Nintendo, the Humble Beginnings

Sometimes we get to find out just how today’s well known multinational companies got started and we can’t help being awed and encouraged by such stories. Companies like these affirm the old adage that Rome was not built in one day, and that courage and determination coupled with innovativeness are the sure keys to success. The Nintendo Company is a limited liability multinational corporation that began humbly a long time ago in Kyoto Japan. From making handmade playing cards through to experiments with forte businesses such as hotels and taxi services, Nintendo finally found its footing in the video gaming industry in 1974. The company went on to become one of the most influential players in this industry up to date. Most people worldwide know it as a video game hardware and software manufacturer, but in Japan the company has endeavored to maintain its initial business of manufacturing playing cards and even has managed to run its own tournament known as the Nintendo Cup.

The company tried its hand in very many things and failures were forthcoming just as success would, finally. The failures were more but the fewer successes outshone such shortcomings. The Game Boy is one of the world’s best selling handheld video game consoles of all time, and this was a product of Nintendo. It wasn’t their first product, but it was their greatest. The brain behind the Game Boy was another awesome occurrence, an employee who was just a maintenance engineer in the company. The company’s owner noticed a device this worker had made during his free time and decided to reproduce it as a toy. The device later named the Ultra Hand became a huge success and it helped the company venture more into the toy industry way before it ever thought of video games. The Game Boy Line remained po[censored] r all around the world until it was recently seen to be replaced by the more modern, sleeker and highly advanced Nintendo DS and its successor the Nintendo DSI handheld video game consoles. Advances in technology, storage mediums and high resolution displays have changed a lot since the inception of hand held video games, and the company turned out to be a key contributor to these developments.



Apart from handheld video consoles, Nintendo has also had major successes in the home based video gaming consoles. The company’s first venture into this field was with the game system Family Computer in 1983 po[censored] rly known as Famicom. This was also the company’s first try at a cartridge based video game console. The success of Famicom led to other developments into this field that saw the evolution of the Famicom into the Nintendo Entertainment System series, the GameCube and its latest successor the Nintendo Wii. Humble were its origins and difficulties were met, but the company has so far sold more than half a billion games in hardware units and close to four billion games in software units worldwide. Not even its founders would have ever imagined that that would ever come to be.