Nintendo Origins

Dan Breen

Takamiya Sensei

9/10/12

Nintendo

            Today, the Japanese company Nintendo is quite possibly the most well-known video game manufacturer in the world.  However, Nintendo wasn’t always the multi-billion dollar industry it is today.  Nintendo, meaning “leave luck to heaven”, was founded as a playing card company by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889.  They manufactured Hanafuda cards, which were all handmade from normal paper.  As demand increased for these cards, the company hired many workers in order to meet the public’s desire for these cards.  Years later Nintendo began manufacturing their cards out of plastic, which was the first time anybody in the industry tried that method.  These more durable cards were a huge hit and raised Nintendo’s profits dramatically.  In 1956, new owner Hiroshi Yamauchi visited the United States in order to obtain new marketing ideas.  He visited the United States Playing Card Company (known as possibly the best card manufacturer in the world), and to his surprise, their headquarters was actually a very small company.  This was perhaps the turning point for Nintendo, since Yamauchi realized that the playing card business could only expand to be so big and that he could not get his company to where he wanted it to be by selling cards alone.

            By 1963 Nintendo began trying out other methods to make money besides selling cards.  It set up a taxi company, a food company that specialized in the selling of instant rice, a vacuum cleaner company, and even a chain of love hotels!  However, these endeavors were all unsuccessful, so unsuccessful in fact that within a year Nintendo’s stock dropped from 900 yen to only 60 yen.  Fortunately, just before Nintendo was going to shut down, Yamauchi created the “Ultra-Hand”, which was basically an extendable scissor-designed contraption that could grab objects from far away.  It was created just in time for the Christmas season, and over a million units were sold, which in turn saved the company.  Following the ultra-hand Nintendo created the ten billion barrel puzzle (similar to the rubix cube), a baseball pitching machine, and a love tester.  All of the devices helped to raise the overall profit of the company. In 1977, Nintendo will make the best move it ever made: the hiring of Shigeru Miyamoto.

            By 1975, Miyamoto spearheaded the creation of games such as EVR Race, Radar Scope, and the game that perhaps launched Nintendo’s career selling video games, Donkey Kong.  Months later, Mario Bros. would be created for arcade machines in addition to their first hand-held game, Mr. Game and Watch.  During this time, small video game companies began illegally creating video games that would work inside Nintendo video game systems such as the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System).  These games were so horrible, that people began to stop buying Nintendo merchandise completely, once again causing their stock to plummet.  To fix this, Nintendo began to use a special “Seal of Quality” in order to distinguish their games from phonies.  Nintendo also began to use a chip called the 10NES to only allow Nintendo’s games to be played on their systems. 

            Today, Nintendo is one of the top three video game industries in the world, competing against Sony (Playstation) and Microsoft (Xbox).  Their newest devices include the Wii, the 3DS and soon to come out, the WiiU. 
              Do you think Nintendo will ever have to adapt what it sells again in order to compete with the economy?