One of the best positioned companies in the gaming industry, Nintendo, is celebrating this September 23, celebrating 135 successful years of a long and successful career that has not only been satisfied with being present year after year in video games. They have also been present in the film and cartoon industry, reaping a well-deserved and extensive trajectory of good things for “The Big N” that saw its beginnings in the distant 1889 thanks to Fusajiro Yamuichi in the city of Kyoto, Japan.
Nintendo’s greatness can be traced back to a mammoth beginning
The original idea of Fusajiro Yamuichi and for which Nintendo was born was to become a marketer of Hanafuda style playing cards, one of the most popular games of the late nineteenth century. The characteristic of these cards is to contain mostly drawings or symbols than numbers, also these cards were hand engraved by Yamuichi himself, so they became popular and began to be a success in sales, being this the first great success of Nintendo in Japan, the name with which this product became known was “Nintendo Koppai”.
From 1929 to 1968 the company undergoes many changes in the name, but its turn in playing cards never changed until 1969, when they begin to have an expansion in electronic toys, by 1979 they begin to go leaps and bounds and enter the world of consoles with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Game Boy. Mentioning also Donkey Kong for the arcades in 1981, the NES was launched in 1985 and with epochal hits like The Legend Of Zelda, Super Mario Bros and Metroid, the Game Boy would arrive in 1988 to mark another great epoch and be the pointer of the “portable”.
The era of the 90’s marks one of the before and after of Nintendo with the arrival of the Nintendo 64 that broke the decade and remained at the top despite having 2 great competitors like the Genesis and the PS1, also had great successes in its catalog, including the considered “the best game in history” The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time. Only in 2005, we see Nintendo’s first false step with the launch of the Game Cube, which did not have the expected sales, as it had as direct competitors the first Xbox and the best-selling console in history: Sony PlayStation 2.
The Wii and Wii U were more niche consoles, with excellent exclusives, but basically went unnoticed, Nintendo’s success from 2005 to 2015 were portable consoles such as the Nintendo Double Screen (Nintendo DS) and its derivatives such as the 3DS and a relaunch of the DS. For 2016, comes the most successful console of “The Big N”, its hybrid console: Nintendo Switch, which was launched with its derivative, the Lite version, reached the rest of the world in 2017 and after almost 8 years of its launch, its success is not about to decrease.
The 135 years of “The Big N” have not been in vain, the video game company is at the top of this industry, although the Switch is not characterized by having the best graphics today, its peculiarity and magic lies in its exclusive video games such as: Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Super Smash Bros or Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In the preparations for the successor of Nintendo Switch, for any gamer this day is a source of pride and we wish many more successes to the creators of Mario, Samus and those characters that brought us thousands of joys.
