Le blog de Jona: Nintendo

An article on the most famous video game company: Nintendo!

Nintendo is world's largest video game company but it wasn't always so.
It was founded in 1889 in Japan, by Fusajiro Yamauchi and was at first a company which produced handmade playing cards, called "Hanafuda", which means litteraly "flower cards", for the flowers pictures painted on the cards.

It was Fusajiro Yamauchi's grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who expanded the sight of the company: in, 1956, after a journey in the U.S.A., he realized the limitation of playing cards and after getting access to Disney's characters, he put them on his cards to increase the sale.

Nintendo tried different sectors of entertainment but most of them failed. Nintendo barely did it, staying on the market as a toy company, and it was thanks to Laser Clay Shooting System, a light gun shooting simulation, that Nintendo founds what will really make it great. Gunpei Yokoi is now the one who runs the company; he will step down around 1996.

From 1974, Nintendo started dealing with video game stuff. The first console sold by this company was the Magnavox Odyssey console and Nintendo starts creating its own hardware in 1977.
Several important people are hired from here: Shigeru Miyamoto, who created some of the most famous Nintendo games and designed the casing for several of the Color TV Game consoles. There is also Genyo Takeda, Nintendo's first game designer, who created EVR Race.

However, it was the creation of the game Donkey Kong, designed by Miyamoto, that dramatically changed Nintendo's fortunes, bringing in many licensing opportunities and a huge increase of profit. Around the same time, an earlier version of Mario was released; back then, it was known as "Jumpman"

Since then, Nintendo never stopped growing, both in console and in game.
One of the greatest successes were the Nintendo Entertainment System,

and Super Mario Bros.

In 1989, Nintendo launched the Game Boy (left) and in 1998, it was follow by the Game Boy Color (right).

In 1996, it was the turn of the Nintendo 64 but at the same time, Sega launched the Saturn and Sony, the Playstation.

In 2001, both the Game Boy Advance and the Game Cube where released.

In 2003, Nintendo gave us the Game Boy Advance SP, smaller and with the possibility to close to prevent damages on the screen.

In 2004, Nintendo released the Nintendo DS (in which DS stands for Dual Screen) and it is Nintendo's best selling handheld gaming system. The innovation was also due to the touch screen (the lower one).

2005: the Game Boy Micro was released, a version similar to the Game Boy Advance, just with a smaller form.

In 2006 Nintendo released the Wii, successor to the GameCube, featuring the controller motion controlled Wii Remote (on the left). The Wii was the best selling console of the seventh generation, regaining the market share lost by the 64 and GameCube. At this time, Nintendo also released the Nintendo DS lite (on the right), the first revision of the DS, smaller and more compact.

In 2009, Nintendo followed up the success of the DS with the release of the Nintendo DSi, similar to the DS lite but with a camera and WIFI access.

In 2011, Nintendo continued with the DS legacy by releasing the Nintendo 3DS, which featured 3D effects. A first tome on a handheld console.

In 2012 Nintendo released the Wii U. It sold slow at first but it was the first eighth generation console. By September 2013, however, sales had incredibly increased.

In 2013, Nintendo hoped to make a cheaper handheld system to appeal to more people by releasing the Nintendo 2DS in 2013 (left). Nintendo also released the Wii Mini, another console redesigned to be cheaper (right).

In matter of game and characters, Nintendo created so many, just telling the half could take days. Let's keep it to the most famous and liked.
The firsts we must name are the games of Donkey Kong and Super Mario (who will become Nintendo's mascot).