Nintendo

[japanese; meaning: "work hard, but it remains in the hands of heaven at last"]

Nintendo is quite a traditional company, founded in 1889 by Fusarijo Yamauchi. It used to deal with  manufacturing Hanafunda, which are japanese playing cards. The business boomed in 1933 and the company established an unlimited partnership, Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. Around 1951 the company expanded and again they renamed the company into: Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd.

Eight years later they started selling cards printed with Walt Disney characters, opening a new market in children's playing cards. The card department boomed! In 1963 the company`s new name has changed to Nintendo Co. Ltd. and started manufacturing games in addition to playing cards. In 1970 the company started selling the Beam Gun series, employing opto-electronics. Electronic technology was introduced into the toy industry for the first time in Japan. In the following years laser clay shooting system were developed, until 1978 when they created and started selling coin-operated video games using microcomputers. Three years late the company announced a wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America Inc.. At this moment "Donkey Kong" became the hottest selling individual coin-operated machine in the business.
In 1983 Nintendo put the first console on the market for private use: The Familiy Computer-Console. Two years later the Nintendo Entertainment System -short NES- succeeded in many ways. In 1987 the NES achieved the status as the #1 selling toy in America and The Legend of Zelda became the first new generation home video game to exceed sales of one million units. Two years after that, in 1989 the Game Boy, the first portable, hand-held game system with interchangeable game paks was introduced.

Ops they did it again: Again tow years later The 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), along with "Super Mario World," is released in the U.S. It is quite popular among the players especially because one year later one was able to play Game-Boy Games on the SNES using an adapter.
Thousands lined up to be the first to experience the world's first true 64-bit home video game system in june 1996, the newest innovation was published in Europe: The Nintendo 64. It was the first time to see all the famous characters like Mario- in 3D.
2001 was the year for Nintendo: The topselling console game Pokémon pushed the company on top of the electronic Entertainment Pokémon Red Edition and Pokémon Blue Edition for the Gameboy were sold over a hundred million times on the first weekend. Two months later Nintendo launches its highly anticipated Gameboy Advance. The current game console, the GameCube was released in Europe in summer 2002.

We may be excited, what new innovation Nintendo will come up with in the next years!