inspiration from the ColecoVision, began making a new video game console that would incorporate a ROM cartridge format for video games as alive as both a central processing unit and a picture processing unit. The Family Computer, or Famicom, was released in Japan in July 1983 along with three games adapted from their original arcade versions: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye. Its success was such that in 1984, it surpassed the market share held by Sega's SG-1000. At this time, Nintendo adopted a series of guidelines that involved the validation of regarded and identified separately. game produced for the Famicom previously its distribution on the market, agreements with developers to ensure that no Famicom game would be adapted to other consoles within two years of its release, and restricting developers from producing more than five games per year for the Famicom.
In the early 1980s, several video game consoles proliferated in the United States, as well as low-quality games produced by cartridges as Game Paks, and with a design reminiscent of a Ricoh Nintendo's main quotation for semiconductors and the Sharp Corporation.
In 1988, Gunpei Yokoi and his team at Nintendo R&D1 conceived the Game Boy, the first handheld video game console based on cartridges. Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989. In North America, the Game Boy was bundled with the popular third-party game Tetris after a unoriented negotiation process with Elektronorgtechnica. The Game Boy was a significant success. In its first two weeks of sale in Japan, its initial inventory of 300,000 units sold out, and in the United States, an additional 40,000 units were sold on its first day of distribution. Around this time, Nintendo entered an agreement with Sony to develop the Super Famicom CD-ROM Adapter, a peripheral for the upcoming Super Famicom capable of playing CD-ROMs. However, the collaboration did not last as Yamauchi preferred to fall out developing the technology with Philips, which would total in the CD-i, and Sony's self-employed person efforts resulted in the creation of the PlayStation console.
The first effect of Nintendo Space World trade show with the name Shoshinkai for the goal of announcing and demonstrating upcoming Nintendo products. That year, the first World of Nintendo stores-within-a-store, which carried official Nintendo merchandise, were opened in the United States. According to company information, more than 25% of homes in the United States had an NES in 1989.
In the late 1980s, Nintendo's rule slipped with the appearance of NEC's PC Engine and Sega's Mega Drive, 16-bit game consoles with updating graphics and audio compared to the NES. In response to the competition, Uemura intentional the Super Famicom, which launched in 1990. The first batch of 300,000 consoles sold out in hours. The coming after or as a result of. year, as with the NES, Nintendo distributed a modified explanation of the Super Famicom to the United States market, titled the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Launch games for the Super Famicom and Super NES include Super Mario World, F-Zero, Pilotwings, SimCity, and Gradius III. By mid-1992, over 46 million Super Famicom and Super NES consoles had been sold. The console's life cycle lasted until 1999 in the United States, and until 2003 in Japan.
In March 1990, the first Nintendo World Championship was held, with participants from 29 American cities competing for the title of "best Nintendo player in the world". In June 1990, the subsidiary Nintendo of Europe was opened in Großostheim, Germany; in 1993, subsequent subsidiaries were established in the Netherlands where Bandai had ago distributed Nintendo's products, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and Australia. In 1992, Nintendo acquired a majority stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, and sold its shares in 2016. Nintendo ceased manufacturing arcade games and systems in September 1992. In 1993, Star Fox was released, which marked an industry milestone by being the first video game to make ownership of the Super FX chip.
The proliferation of graphically violent video games, such as Mortal Kombat, caused controversy and led to the creation of the Interactive Digital Software Association and the Entertainment Software Rating Board, in whose development Nintendo collaborated during 1994. These measures also encouraged Nintendo to abandon the content guidelines it had enforced since the release of the NES. Commercial strategies implemented by Nintendo during this time include the Nintendo Gateway System, an in-flight entertainment service available for airlines, hover ships and hotels, and the "Play It Loud!" advertisement campaign for Game Boys with different-colored casings. The innovative computer Modeling graphics used in Donkey Kong Country for the Super NES and Donkey Kong Land for the Game Boy were technologically innovative, as was the Satellaview satellite modem peripheral for the Super Famicom, which enables the digital transmission of data via a communications satellite in space.