Nintendo is 125 years old

The Japanese game company Nintendo is celebrating its 125th anniversary on Tuesday. Where the company started in the nineteenth century with the sale of handmade game cards, it has become an established name in the game industry two turns of the century.

Nintendo was founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. The Japanese company mainly produced and sold game cards until 1969. Initially this was for a relatively modest audience, but gradually Yamauchi’s products gained popularity. In Japan, all kinds of games were invented. This also happened in increasingly large parts of the country. Nintendo, however, continued to innovate.

The company started to focus on electronics in the late 1960s. It achieved varying degrees of success in its early years. The turning point came in 1977 when Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo: he was largely responsible for the new era that dawned for the company. In 1977 all the Color TV-Game consoles appeared. The arcade game Donkey Kong hit the market in the 1980s and later the company also introduced its hugely popular Famicom console. Its worldwide breakthrough was in 1985, when it introduced the NES in the United States. Games such as Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda followed later.

Nintendo has produced several consoles over the decades. The NES got a successor in 1990 with the SNES. The Nintendo 64 came in 1996, the GameCube followed about five years later, and the Wii series is the most recent series of traditional consoles. Nintendo also plays an important role in the handheld market. The first Game&Watch appeared in 1980: a portable console with an LCD screen that ran a single game. The GameBoy came in 1989 and combined the portability of the Game&Watch with the game-switching capability of the NES. The successors of the GameBoy models subsequently appeared in the Nintendo DS series.

Nintendo is currently going through difficult times: the Wii U is not selling as well as hoped and is losing out to Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4. In the handheld market, the Japanese company faces fierce competition from smartphones and tablets.