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Nintendo

Nintendo (任天堂) (Ninten is translated roughly as "leave luck to heaven" or "in heaven's hands," do is a common suffix for names of shops or laboratories) was originally founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda (Japanese playing cards). Over the years, it changed to a video game company and became one of the most powerful companies in the video game industry. Nintendo of Japan, the main branch of the company, is based in Kyoto, Kyoto prefecture, Japan. Nintendo of America, its North American division, is based in Redmond, Washington and Nintendo of Europe, the European division, is based in Großostheim, Germany.

History

In 1950, Hiroshi Yamauchi, great-great-grandson of Fusajiro and future president of Nintendo, made a deal with Disney to produce playing cards featuring Disney characters, when Nintendo came to make western-style playing cards as well as hanafuda at that period. Even from its early history it was clear that Nintendo was focused on making entertainment for children. These cards sold millions of packs, and made Nintendo enough money to move into other ventures, particularly toys.

By the late 1970s, Nintendo had begun to lose market share to electronic game manufacturers such as Bandai, and they responded with the "Game & Watch" series (small single-screen LCD games) which were created by the late visionary Gunpei Yokoi, as well as a series of arcade games. In 1980, Nintendo of America (NOA) was established by Yamauchi's son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa.

Rise of TV Consoles

Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)in the United States in 1985 after a successful launch of the Famicom in Japan. The NES is often considered to be the "savior" of the video game industry. Nintendo debuted Super Mario Bros, and later such hits as Metroid, and Zelda, helping to boost a market which seriously diminished in the early 1980s (often called "Video game crash of 1983" or "The Great Video Game Crash of the 80's").

By the end of the 1980's the courts found Nintendo guilty of anti-trust activities because it had abused its relationship with 3rd party developers and created a monopoly in the gaming industry by forcing developers not to make games for any other platforms.

Nintendo released the Super Famicom in November 1990 to fight against the Sega Megadrive and the PC Engine.

In September 1991, Nintendo released the Super Nintendo in North America, to keep up with the fierce competition of the 16-bit Sega Genesis and NEC Turbo Grafx 16.

In 1992, the SNES was released in Europe as the rival to the Sega Megadrive.

In Japan, the SFC easily took control of the gaming market.

Although the had a slow start, the SNES in North America eventually overtook the Sega Genesis, thanks to franchise titles such as Mario World, Zelda 3, Street Fighter 2, and the Final Fantasy series. Nintendo's stringent blood and violence policies (which was later eased up on in the mid '90's) continued to give it the apperance as the "kid's system", and was often approached skeptically by older gamers. Nintendo initially contracted with Sony to develop an addon CD-ROM drive to the SNES, but after Sony announced a standalone version of the drive, Nintendo terminated the contract and went with Phillips. Either way, nothing happened of the addon drive in regards to the SNES, but Sony took the time and research and began to spin it off into a standalone product. (As for whether or not Nintendo was justified with dismissing Sony so rapidly, the point is one of contention. Nintendo critics point out that the dismissal was capricious and done in a tasteless manner (Nintendo announced their alliance with Phillips at the same confrence that Sony showed off their CD-ROM drive), while defenders note that if Nintendo had allowed Sony to continue, they would have become a 'de facto' second-party developer.)

The system did not do as well as the Megadrive in Europe. This isn't terribly surprising, as Europe has historically been Nintendo's weakest market. During the NES era, Nintendo of Europe found itself in the odd position of actually producing several titles for the Sega Master System.

In 1995, Nintendo found themselves in a similar competitive situation. Former competitor Sega introduced their 32-bit Saturn, while newcomer Sony introduced the 32-bit Playstation, based on the work that they had done on the SNES CD-ROM drive. Sony's fierce marketing campaigns ensued, and it started to cut into Nintendo and Sega's market share. In 1995, Nintendo introduced the Nintendo 64 (N64). Nintendo had shocked many gamers for their choice of the out-dated Cartridge medium, especially considering their competition's choice of emerging CD-ROM storage mediums. The first 3D mario game was introduced as Super Mario 64, which was said to have set the measurment standards of 3D video games to this day. The N64 managed to secure a solid number 2 spot under the #1 Sony Playstation.

By 2001 the next generation consoles were being released. Sega had introduced the Dreamcast in 1999, Sony answered with the PlayStation 2 (PS2), Microsoft joined the fray with the Xbox, and in November of 2001, Nintendo released the GameCube. Thanks to the popular high quality franchise titles (Mario, Zelda, F-Zero, Metroid, etc.) the GameCube assisted in squeezing out the Dreamcast and as of November 2003, it has surpassed the Xbox, but remaines #2 behind the PS2. This was made evident when the price of the GameCube was dropped to $99.

Portable Gameboy

Introduced in 1989, and continuing strong today, is Nintendo's portable Gameboy systems. With several evolutions, including Pocket, Color, Advance, and Advance SP versions, the Gameboy is the single most successful, and oldest video game platform still in production. The Gameboy has been known for putting over a dozen other portable systems out of business (Including Nintendo's other attempts such as the Virtual Boy). Due to low battery consumption, durability, and a library of over a thousand games, the Gameboy has been on the top of the portable game food chain since it's inception.

Dwindling sales of the gameboy was saved by the introduction of the Pokemon game, which started a phenomon of top selling video games, movies, merchandise, and TV shows. The Pokemon phenomena helped and continue to help rocket gameboy sales all around the world.

Happenings

In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down as the president of Nintendo and named Satoru Iwata his successor.

In 2003, Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, sued Nintendo, Pokemon U.S.A., and various other Nintendo affiliates over breach of contract and various of other charges relating to the Pokemon trading card game.

In early 2004 Nintendo announced a new portable game console, codenamed Nintendo DS expected worldwide release is sometime in 2004, the only things that are known on the Nintendo DS is that it is going to be marketed seperately from their Game Boy Advance and GameCube consoles, it will have two three inch backlit TFT LCD screens, separate processors and up to 1 GB of memory, the Nintendo DS will be unveiled at the E3 gaming expo. It is not known if the Nintendo DS will be compatible with the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance.

The Hardware

Game & Watch
Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom for short) (Japanese console)
- Famicom Disk System (Japan only) - A large number of stores in Japan had "Disk Writers" with games stored in them that could be downloaded to a non-standard floppy disk for ¥2,000. Very popular in Japan, killed due to advancing technology that rendered the disks obsolete, and later, rampant piracy of said disks.
Nintendo Entertainment System (North American and European console version of the Famicom)
Game Boy - Portable black and white handheld system. The best-selling videogame system of all time
Super Famicom (Japanese console)
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES or SNES for short) (North American and European console version of the Super Famicom)
Super Game Boy - Adapter for playing Game Boy games on the Super NES.
Virtual Boy - The Virtual Boy used a red monochrome 3D virtual reality like system. Fewer than two dozen games were released for it in the United States.
Game Boy Color- A version of the Game Boy with a simple colored screen
Nintendo 64 - Originally the Ultra 64, this system saw Nintendo fully embrace 3D game worlds, though their refusal to end their use of cartridges, which held less and were more costly than optical media, proved ruinous.
- 64DD - Only released in Japan, this add-on system's games are on rewriteable disks. Games released include a paint and 3d package, F-Zero X, for creating new F-Zero tracks and a few others. An utter commercial failure, many speculated that Nintendo released it only to save face after promoting it pre-emptively for years.
Game Boy Advance - The new, more advanced version of the Game Boy. It was upgraded in 2003 with a backlight, a new design, and a new name: The Gameboy Advance SP.
Nintendo GameCube - Nintendo's next-generation system; uses a proprietary DVD medium to prevent piracy and lock out third-party developers.
Triforce - An arcade system based on Gamecube hardware, developed in partnership with Sega and Namco.
Game Boy Advance SP - a fold-up version of the Game Boy Advance with a backlit screen. The SP stands for Special Project.
Game Boy Player - An adapter for playing Game Boy games on the GameCube.
Nintendo GameCube 2 (tentative) - Nintendo plans to release its next video game console either before or at the same time as the Sony PlayStation 3.
Nintendo DS - forthcoming dual-screen portable game console
Nintendo 256 (speculative)

Nintendo's chief designer, and video game producer, is Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto is largly known for creating Nintendo's most popular games. Miyamoto is considered by many to be the most talented video game developer in the industry. He is known for several franchise titles, such as Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, F-zero, Mario-Kart, and Starfox.

The Software and Franchises

Animal Crossing
Balloon Fight
Donkey Kong - Dates back to its original line of arcade games. Introduced Mario, then known as "Jumpman".
Doshin The Giant
Duck Hunt
Earthbound (called "Mother" in Japan)
Excitebike
Fire Emblem - Remained Japan-only until 2003.
F-Zero
Game & Watch - Nintendo's oldest franchise
Golden Sun
Ice Climbers
Kid Icarus
Kirby
Legend of Zelda
Mac Rider
Mario
Metroid
Pikmin
Pokémon
Sheriff
Star Fox
Wario

Policies

Nintendo is known for hard-line stance against emulation of its video game consoles. It claims that mask work copyright protects its Game Paks from the exceptions that United States copyright law otherwise provides for software. Until mid-2002, the company also claims that emulators have no use other than to play pirated video games, contested by some who say emulators such as LoopyNES (for NES) and VisualBoyAdvance (for GBA) have been used to develop and test independently produced software. The revival of the NES and SNES through emulation has gradually settled down, and NES and SNES ROMs are actually getting easier to find.

For many years Nintendo also had strict censorship regulations on its games, and had a long list of objects, situations, and phrases that were not allowed to appear in Nintendo games. Among the banned subject matter was the appearance of blood, gore, nudity, religious icons (such as crosses), swearing, and smoking. This zero tolerance policy was popular with parents, but unpopular with older, mature gamers who felt they were being "babied." Upon the advent of a video game ratings system in 1994, the censorship practices were largely abandoned.

Nintendo has been accused of reverse piracy, especially for regional lockout. The company is also the originator of regional lockout.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Nintendo".