History of Nintendo

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The history of Nintendo, a Japan-based international video game company, starts in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Yamauchi Nintendo", producing handmade hanafuda playing cards. Since its founding, the company has been headquartered in Kyoto.^[1] Sekiryo Kaneda was company president from 1929 to 1949, and succeeded by Hiroshi Yamauchi. Hiroshi Yaumauchi's Nintendo started producing toys like the Ultra Hand and operating love hotels. In the 1970s and 80s, they made arcade games and related accessories, as well as the Color TV-Game series of home consoles and the Game & Watch series of handheld electronic games.

Shigeru Miyamoto was hired by Nintendo in 1977, and created Donkey Kong (1981) for arcades: the company's first international hit video game and the origin of Nintendo's mascot Mario. After the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo filled a market gap in the west by releasing the Japanese Famicom home console (1983) as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. The innovative NES games Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986), both designed by Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, were highly influential to the games industry.

The Game Boy handheld (1989) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System home console (1990) were successful, while Nintendo had an intense business rivalry with Sega's competing consoles. Nintendo owned the Seattle Mariners baseball team from 1992 to 2016. The Virtual Boy stereoscopic 3D handheld (1995) was unpopular and a financial failure. The company entered 3D computer graphics with the Nintendo 64 ("N64", 1996) and its influential launch title Super Mario 64. The Pokémon media franchise, partially owned by Nintendo, has been a worldwide hit since the 1990s.

The Game Boy Advance ("GBA", 2001) was another success. The GameCube home console (2001), while popular with core Nintendo fans, had weak sales compared to Nintendo's new competitor consoles, Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox lines. In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi was succeeded by Satoru Iwata, who saw the release of the Nintendo DS handheld (2004) with a touchscreen and the Wii home console (2006) with motion control, which were extraordinarily successful—Nintendo, now aiming for a wide audience including casual gamers and previously non-gamers, temporarily stopped competing with Microsoft and Sony, who targeted devoted gamers. Wii Sports (2006) remains the company's best-selling game.

The Nintendo 3DS handheld (2011) successfully retried stereoscopic 3D. The Wii U console (2012) sold poorly, causing the company's future prospects to be questioned and influencing Iwata to bring Nintendo into mobile gaming. Iwata also led development of the successful Nintendo Switch hybrid home/handheld console (2017) before his death in 2015. He was succeeded by Tatsumi Kimishima until 2018, followed by current president Shuntaro Furukawa.