It is pretty clear that Nintendo is where my heart lies, where video games are concerned. Since I was a boy, I have embraced all things Nintendo – well, almost all things – and I look forward to seeing what they develop in the future. What I did not know as a kid is that Nintendo’s history stretches back a lot further than I realised, and here, I wish to offer up my own take on their legacy. Now, I must mention this is not a definitive account of the company’s past, so please do not take this as gospel. There’s plenty of material out there you can find via Google! With that said, let us begin.
The Early Days
Nintendo was founded on the 23rd of September, 1889. Yes, you read that correctly. Nintendo is more than one hundred years old. It goes without saying that they weren’t producing video games in the 19th Century, so what were they up to? The company’s founder, Fusajirō Yamauchi, made playing cards, notably hanafuda cards, in an era where laws around such cards were quite strict, and relaxed only a few years earlier. Mr Yamauchi soon needed to hire assistants to make more cards, owing to the popularity of his products.

This business would continue for some time, with Mr Yamauchi passing the company on in 1933 to his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda, who took on the Yamauchi name, as per Japanese tradition, and ran the business until 1949, when he suffered a stroke, and had to retire. He expanded sales of cards to India, and also to Japanese migrants to the USA, and oversaw Nintendo during the turbulent years of World War II, where he kept the company afloat by making and selling cards with nationalist messages. When he was taken ill, Mr Kaneda passed the company to his grandson, Hiroshi, and in the 1950s he became aware of the limitations of the playing card business, when he sought to strike an alliance with an American card company. The USPCC was the largest playing card company in the world at the time, but they had a small office within a much larger building, and Hiroshi realised it was time to seek to add to Nintendo’s portfolio.
This did not mean the end of playing cards, and in 1958, Hiroshi arranged a deal with Disney to use Disney’s characters on his cards. Whilst this was seen as controversial in Japan (American characters were hardly beloved), the idea proved to be such a success that in 1962, Nintendo floated on the Osaka Stock Exchange. However, things would take a turn for the worse.
False Dawns

The 1960s brought several efforts, many of them unusual (even by Nintendo’s standards), and many of them unviable. Among their strange new wares, Nintendo launched a remote control vacuum cleaner, a range of instant rice, the Ultra Machine (pictured above, a sort of baseball contraption), and the Love Tester, which was Nintendo’s first product to incorporate real electronic components. Nintendo felt the need to push different ideas, because by 1964 the playing card industry had reached saturation, and Nintendo’s share price plummeted.
Some of Nintendo’s ventures failed, such as the Love Tester, and their rice products. Others gained momentum, and served to push Nintendo in new directions. Hiroshi, upon a visit to an assembly line, discovered one of his employees, Gunpei Yokoi, had developed what became the Ultra Hand, for his own amusement, but this extendable claw would prove to be quite a success story, and helped Nintendo to survive an otherwise difficult spell. As the sixties became the seventies, Mr Yokoi would become an increasingly important figure within Nintendo, and he would help pioneer Nintendo’s move into video games. These first moves took the form of collaborations with other companies, but they would soon start to look into building arcade machines, working in particular with light guns.
This development of an increasingly popular market led Nintendo to make and release the Color TV-Game in 1977, which was in effect their first video game console, albeit one only released in Japan. Developed with Mitsubishi, this console played games such as Pong, and it proved quite popular in Japan.

Under the guidance of Mr Yokoi, Nintendo also released the popular Game & Watch devices, small hand-held products that ran simple games. One of these, some sort of tennis-based game, was actually in my home growing up, but I didn’t realise it was a Nintendo product until after we got a NES. More on that later.
The success of these ideas was propelling Nintendo along, and as the seventies drew to a close, the eighties would bring some of Nintendo’s biggest milestones.
The Rise of Icons
In 1977, Nintendo hired a young man by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto to help develop games and ideas. Mr Miyamoto worked with Mr Yokoi, and Hiroshi Yamauchi, to develop the Donkey Kong arcade game, which launched in 1981 to enormous acclaim. The game also introduced the gaming world to a certain character that would become Mario, and Nintendo released the Mario Bros arcade game in 1983. With these games proving to be popular, the company shifted its focus to the home video games market, then something of a small yet growing industry at the time. The Family Computer – or Famicom – launched in Japan in 1983, and two years later, Nintendo redesigned it as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, for launch in the USA.


Whilst it is tempting to regard the NES as a first-generation console, it technically fell into the category of a third-gen machine, and in a curious quirk of fate, it would be Nintendo and another Japanese company, Sega, that would have the video games market virtually to themselves, following a market crash in the USA in 1983, which dented the aspirations of US video game companies (such as Atari). Nintendo placed a firm emphasis on quality, having watched as the US market was flooded with mediocre games, and would insist on only releasing titles on their hardware that met their standards of quality.
In 1985, the first fully-formed Super Mario Bros game launched, to widespread acclaim and delight. The title proved to be an enormous success, and spawned many other critical and commercial victories for Nintendo. In 1986, the world saw the birth of the Zelda franchise, and the Metroid series, which have both become massive hits in their own right. The eighties were proving to be huge for Nintendo, and before the decade ended, they released the portable Game Boy (developed by Mr Yokoi), starting another huge legacy for the company. Nintendo concluded the eighties with the announcement of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, which would mark the jump from the 8-bit NES hardware, to 16-bit.
The Console Wars
The Super Famicom, as it was known in Japan, launched at the end of 1990, and in Japan the new console proved a smash hit. With a new, 16-bit Mario game, Super Mario World (which this meerkat would argue is the best ever Mario game) leading the way, Nintendo dominated their domestic market. Overseas, the story was quite different.

Nintendo’s biggest rivals of the era were Sega, also from Japan, and whilst the Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the USA) struggled to compete with the SNES in Japan, Sega had stolen a two-year lead over Nintendo with their 16-bit hardware, something reflected in the initial performances of the two consoles outside Japan. Whereas Nintendo had virtually cornered the 8-bit market in the USA (with 90-95% market share), the SNES initially only captured a 35% market share, when compared to the Mega Drive. What didn’t help is that the SNES did not hit the US market until the middle of 1991, and it would not reach Europe until 1992, which gave Sega plenty of time to build their game library, and dictate the early flow of the 16-bit gaming industry.
Nonetheless, Nintendo’s new machine would ultimately outsell the Mega Drive. With the aforementioned Super Mario World, and also the likes of Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Star Fox, Nintendo produced hugely popular, and critically delightful games, and ultimately global sales of the SNES hit 49 million, as opposed to 40 million for the Mega Drive. However, the nineties were going to prove revolutionary for the video game industry, and in a way, Nintendo would help create a potent new rival.
Nintendo had ambitions of developing a CD-ROM attachment for the SNES. Such a device was developed for the Mega Drive, with decidedly mixed results, but Nintendo remained interesting in pursuing the idea, and worked with Sony, then most famous for TVs and sound systems, to move the idea forward. Distrust of Sony, and contractual wrangles, led to the relationship falling apart, but not before prototypes of a PlayStation, one capable of playing SNES cartridges, had been produced. Sony actually went as far as to announce the idea at a tech conference in 1991, only for Nintendo to announce a rival partnership with Philips, the very next day.

Nintendo had inadvertently provided Sony with the motivation to develop the PlayStation as an independent idea, and with the launch of this new, 32-bit, CD-based hardware in 1994, Sony quickly emerged as serious players in the gaming industry. Nintendo were already planning their next move, announcing in 1993 that they were working on a 64-bit console, codenamed Project Reality.
It rapidly became clear that Sony, not Sega, would become the chief problem to Nintendo’s aims. Whilst Sega’s 32-bit entry, the Saturn, floundered, the PlayStation was proving a huge hit. It was easy for developers to work with, and soon boasted a large library of games. Nintendo would not release the Nintendo 64 until 1996, whereupon it did succeed, but Sony had stolen Nintendo’s thunder.

The N64 had some excellent games, including Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Star Fox 64, along with Goldeneye, which I remember playing with friends in frantic, sometimes hilarious contests. The concept of four controllers for the console effectively ensured multiplayer fun. However, the strange design of the controllers divided opinion, and it seemed Nintendo were falling into the trap of trying too hard to be quirky.
The Age of Ups and Downs
Nintendo’s tight control over third-party games, and their strict rules, meant Sony gained a lot of traction, given how easy it was for developers to work with the PlayStation’s hardware and software. Whilst Nintendo would enjoy a surge in sales via the Game Boy (and later editions of their hand-held machine), thanks in no small part to the Pokemon franchise, they were legally forced to allow licensees to release as many games as they wished, without Nintendo’s prior approval. In 1997, the same year as this ruling, Mr Yokoi was killed in a car crash, at the age of 56.
With the Nintendo 64 proving reasonably popular, there was still the risk from Sony. The PlayStation was fast becoming the new market leader, and Sony were not resting on their laurels. The announcement of the PS2 was met with a great deal of excitement, and Nintendo had to counter it. In 1999, they announced they were working on a new console, codenamed Dolphin, and unveiled it as the GameCube in August 2000. Nintendo were also working on the Game Boy Advance, a 32-bit hand-held console, which was also capable of playing all the original Game Boy games. In 2001, the GBA was released, and it proved to be a success. The GameCube launched in the same year in the USA and Japan, and came out in 2002 in Europe.

The GameCube failed to dent the popularity of the PlayStation brand, though it did hold its own against a new competitor, in the form of Microsoft’s X-Box console. This era saw the end of Nintendo’s formerly great rivals Sega end their time as a console developer; they switched solely to software, but Nintendo were determined to keep their place in a competitive console market.
The GameCube had some good games. The Zelda series had a strong new entry, in the form of The Wind Waker. Luigi’s Mansion was a lot of fun, and it marked a long overdue solo outing for Luigi. However, nothing else especially leaps out in this meerkat’s mind from the GameCube, and its general inability to compete with the PS2 was a disappointment for Nintendo. They failed to attract the third-party games that were beginning to make serious waves, such as Grand Theft Auto, though this was in part intentional; Nintendo pride themselves on a family-friendly image, which some commentators observed was both a strength and weakness. Either way, Nintendo’s rivals were getting the big games on their hardware, and consequently selling more of it.
In May 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo, after running the business for 53 years. His successor, Satoru Iwata, would oversee the development of not one but two new ideas, both of which would go on to be highly innovative, and help Nintendo recover from a patch of poor sales, and hefty fines concerning business practices. The Nintendo DS was a new concept for their hand-held consoles, with two screens, one of which being a touchscreen, and a stylus, enabling a new way to play games. Released in November 2004, this nifty device could play Game Boy Advance games, and make use of wi-fi technology. It was eagerly anticipated, with three million pre-orders!

Nintendo also announced their next home console, code-named Revolution, in 2004. Mr Iwata stated that gameplay, not graphics, would be the focus of this new console, which would be a ‘small, quiet and affordable console’. The codename reflected the idea; Nintendo aimed to change how people played games. The Revolution was unveiled in May 2005, as the Wii, and it was certainly a very different approach to their rivals.

The Wii introduced motion controls to the equation, and was supported by a playful marketing campaign in the build-up to its launch. Nintendo stressed the innovative new ways to play games, as well as the much lower price compared the PlayStation 3. Released in winter 2006, the Wii captured new gamers, including people outside of the typical demographic, and neither Sony nor Microsoft were quite prepared for how much people would embrace this unique idea.
In fact, the Wii would outsell both the PS3 and the X-Box 360, its generational competitors. It put Nintendo back to a healthy place, with great games like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Mario Kart Wii (which was a belter when played online), and the Wii Sports game, which featured plenty of mini games for families to enjoy. As of first publishing this article, the Wii sits seventh on the list of all-time console sales. Unfortunately, this tremendous success would be followed up with a near-complete reversal of fortune…

If the Wii was a clever, lightweight idea, accessible quite easily for anyone and everyone, the Wii U was the exact opposite. The general idea was clever: the console, which was backwards compatible with Wii games – in a fashion – could be connected to a TV, like most consoles. However, if someone wanted to watch TV, the controller itself, featuring a large touchscreen, could function as a sort of hand-held machine. Unfortunately, Nintendo did not execute the premise particularly well, with some games trying to incorporate the touchscreen as a secondary function of the main game. Fans were also confused: was the Wii U a new console, or intended as an addon for the original Wii? This marked the first time I did not personally acquire a new Nintendo console when it launched, it held no particular interest to me, and I would not end up with one until I got one second-hand, for my daughter’s benefit.
It did have some entertaining games, such as Super Mario Maker, but the Wii U was both a critical and commercial failure. Nintendo needed to respond to this setback, which saw them record a loss in 2012, the first time they had done so as a video game manufacturer. It was not long before they were cooking up something new, code-named the NX, first spoken of in March 2015.
On July 11, 2015, Satoru Iwata died from a bile duct tumor at 55. He was succeeded by Tatsumi Kimishima in September, and Mr Kimishima would guide the company into what would be a make or break moment. The NX gathered pace, and alongside it, a new Zelda game, one that promised a huge shift in how that series looked, emerged, as a swansong for the Wii U, and a breakout title for the NX. Nintendo had to come up with something big, and they certainly achieved it…
The Age of the Hybrid
After months of speculation, including some rather way-off artistic impressions of what people thought the NX would be like, Nintendo pulled back the curtain in a big reveal in October 2016. The Nintendo Switch was taking the general premise of the Wii U, and turning it into a true hybrid console, one that could be docked to a TV, and seamlessly undocked to use as a hand-held machine. The controllers could be detached, and the pair of controllers mounted on either side of the console could be used individually, depending on the number of players. The first trailer for the console gave a snippet of footage of Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Odyssey, and whetted the appetite for Nintendo once again.

The Switch is not a hugely powerful piece of hardware, though Nintendo managed to produce the huge and epic Tears of the Kingdom for it, extracting every bit of performance to perfection. The Switch has seen some tremendous games, including Super Mario Maker 2, Super Mario Wonder, mainstream Pokemon titles, new Super Smash Bros games, and many more. It also grants access to libraries of previous Nintendo consoles, via the online service, and it has moved to third on the list of all-time console sales, just behind the Nintendo DS, and not far behind the PS2. Although the Switch was released four years after the PS4, it has outsold the PS4 to the tune of nearly 29 million sales. It comfortably eclipsed the X-Box One. It marked a powerful new era for Nintendo, but the question remained, would they learn from this experience, or would they try yet again to be too quirky, too different, in pursuit of their next hardware?
The answer is an emphatic no.
The Switch 2 is an evolution of the console, being bigger, and presumably more powerful. At the time of writing this, Nintendo have given us only one brief, somewhat dry trailer, with a further announcement due in April. I’ll aim to update this article then. There are many details to iron out, but it does look as though Nintendo have decided to go with what works, and push that idea forward. Precisely how this will play out is unclear, but there’s been a huge interest in the Switch 2, ever since it was rumoured to be in development, back in 2023. I will confess to being excited, as I am often am when Nintendo release a new console. Can Nintendo capture lightening in a bottle twice over? I hope so.