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A Brief History of Nintendo
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
If there is a sentimental favorite in interactive entertainment, it's Nintendo, the 110-year-old company that has published such video game legends as Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers. After the video game market crashed in 1983, Nintendo was the company with the foresight, technology, and courage to resurrect it.
Nintendo, which started out manufacturing Japanese playing cards, entered the video game business in the late 1970s with a relatively high-priced line of liquid crystal display (LCD) games called Game & Watch. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to make the jump into arcade games in 1979. While he had some success in Japan with Radarscope, it took the 1981 release of Donkey Kong for Nintendo to crack the U.S. market. After a run of successful arcade games, Yamauchi's next move was to market the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), known as the Famicom in Japan. Released in the United States in 1985, the system became an international phenomenon. Nintendo sold over 30 million NESs in the United States and nearly 62 million units worldwide. There were no real challengers to compete with NES sales. Such early video game companies as Atari, Fairchild, and Mattel had either left the business, gone bankrupt, or faced severe financial difficulties. Sega, Nintendo's only significant rival, was too late entering the Japanese market and did not have the funding to match-up in the United States.
This was not the case, however, when Nintendo launched its 16-bit Super NES in 1991. Sega had already released its 16-bit Genesis and NEC had launched the TurboGrafx two years earlier. While NEC never emerged as a significant factor, Sega managed to control a small minority of the 16-bit market through the especially lucrative years of 1992-1994. At the end of 1994, Nintendo released a game called Donkey Kong Country and recaptured the market. In the end, Nintendo sold 48 million Super NESs worldwide. By 1996, Nintendo had sold more 16-bit units, but Sega controlled the most lucrative years of the market and cut deeply into Nintendo's lead. Nintendo's most successful and long-living system is Game Boy, a handheld cartridge system with an eight-bit processor and a small black and white LCD screen. Launched in 1989, this system has remained active for nearly a decade. Game Boy hardware has been updated several times. In 1996, Nintendo shrank the casing, added a slightly better screen, and repackaged it as Game Boy Pocket. In 1998, a color screen was added. Nintendo has sold nearly 80 million Game Boys, Game Boy Pockets, and Game Boy Colors worldwide. Nintendo's most recent television game console is Nintendo 64. While Nintendo 64 has sold fairly well in the United States, it has not performed well on a worldwide basis. Nintendo has sold approximately 25 million Nintendo 64s worldwide, more than 13 million of which were sold in North America. By comparison, Sony Computer Entertainment has sold 50 million PlayStations worldwide.
What Nintendo of America lacks in hardware sales it makes up in game-by-game sales. Seven of the top ten games of the latest generation of video game systems were for the Nintendo 64.
