Nintendo
From GameWiki
Contents |
Summary
Nintendo Company Ltd. is a multinational corporation originating in Japan founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in order to make hanafuda cards. In recent years the company has been best known for the manufacture of video games and consoles with more notable titles including Super Mario Bros., Legend Of Zelda and Metroid.
In the early days of Video Games Nintendo began by distributing the Magnavox Oddysee in Japan in 1974 and then in 1977 they producted their own color TV games system with help from a student product designer named Shigeru Miyamoto. One year later 1978 Nintendo entered the arcade market and then in 1981 gained huge sucess with the arcade game Donkey Kong developed my Shigeru Miyamoto, which is notable not only for being a hugely sucessful Nintendo game, but also being the first game to contain Mario (Who was called Jumpman at this point)
Early Days
In 1983 Nintendo launched the Family Computer in Japan (AKA FamiCom)and two years later was brought over to the rest of the world under the name Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and featuring games such as Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda became a huge sucess and over the years has sold over 60 million units. After the sucess of the NES Nintendo carried on their sucess with the launch of the GameBoy in 1989, which although being less powerful than its competitiors at the time has lasted the longest of any video game console and over the years has managed to sell over 118 million units. The GameBoy had several revisions to it such as GameBoy pocket and GameBoy Light.
1990s
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was launched in Japan in 1990 and over the space of 2 years creeped into the worldwide markets and with it's 16 bit processor and SuperFX chip and superior mode7 graphics managed to sell over 49 million units. This was followed by the ill fated Virtual Boy which was seen by many as a commercial disaster and only lasted less than one year on the market before being discontinued to make way for the Nintendo 64, Nintendo's next home video game console. The Nintendo 64 was released iin 1996 into the fith generation of video games consoles and competed directly with the PlayStation and Sega Saturn video games consoles, it was however not as commercially sucessful compared to the Sony PlayStation having only sold around 32 million units compared to the PlayStation's 102 million. This has been attributed mainly to Nintendo's descision to keep ROM cartridges in favour of CDROM technology due to piracy issues, however, ROM cartridges are expensive to produce and have much smaller space on them so consumers seemed to prefer the cheaper CDROM techonology used in the PlayStation. Just before the end of the decade in 1998 Nintendo released a sucessor to their longstanding GameBoy handheld console named the GameBoy Color.
2000 onwards
In 2001 Nintendo launched the Nintendo GameCube as a sucessor to the Nintendo 64, but due to the penetration of the PlayStation brand in the mid 90s and lack of DVD support it failed to compete fully with the Sony Playstation 2 in the end only managing to sell just over 20 million units. Many people thought this could have been the end of Nintendo as Sega had recently gone out of the console market due to PlayStation dominance and this may have been the case if it wasn't for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance (GBA) released around the same time as the Nintendo GameCube. This was a completely new GameBoy and was a lot more powerful than any other portable console at that time and managed to sell over 80 million units with 2 revisions to the hardware (GameBoy Advance SP and Micro)
Current
Currently Nintendo supports the Nintendo DS (and DS Lite) and the Nintendo Wii. The Nintendo DS, launced in 2004, looks similar to the Game and Watch handheld consoles of the early 80s. It features two screens, one of which is a touch screen as well as an inbuilt microphone. So far the Nintendo DS and DS lite has sold over 70 million units. The Nintendo Wii, originally released in late 2006 brings Nintendo back to top form and is generally being hailed as the saviour of Nintendo and has outsold the Microsoft Xbox 360 which was released over a year earlier with current sales of over 24 million and counting.
