Creator / Nintendo

Although Nintendo is the world's most widely known video game company, it didn't become one until the late 1970s. The Kyoto-based company has been around for a while, a really long while: Nintendo dates to 1889, when founder Fusajiro Yamauchi created playing cards called hanafuda. The business was successful enough to create sufficient demand, and Nintendo had modest expansion through much of the 20th century. Though its influence on the video game industry is both widespread and undeniable, it continues to manufacture hanafuda, together with playing cards, shogi, and go to this day.

Under the leadership of young Hiroshi Yamauchi (Fusajiro's grandson) after World War II, the company looked to expand its business model to everything from a taxi service to a chain of Love Hotels to instant foods. Most of these junctures failed and their hanafuda sales would plummet after the 1964 Olympics. Near-bankrupt, the company reached out to one of its workers, Gunpei Yokoi, noted among coworkers for inventing devices on the side, for product ideas. Yokoi brought in a few of his inventions, and Nintendo had a few modest hits in these ideas: the Ultra Hand, the Love Tester, and the Ultra Machine, among others. Bolstered by these successes, Yamauchi decided that Nintendo would become an entertainment and games company.

Tinkering around with solar cells and transistors led Yokoi and another engineer to create a series of basic light gun games — shooting a bottle in the right spot would cause it to pop apart, a toy lion would roar, and so on. Moving these into abandoned bowling alleys gave Nintendo their Laser Clay Ranges, where players would insert some coins and shoot at electronic targets installed at the ends of lanes. Though initially successful, the 1973 oil crisis sunk demand for the Rangers, and Nintendo was forced to go another route.

Basic video games like Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey were becoming popular, and Nintendo soon created the Color TV Game 6, complete with cheesy plastic overlays. Soon after was the more powerful Color TV Game 12. Following the success of those, Nintendo moved into arcade games, with help from games like the original Donkey Kong, which was designed by a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto. Deciding that simple Pong clones were not enough, Yamauchi wanted to create a more powerful gaming system, one that was so much better than the competitors that it would not even be a choice as to which the consumer wanted. With this in mind, Nintendo eventually released the Family Computer in Japan.

The Family Computer, or Famicom, was a massive success. After only a few years on the shelves, it had a lock on 90% of the Japanese home video game market. Eventually, Yamauchi decided to expand overseas, and he asked his son-in-law Minoru Arakawa to run Nintendo of America. After braving some initial struggle, Nintendo of America was saved by an arcade game starring a portly red-clad carpenter and a large hairy ape, which gave them the necessary capital and support to make more games.

At this point (early to mid '80s), the American home video game market was dead from The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Deader than dead, really, but arcades were still booming, so Nintendo decided to give the home market a shot; their thinking was that the Japanese and US markets couldn't be that different. Nintendo of America worked hard translating and porting games over from Japan, the system was redesigned several times to look more like a consumer electronic product and less like a video game machine, and several cool looking peripherals were designed to help sell the system - primarily, the NES Zapper Gun and R.O.B, the Robotic Operating Buddy. R.O.B. didn't do much, but he still looked pretty good for the early 1980s, and he was something different.

Though early comments from testing with kids proved discouraging, with a comment from an 8-year-old being "this is shit!", Yamauchi told Arakawa to get the system out anyway. Showing some true entrepreneurial determination, he told Arakawa that they must get the system into the hands of the consumers — that was the only test that mattered. Working through the winter months, Arakawa and the fledgling Nintendo of America got the system onto store shelves in New York in time for the Christmas season of 1985. Over half of the 100,000 systems sold. Though not as successful as Nintendo had hoped, the retailers had seen the viability of the product, and Nintendo had gotten their foot in the door.

More systems and games were shipped over to the States. Sales were slow at first, but word spread (as did Nintendo's distribution channels) and the system sold more and more — over 1,000,000 systems by the end of the first year and 3,000,000 by the end of the second. Consumer analysts were baffled, having predicted that the system would go the way of Atari and Coleco before it, but they didn't count on Nintendo's aggressive strategy and controlled games releasing, which avoided the flood of terrible-quality product that had caused the market to die before. It helped that their games — games like Super Mario Bros. 1, The Legend of Zelda I, and Metroid — were exceptional.

More games were translated. Original, American-developed titles were created. Licensing contracts were drawn up and signed. Nintendo Power, a magazine all about Nintendo games, was published. Help lines and call centers were being used night and day. Soon, home video games were booming once again, and all of it was Nintendo's doing — it single-handedly revived the dead-in-the-water industry and guided the market to the smashing success it is today with a portly red plumber and a small grey box.

Though several companies have come and gone, Nintendo remains strong in both hardware and software thanks to a constant cycle of innovation with its consoles and games. Nintendo's first-party games are nearly always high in quality, and they show a remarkable commitment to ensuring that even long-running series like Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda remain fresh and interesting with each new installment.

Nintendo is currently the only one of the big three players in the current console wars to solely make video games and consoles; Microsoft and Sony are enormous titans in other industries,^note Chances are high you are on a computer running Microsoft Windows and at least some piece of tech you own is made by Sony but Nintendo is forced to stay viable in order to compete in the game market. It must do this by keeping their products affordable and selling them at a profit, forcing it to use older technology instead of selling at a loss with newer technology. This also forces it to cut some features that the competing consoles have such as DVD/Blu-ray playback and graphics as high in quality as the other consoles. The stakes are also much higher for it, as it's stated that the day it no longer makes consoles is the day it drops out of the game business entirely.

On the other hand, these same attributes also ensure that Nintendo is never hurting for cash. Nintendo is one of those rare few companies that not only makes a profit, but makes consistent profit and has a tremendous bank account saved up for "rainy days". Indeed, there has rarely been a generation when Nintendo has not made a profit from day one, whereas competitors generally require years before hardware and software begin to make money. More than that, since Nintendo has such strong power as a company and as a brand, a good part of their success lies in transforming games into franchises (see Pokémon for a good example of how Nintendo parleyed a game into everything from stores to movies). Suffice to say, while the stakes are higher for Nintendo, it's in the business of video games because it wants to be despite easily being able to drop out and be a pure media company.

While its consoles usually lack in graphical power, they make up for it with innovative games and controllers. Controller mainstays such as rumble, shoulder buttons, and analog sticks were either pioneered or popularized by Nintendo, and its decision to go with motion controllers for the Wii proved to be a smart decision as the console became a game-changing hit. Microsoft and Sony quickly produced their own answers to Nintendo's Wii Remotes, but not fast enough to keep the Wii from winning that generation in terms of sales and causing a permanent change in the way that we play games, as well as introducing a whole new collection of gamers to the hobby.

Nintendo also created and monopolized handheld units until the Japan-only WonderSwan, and later the PlayStation Portable arrived in 2004 (after which it merely dominated handheld consoles). The Game & Watch was the greatest handheld console in the early/mid 1980s. Following it was the Game Boy in 1989, which was a similar success, thanks (in part) to the bundle-packaging of Tetris. Nintendo's biggest console failure was the Virtual Boy, which bombed due to headache-inspiring pseudo-3D visuals and few good games besides Virtual Boy Wario Land. The Game Boy was succeeded by the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance before being phased out in favor the the Nintendo DS line.

One element of Nintendo which became deprecated was the Official ("Original" in Europe) Nintendo Seal of Quality. It was originally created to show which games had been licensed for publishing by Nintendo officially, as opposed to being a pirated or counterfeit releases, for the NES. Eventually, they dropped the "of Quality" during the GameCube/GBA era, with consumers finally realizing it didn't stand for game quality^note the intent was to indicate the quality of the hardware the games were on and that it would work on the console it was intended for without any problems provided there are no defects, but as mentioned it was misunderstood to mean software quality.

Nintendo's placement in the Console Wars has been all over the place, ranging from unquestionably first (NES and Wii) to barely first (SNES) to only beating out a dying Sega console (N64) to dead last (GameCube and Wii U). Regardless of how they place, all of Nintendo's consoles are beloved, and every one of them has a group of standout games that represent the best of their generation, if not the best of all time.

The company has developed a reputation of making high-quality games that are simply fun — they're often brightly colored, chipper in tone, incredibly well designed, and a blast to play with friends. Other companies devote themselves to rich story telling, intense FPS games, or year after year of sports titles, but Nintendo is known for bringing out the ten-year-old kid in everyone. In that regard, while not everyone has Nintendo as their favorite company, it's hard to find anyone that actively and genuinely dislikes Nintendo.

Currently, the Wii U is lagging in expectations and sales and is losing badly to its rivals, but the 3DS is crushing the Vita and doing well (if below expectations) despite mobile games taking a significant chunk of the handheld market base. It's a little too late to completely turn things around (the PlayStation 4 has sold nearly three times as much as the Wii U), but the announcement and release of some big-name franchises and as well as some new franchises for both the Wii U and 3DS are helping quite a bit

Perhaps due to this underwhelming performance, the Wii U is possibly getting an early retirement, given Nintendo's announcement in March 2015 that it was already working on its next console — the codenamed NX, currently slated for a March 2017 release. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be a launch title alongside it.

It also took its first steps into the mobile and free-to-play market in 2015, announcing a partnership with developer DeNA to develop titles for phones and tablets. Miitomo was the first of those, and Pokémon Go was a few months behind it, with more to follow. Pokemon Go proved to be a massive hit, becoming the most popular mobile game ever in the United States within the week after release, and it causeed Nintendo's stock to skyrocket to levels not seen in over a decade.

In May of 2015, Nintendo made even bigger news: Universal successfully secured the license to use Nintendo properties for its theme parks. The first of the attractions, which will be primarily Mario-themed, will open in Universal Studios Japan in 2020.

On July 11, 2015, it was announced that CEO Satoru Iwata had passed away from a bile duct growth. He will be deeply missed by the community, and his passing was noted and mourned by many prominent figures and companies within the gaming industry. Even 4chan honored the man and his contributions to the world of video games. His successor, Tatsumi Kimishima, was chosen in September 2015.

In May 2016, Kimishima stated in an interview that Nintendo will be reconsidering their stance on movie adaptations and are now planning on producing animated movies based on their franchises. What's more, they intend to (whether fully or partly) finance and produce the movies themselves rather than license them to other studios (similar to the pre-Disney structure of Marvel Studios), meaning that the disastrous live-action Super Mario Bros. film was still fresh in their minds to ensure that a film like that wouldn't happen again.

As a fun side note, they also majority-owned the Seattle Mariners, a US baseball team, from 1992 to 2016 — with the original purchase being rather controversial at the time. They still hold a (much smaller) stake in the team.

Those looking for a more detailed history of Nintendo, ranging from its beginnings through approximately the N64 era, can find it in the book Game Over: Press Start To Continue by David Sheff and Andy Eddy.

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Also see:

• Nintendo Power, which for years was the company's in-house magazine and remained one of the most popular gaming publications until it ended in 2012.
• Nintendo Direct, the company's announcement webcast series.
• amiibo, a line of figures and collectibles that tie into various games.

Nintendo was once (or, depending on your preference, still is) the go-to company for video games, and as such, they hold a larger place in entertainment history than any other video game company. The list that follows is only a partial selection of an absolutely massive 30+ year lineup on at least five different consoles and many hand held variants:

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Notable people associated with Nintendo:

• Hiroshi Yamauchi
• Shigeru Miyamoto
• Satoru Iwata
• Gunpei Yokoi
• Hirokazu Tanaka
• Satoshi Tajiri
• Koji Kondo
• Mahito Yokota
• Shigesato Itoi
• Masahiro Sakurai (Project Sora)
• Yoshiaki Koizumi
• Reggie Fils Aime
• Kazumi Totaka
• Yoshio Sakamoto
• Tatsumi Kimishima

List of Nintendo subsidiaries and related videogame companies:

• Alpha Dream (responsible for the Mario & Luigi subseries)
• Brownie Brown (now split up into two studios, Brownies and 1-Up Studio)
• Camelot Software Planning
• Creatures Inc
• Good Feel
• Game Freak (handles the main Pokémon games)
• HAL Laboratory
• Intelligent Systems (responsible not just for games like Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, but also Nintendo's development tools)
• Jupiter Corporation
• Left Field Productions (had a minority interest bought by Nintendo in 1998, which was bought back from them in 2002)
• Level-5 (third-party, but frequently has Nintendo distribute its games outside of Japan)
• Monolith Soft and Tetsuya Takahashi (an offshoot of Square Enix founded by their former employees, including Takahashi; started life as a Bandai Namco Games subsidiary until it sold most of its stake to Nintendo)
• Genius Sonority
• Next Level Games
• PlatinumGames
• Rareware (sold to Microsoft in 2002)
• Retro Studios (made the Metroid Prime Trilogy)
• Shinen Multimedia
• Silicon Knights (just like Rareware, it was later bought up by Microsoft, though it died at its hands too)

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Tropes associated with Nintendo:

• Ascended Meme: Non-Specific Action Figure, an Ensemble Darkhorse of the pre-E3 2012 video, gets some recognition during E3 itself — one in the 3DS Software Showcase, and the last Nintendo E3 2012 video on YouTube.
• Badass Boast: Reggie's classic E3 2004 introduction speech, quoted above.
• Bleached Underpants: Before video games, one of its ventures was a chain of Love Hotels. It didn't go very well.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: "Nintendo marches to the beat of their own drum" is a common saying, because they've always been willing to experiment with ideas that the public tends to find very strange. The DS and Wii show just how profitable this mindset can be, although there have been just as many failures.
• Create Your Own Villain: Nintendo is the reason why Sony got into the video game market, and the decision to use cartridges on the Nintendo 64 indirectly led to the PlayStation's success. (See the SNES CD-ROM page for more details.)
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: After their experiment with disks with the Famicom Disk System led to massive piracy on the system, Nintendo has been massively cautious when it comes to piracy ever since. Most system updates for the Wii have been intended solely to kill potential exploits for homebrew. This doesn't stop the Wii from being one of the most easily homebrewable systems ever, though. Thankfully, most homebrewers prefer to insert their own content into official games (thus requiring prospective players to actually have said game in order to play) rather than pirate games left and right.
• Excuse Plot: The company had its original heyday when this was the norm, but it's still applied it to certain franchises today, sometimes because of the Grandfather Clause, other times because it's found that having a plot is secondary to the quality of the main game. Miyamoto himself has gone on the record to say that sometimes a plot can be an obstruction to the quality of the gameplay, regardless of how good the plot itself is. That's not to say there aren't any exceptions.
• Extreme Omnivore: Just about every one of its franchises has at least one of these. Yoshi and Kirby are probably the stand-out examples though.
• First-Name Basis: While most of the major Japanese developers and executives (Miyamoto, Iwata, Sakurai, etc.) are the opposite trope, the company's prominent Western staff are this (Reggie Fils-Aime is almost universally referred to as simply "Reggie").
• Giant Hands of Doom: The developers of this company seem to like this type of boss, especially Masahiro Sakurai.
• Grandfather Clause: The Mario series in particular is prey to this. Though each game has pretty good gameplay evolution, the plot's often thin and usually just an excuse to get Peach kidnapped and Mario out adventuring. Other key franchises such as Zelda, Metroid, and even Star Fox have received much more character and plot intricacy in recent games.
  • Super Mario RPG plays with this: Peach is kidnapped, but shortly thereafter is rescued, and both she and Bowser permanently join the party to defeat the real Big Bad.
• Heroic Mime: Most of its leads are this or have been this, but some have been given a voice, for better or for worse.
  • Voice Grunting: Most of its major characters have a voice even if they don't speak full lines of dialogue. Some of them also have short phrases they often use (Mario: It's-a me, Let's-a go).
• Iconic Logo: Red in the West and blue in Japan for much of the company's video game-making history, but switched to gray internationally in 2006.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • ROM cartridges were always called "game paks". The NES system itself was called a "control deck", not a console. The reason for this and other such terms was to have Nintendo distance itself from the failure of Atari, and thus attempt to avoid some of the stigma associated with home video games in North America. Clearly, something worked.
  • Nintendo prefers to call free-to-play games, including its own, "free-to-start".
• Knight Templar: In regard to playing the systems not how it wants you to, a problem that has plagued it from the beginning.
  • The infamous coding lock on the NES, which meant "first-party or expensively licensed games only". This got it into a lot of legal hot water, and didn't manage to completely stem the tide of unauthorized games (though it did prevent a great deal of them).
  • The EULA for the 3DS says, in Layman's Terms, that they will intentionally brick your system if they find any software that they consider "unauthorized". Ouch.
  • The words "Project M" are tripwired on Miiverse. Even typing the phrase or an abbreviation thereof will trigger an automatic ban for discussing "criminal activity" (which had the side effect of causing users to be banned for abbreviating Paper Mario as "PM").
• Last of His Kind:
  • Every other dedicated console company such as Atari and Sega have either gone third-party or outright gone defunct. Nintendo is the last one remaining.
  • Third-party publishers have recently been accused of spoiling the experience with DLC and other transactions that give players who spend more money an unfair advantage, and a few of these publishers such as EA have chosen to stop supporting Nintendo. As a result, some fans of Nintendo have referred to the Wii U as the last real gaming console.
• Mascot: Mario, who is also considered to the mascot for video games in general.
• Mercy Mode: Their patented Super Guide, which was made as an excuse to bring back Nintendo Hardness without alienating less skilled players.
• Morton's Fork:
  • Played with by the Internet at large. If Nintendo releases its usual products, they're all kiddie stuff. If it goes for darker, edgier content, it's seen as overstepping its comfort zone. If it appeals to the hardcore game, it's going for an audience it's lost. If it appeals to the casual gamer, it's ignoring the essential hardcore crowd.
  Zero Punctuation: Turns out a big chunk of this "online-multiplayer"-focused game is a single-player campaign. Oh, Nintendo, you poor sod! Someone suggested making an online shooter and was smart enough not to stand on the trapdoor to the piranha tank, so you had to reach a compromise, but you just couldn't fight the old instincts!
  Nintendo exec: *cries aloud as his hand refuses to shake the dev's*
  • invoked Sticking to tradition with established franchises leads to claims of It's the Same, so It Sucks (such as with New Super Mario Bros. in general), while experimenting tends to lead to They Changed It, Now It Sucks (such as with Super Mario Sunshine and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker)
• Multi-Platform: Zig-zagged.
  • It was originally averted in the U.S. with the NES — for the first few years anyway. The developer contract stipulated that a game released for the NES could not be released for any other U.S. system. This had the effect of killing the Sega Master System in its infancy and sealing the Commodore 64's fate (in the States — both systems fared better in other countries). It took antitrust litigation to force Nintendo to loosen its stranglehold.
  • However, starting with the Nintendo 64 era, this trope ends up averted more often than not. Nintendo's first-party titles are never multiplatform, and developers in those generations tended to skip Nintendo's console with their releases for a variety of reasons — vastly differing power levels, smaller install base, lower sales, different media format, and a few more.
• Necessary Weasel: As mentioned above, many of their games employ an Excuse Plot so that it wouldn't detract from the gameplay.
• Network Decay:
  • Nintendo Co., Ltd.:
    • The announcement of Nintendo beginning plans for a "Quality of Life" platform/services has not set well with many gamers. They view this as more Network Decay, though with the Quality of Life platform/services still lacking a proper public unveiling, it is difficult to tell if this could be the case (as some analysts have speculated this could simply be a side venture not any different from Microsoft also creating computers, or Sony with electronics).
    • Nintendo making video games in the first place qualifies as Network Decay, considering the company originally created and distributed playing cards.
  • Nintendo's American branch:
    • invoked When Nintendo of Europe, usually the leader in No Export for You, actually localize games for their region and Nintendo of America doesn't (the Operation Rainfall games were the most egregious example), you know there's a problem at Nintendo of America. Though Nintendo of America are trying to turn this around by localizing a number of games in 2014 that would have fallen victim to No Export for You in the past.
    • Many also find Nintendo of America's lack of mainstream marketing a sign of decay that seems to be not going away any time soon.
    • There's also the matter of Nintendo of America being overprotective of the company's copyrights on YouTube and tried to deny any Super Smash Bros. games from being at EVO 2013 (though it's worth noting that the aforementioned incidences had their decisions reversed after fan backlash).
• Nintendo Hard: Trope Maker and Trope Namer; largely the case with NES games, present in a small few titles since, and coming back through the creation of the Super Guide feature in recent first-party games.
  • Not in just the games they made; the NES versions of Battletoads and Ghosts 'n Goblins were much harder than their Sega and arcade counterparts.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Usually a side effect of the aforementioned Excuse Plots, but more recent plot-heavier titles also have a surprising tendency to avoid portraying romance. Even Nintendo's two most prominent "romantic" couples, Mario/Peach and Link/Zelda, are typically shown to be so hands-off that they can be easily be interpreted as platonic. The one series that most thoroughly averts this trope is Fire Emblem, where certain installments let you not only build relationships between two characters and eventually get them married so that they give each other stat buffs in combat, but also control their kids later in the game.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Many of Nintendo's own games will have notices before and during a game. Mostly, from the Wii onwards they involve safety notices like making sure the Wii Remote is strapped properly or advice like taking a break after a playing certain amount of time.
• Platform Game: Codified this genre. While Nintendo has many many successful games, series, and franchises spread over a variety of genres, some of the most loved and well-received series and franchises are of this genre as well.
• Quality Over Quantity: This trope was Nintendo's whole argument during its dominance in the '80s and early '90s before it changed its policies after being accused of monopolistic practices with its licensing agreements. The original agreement was that licensees could only make up to five games a year; the reasoning behind the decision was that it was better for the developers to focus on creating a few smash hits than to flood the market by churning out mediocre games, as was the case with Atari before the crash.
  • Becomes a Hilarious in Hindsight moment when the Mario Party series were introduced and had a new installment nearly every year, which caused most gamers and critics to view the series as mediocre after a while. Mario Party 9 broke the trend by being released several years after the eighth installment and changing up the basics, which was something most critics liked.
• Rule of Fun: The foundation of game design at the company.
• Self-Deprecation: Their E3 2014 digital media event contained a number of short sketches by the Robot Chicken crew which poked fun at themselves and their characters.
• Show, Don't Tell: It gained the respect of various media personalities and game critics (most notably Jim Sterling of Jimquisition) in recent times because of its abiding by this trope when it comes to hype generation. As opposed to most top tier devs, who generate hype by massive marketing campaigns and fake, CGI trailers (most infamously with Dark Souls II and Watch_Dogs), it just ups and shows the actual gameplay.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Many of its franchises gravitate heavily towards the idealistic end of the scale. Even darker franchises such as Metroid still tend to have an optimistic tone.
• Super Title 64 Advance: It's strongly associated with this trend, doing it with its own games and sometimes letting third-party developers do it when releasing on its consoles.
• Surprise Creepy: It has a reputation for making sweet, family-friendly games... and thus a lot of the weirder and scarier elements of games it develops or publishes tend to blindside people. Kirby games in particular are infamous for this, due to them being in the Lightest and Softest of Sugar Bowl settings yet still having Eldritch Abominations as the Final Bosses most of the time.
• The Great Video Game Crash of 1983: The company single-handedly ended it with the NES. Many of their business practices in the US were specifically to combat the underlying causes of the crash, centering around the mantra of "quality over quantity" for both them and their licensees. As the games industry grew healthy, many of their aggressive business practices worked against them, rather than for them - Nintendo's famously restrictive licenses hurt them with the Genesis and PlayStation, as game makers had other companies to do business with.
• Tonka Tough: ALL of their consoles^note (though maybe not the hinges and shoulder buttons of the Nintendo DS Lite) were/are nigh-indestructible, especially the Game Boy and GameCube. The usual joke is that Nintendo products are made of Nintendium.
  • The Nintendo World store in New York City has an original Game Boy that was hit by artillery fire during the first Gulf War and still runs (more specifically, the Tetris opening/demo).
  • Wii Remotes are said to be coated in the stuff, as they smash TV screens and windows with little to no damage to themselves.
  • GizmoSlip drop-tested the Wii U controller onto concrete — repeatedly — and it suffered nothing worse than some scuffs on the corners, while the 6.2-inch touchscreen didn't even get marred.

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