Nintendo (1889-2015, 2017-2020)

NOTE: This page was imported from the now-deleted original Awesome Games Wiki.

Nintendo
Leave luck to heaven.
Type: Public Founded: September 23, 1889 Founder: Fusajiro Yamauchi Headquarters: Minami-ku, Kyoto, Japan Key people: Shuntaro Furukawa (president) Shigeru Miyamoto (fellow) Divisions: Nintendo EPD Nintendo PTD Nintendo BDD Subsidiaries: 1-Up Studio iQue Mario Club Monolith Soft NDcube Next Level Games Nintendo European Research & Development Nintendo Sales Nintendo Software Technology Nintendo Technology Development Retro Studios Website: nintendo.com

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (任天堂株式会社, Nintendō Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese consumer electronics and video game company based in Minami-ku, Kyoto. Founded in 1889 as Nintendo Karuta which produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. In 1977, Nintendo manufactured the first game system, the Color TV-Game, which was succeeded by the Family Computer in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System available in the rest of the world. The company gained international recognition with the release of the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong and later with Super Mario Bros., a platform video game released in 1985.

Due to the success of the NES, Nintendo started producing other consoles, with the most successful being the Game Boy, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Nintendo DS, the Wii, and recently, the Nintendo Switch. The company is also notable for publishing video games of the Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Kirby, Metroid, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, and Super Smash Bros. franchises.

Why They Left Luck to Heaven Back Then

1. Mario, one of their fictional characters, became their most iconic character, but also their mascot and most known game series of the world, a.k.a, the Mickey Mouse of Gaming.
   • Pikachu, the mascot of Pokémon, is another iconic Nintendo character.
2. Ended the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 with its first major console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, which helped give birth to many great franchises that continue to this day. They also put many rules in place to prevent another video game crash.
3. They pretty much created Handheld Gaming with the Game and Watch series in 1980 and the Game Boy in 1989. To this day, they're still the unquestionable kings of handheld gaming. Not even Sega or Sony could dethrone them (with the latter giving up after Vita's failure). This culminated in the Nintendo Switch, being the first home game console that you could actually take with you, which is what the Game Boy series was trying to accomplish. (See GQ #14).
4. They invented the role-playing genre through one of their subsidiaries, Intelligent Systems.
5. They have many arcade classics like the original Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Punch-Out, Popeye, VS. Super Mario Bros.
6. Shigeru Miyamoto created several of Nintendo's most iconic franchises, such as Super Mario, Pikmin, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox. He is beloved by many gamers for his hard work on Nintendo's games and has been classified as an icon in the industry.
7. It has produced many memorable and beloved IPs, including Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kirby and Pokémon.
8. They defeated Sega in the legendary Console Wars.
9. They also allowed Japan to dominate the video game market for decades (Japan is currently dominating the market once more), with companies like Bandai Namco, Konami, Capcom, Sega, Square Enix, Sony, Taito, and much more.
10. It played a larger role in the transition from 2D gaming to 3D, and it is all thanks to the Nintendo 64.
11. Their consoles nowadays mostly focus on gimmicks like motion controls and touch screens, which is what other major console manufacturers never have really done.
12. They often cared more about gameplay than graphics or technology because they follow a philosophy: "Lateral thinking with withered technology". Their consoles, while gimmicky, are unique and fun as a result.
13. Nintendo is often more family-friendly than many other game companies nowadays and like most of the gaming industry back then, making their games enjoyable by anyone regardless of age.
14. Their current console, the Nintendo Switch, has combined handheld gaming (unarguably Nintendo's biggest strength) with home gaming. It fixed many of the issues the Wii U had like its poorly handled gimmicks and its unforgivably low power that resulted in a severe lack of third-party support.
    • The Nintendo Switch was a huge commercial success, selling 100 million units in its first five years.
15. They are most famous for creating many great Local Multiplayer games, such as the Mario Kart series and Super Smash Bros series.
16. Amiibos, their series of interactive figurines that came out after Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, are cool collectible figures based on Nintendo games (and 3rd party games in some cases) that can also unlock certain special items/features in compatible games.
17. They introduced the Classic Edition series of plug n' play systems modeled after their older consoles, which are a great way for people to revisit those old games.
18. Nintendo created a NES cartridge called Nintendo World Championships, specifically created for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. Two versions of this cartridge are considered holy grails amongst video game collectors.
    • The original grey cartridges were the original cartridges. These cartridges were used at the actual championships. These cartridges were given away to the challengers who made it to the final round of the Nintendo World Championships in 1990. This cartridge is very hard to come by, and even when you do, it may cost somewhere around $500k to $750k.
    • The gold-plated cartridges were given away through a contest in a Nintendo Power magazine. There were only 26 of these gold-plated Nintendo World Championships cartridges ever produced for the contest, and these cartridges are even rarer than the original cartridges used for the championships, and the highest-priced gold-plated cartridge that has not been purchased is being sold for 1 million dollars on eBay.
19. While they aren't the best with criticism, they sometimes learn from their mistakes:
    1. After Mario Party 1's analog stick controversy, they made their analog sticks more comfortable, and future Mario Party games no longer had mini-games that involved rotating the analog stick (or at least not to the extent that some of MP1's mini-games did), or recently, added a warning to not do so.
    2. Another mistake they learned from was the Wii U and its marketing.
20. Cares more about the quality of the games rather than profit, which is a rare thing nowadays.
21. They started a relationship with Microsoft (both companies are based in Seattle) and ported Minecraft to their consoles. Additionally, Steve, the main character of the game, appeared in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC fighter.
    • Banjo-Kazooie, another Microsoft-owned IP that made its debut on the Nintendo 64, also appeared in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC fighter. The Banjo-Kazooie series was added to Nintendo Switch Online in January 2022.
22. They granted Chris Taylor's (Spookywoobler) dying wish to play the E3 demo of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate early before his death from bone cancer on September 24, 2018.
23. The LABO VR is a massive improvement unlike its other virtual predecessor, even though it doesn't have a head strap.
24. By responding to the controversy of Sony's censorship policy on their consoles, they stated that they won't censor third-party games on theirs, something that they used to do during the NES and SNES era.
25. They once made a collab with LEGO to make the LEGO Mario brand which looks a lot like the games and spawned a console that looks similar to the actual Nintendo DS.
26. For the most part, they do a fantastic job at adding nostalgic elements to their games, like the 8-bit sections and Super Mario 64's Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey. Also, the retro courses in the later Mario Kart games are considered more to be Easter eggs and small nods at older games and don't go as far as nostalgia pandering as other companies such as Sega do.
27. They created the Miis, avatars that made their debut on the Wii and carried over to all their future consoles. Miis are playable characters in first and third-party games such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Fit.
28. They rescued the Bayonetta franchise by funding the development of the second and third games after Sega gave up the publishing rights for it, and no other companies like Sony or Microsoft were willing to publish them at the time.
29. Unlike Square Enix, they are still able to delay games for good reasons (regardless if they have a full release date or not) like what they did with Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Pikmin 3.
30. They still make playing cards, over a hundred years after the company was founded.
31. They joined their competitors, Sony and Microsoft, in their stance against Activision Blizzard regarding that company's horrible treatment towards their co-workers.
32. They have also been very competent at giving game designers creative control, such as when Shigetsu Itoi decided to end the Mother series after 3, confirming that the storyline in the games is complete and there will be no more games after it, and rightfully so too, unlike other game franchises like Mega Man X, when that series could've easily ended at 5, but got more installments for some reason.
33. They took legal action over RomUniverse, a ROM site that was notorious for locking downloads behind premium accounts, meaning that was piracy.
34. Unlike many companies that changed their logos rainbow for Pride Month, Nintendo of Japan instead decided to show support towards those from the LGBTQ+ community by giving employees who work for Nintendo the same workplace benefits as straight people. Everyone is a winner!
35. They took down a Super Mario NFT gambling game made by the cryptocurrency scheme '1-UP Platform'.
36. Instead of firing employees, Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo, lowered his salary twice because the 3DS and the Wii U were both underperforming.

Bad Qualities

Despite being known for their good games, they've been going downhill in recent years (and even back then) thanks to lazy business decisions. Click on this link if you're curious.

Trivia

• Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo Co. Ltd, passed away on July 11, 2015.
• Legend has it that the company's name is Japanese for "Leave Luck to Heaven”.

External links

• Nintendo (2015-2017, 2020-present)
• Nintendo on Nintendo Wiki

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