Happy 117th Birthday Nintendo!
Yup, thats right, today is Nintendo's 117th Birthday!
Today, 117 years ago, Nintendo was born!
Happy 117th Birthday Nintendo!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo
From Wikipedia:
"On September 23, 1889 in Kyoto, Nintendo started as a small Japanese business by Fusajiro Yamauchi near the end of 1889 as Nintendo Koppai. Based in Kyoto, Japan, the business produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The cards, which were all handmade, soon began to gain popularity and Yamauchi had to hire assistants to mass produce cards to keep up with demand.
Fusajiro Yamauchi did not have a son to take over the family business. Following common Japanese tradition, he adopted his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda (Sekiryo Yamauchi, after the marriage). In 1929, Yamauchi retired from the company and allowed Sekiryo Yamauchi to take over the company as president. In 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi established a joint venture with another company and renamed the company Yamauchi Nintendo & Company. In 1947, Sekiryo established the company Marufuku Company, Ltd., to distribute the Hanafuda cards, as well as several other brands of cards that had been introduced by Nintendo. Sekiryo Yamauchi also had only daughters, so again his son-in-law (Shikanojo Inaba, renamed Shikanojo Yamauchi) was adopted into the family. The marriage produced a son, Hiroshi Yamauchi, but Shikanojo soon abandoned his family and disappeared, leaving Hiroshi to take over the company. Subsequently, Hiroshi was brought up by his grandparents.
Hiroshi Yamauchi
Hiroshi Yamauchi attended Waseda University in Tokyo. However, after his grandfather died suddenly in 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi took office as the president of Nintendo. He was only 21 years old. He renamed Yamauchi Nintendo & Company to Nintendo Playing Card Company, Limited., and in 1951 he renamed their distribution company, Marufuku Company, Limited, to Nintendo Karuta Company, Limited. In 1953, Nintendo became the first company in Japan to produce playing cards from plastic. This was a huge hit and allowed Nintendo to dominate the card market.
In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi paid a visit to the U.S.A, to engage in talks with the U.S. Playing Card Company, the dominant playing card manufacturer in the States. Yamauchi was shocked to find that the world's biggest company in his business was relegated to using a small office. This was a turning point where Yamauchi realised the limitations of the playing card business.
In 1959, Nintendo struck a deal with Disney to have them allow Nintendo to use Disney's characters on Nintendo's playing cards. Beforehand, Western playing cards were regarded as something similar to hanafuda and mah jong- a device for gambling. By tying playing cards to Disney and selling books explaining the different games which one can play with the cards, Nintendo could sell the product to Japanese households. The tie in was a success and the company sold at least 600,000 card packs in a single year. Due to this success, in 1962, Yamauchi took Nintendo public, listing the company in Osaka Stock Exchange Second division.
Following the aforementioned success, in 1963 Nintendo Playing Card Company Limited was renamed to Nintendo Company, Limited by Hiroshi. Nintendo now began to experiment in other areas of business using the newly injected capital. During the period of time between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a taxi company, a "love hotel" chain, a food company (trying to sell instant rice, similar to instant noodles), and several other things (including a vacuum cleaner- Chiritory- which was later seen as a two-player game in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ in 2003). All these ventures failed, except toymaking, where they had some earlier experience from selling playing cards. Then the bottom dropped out. In 1964, while Japan was experiencing an economic boom due to the Tokyo Olympics, the playing card business reached its saturation point. Japanese households stopped buying play cards, and the price of Nintendo stock tumbled from 900 yen to a meager 60 yen.
In 1965, Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi as a maintainance engineer for the assembly line. It wasn't known however, that Yokoi would soon become famous for much more than his ability to repair conveyer belts.
Toy Company
Riddled with debt, Nintendo struggled to survive in the Japanese toy industry; it was still small at this point, and dominated by already well established companies such as Bandai and Tomy. Because of the generally short product life cycle of toys, the company always had to come up new product. This was the beginning of a major new era for Nintendo.
In 1970, Hiroshi Yamauchi was observing a hanafuda factory. He noticed an extending arm, which was made by one of their maintainance engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, for his own amusement. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. Released as "The Ultra Hand", it would become one of Nintendo's earliest toy blockbusters, selling over a million units. Seeing that Yokoi had promise, Hiroshi Yamauchi pulled him off assembly line work. Yokoi was soon moved from maintainance duty to product development.
Due to his electrical engineering background, it soon become apparent that Gumpei was quite adept at developing electronic toys. These devices had a much higher novelty value than traditional toys, allowing Nintendo to charge a higher price margin for each product. Yokoi went on to develop many other toys, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a Love Tester. Another invention of his, in collaboration with Masayuki Uemoura from Sharp, was the Nintendo Beam Gun Game, the precursor to the NES Zapper.
The 1970s also saw the hiring of Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who (along with Yokoi) would become a living legend in the world of gaming and the secret to Nintendo's longevity; his creative vision was instrumental in determining the path Nintendo's future (and indeed, the industry's as a whole) would follow. Yokoi began to mentor Miyamoto during this period of time in R&D, teaching him all that he knew.
Electronic Game
Nintendo at this time saw how successful video games were and began to dabble in them. Their first step in that field was to secure the rights to distribute the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan, which they did in 1975. At the time, home video game consoles were extremely rare — even the seminal Atari PONG console had yet to be produced. After experiencing reasonable success at this, Nintendo began developing its own video games, both for the home and for arcades. In 1970s, Mitubishi Electric propose joint development of "Colour TV Game Machine". In 1977, they released "Color TV Game 6" and "Color TV Game 15" (6 and 15 indicates the number of games).
Their first video arcade game was 1978's Computer Othello; a large handful of others followed in the next several years, Radar Scope and Donkey Kong being among the most famous of these. The early 1980s saw Nintendo's video game division (led by Yokoi) creating some of its most famous arcade titles. The massively popular Donkey Kong was created in 1981 with Miyamoto as its mastermind, and released in the arcades and on the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision video game systems (although Nintendo themselves generally had no involvement with these early console ports). This release method would be used on several later Nintendo arcade games of this same period, including the original Mario Bros. (not to be confused with the later Super Mario Bros.!) In addition to this arcade and dedicated console game activity, Nintendo was testing the consumer handheld video game waters with the Game & Watch.
1983–1989
In July 1983, Nintendo released their Famicom (Family Computer) system in Japan, which was their first attempt at a cartridge-based video game console. The system was a booming success, selling over 500,000 units within two months. The console was also technically superior and inexpensive when compared to its competitors, priced at about $100 USD. However, after a few months of the consoles selling well, Nintendo received complaints that some Famicom consoles would freeze when the player attempted to play certain games. The fault was found in a malfunctioning chip and Nintendo decided to recall all Famicon units currently on store shelves, which cost them almost half a million USD.
By 1985, the Famicom had proven to be a huge continued success in Japan. However, Nintendo also encountered a problem with the sudden popularity of the Famicom — they did not have the resources to manufacture games at the same pace they were selling them. To combat this, Yamauchi decided to divide his employees into three groups, the groups being Research & Development 1 (R&D 1), Research & Development 2 (R&D 2) and Research & Development 3 (R&D 3). R&D 1 was headed by Gunpei Yokoi, R&D 2 was headed by Masayuki Uemura, and R&D 3 was headed by Genyo Takeda. Using these groups, Yamauchi hoped Nintendo would produce a small number of high quality games rather than a large number of average quality games.
During this period of time, Nintendo rekindled their desire to release the Famicom in the USA. Since the company had very little experience with the United States market, they had previously attempted to contract with Atari for the system's distribution in 1983. However, a fiasco involving Coleco and Donkey Kong soured the relationship between the two during the negotiations, and Atari refused to back Nintendo's console. The video game crash soon took out not only Atari, but the vast majority of the American market itself. Nintendo was on its own.
Nintendo was determined not to make the same mistakes in the U.S. that Atari had. Because of massive influxes of games (games that were regarded as some of the worst ever created), gaming had almost completely died out in America. Nintendo decided that to avoid facing the same problems, they would only allow games that received their "Seal of Quality" to be sold for the Famicom, using a chip called 10NES to "lockout" or prevent unlicensed games from working.
In 1985, Nintendo announced that they were releasing the Famicom worldwide — except under a different name — the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) — and with a different design. In order to ensure the localization of the highest-quality games by third-party developers, Nintendo of America limited the number of game titles third-party developers could release in a single year to five. Konami, the first third-party company that was allowed to make cartridges for the Famicom, would later circumvent this rule by creating a spinoff company, Ultra Games, to release additional games in a single year. Other manufacturers soon employed the same tactic. Also in 1985, Super Mario Bros. was released for the Famicom in Japan and became a large success.
Nintendo test marketed the Nintendo Entertainment System in the New York area on October 18, 1985. Following immediate success, they soon began shipping the NES nationwide in February 1986, along with 15 games, sold separately. In the U.S. and Canada, it outsold its competitors on a ten to one scale. This was also the year that Metroid (Japan) and Super Mario Bros. 2 (the Japanese version) were released."
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Well, I think we all know what happened after this point in history! ^_~
Nintendo has done well over the years... They've hit a few bumbs here and there, but for the most part, they've stayed alive and kicking. And they keep going.
They've been in the business of fun entertainment for over 100 years, and no other videogame company can say that.
So once again, Happy 117th Birthday Nintendo! Long live Nintendo!
