Few companies in the world can claim a history that stretches from the Victorian era to the age of hybrid gaming consoles. The History of Nintendo — the company behind Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and Donkey Kong — was founded in 1889, making it older than commercial cinema, the automobile industry, and most of the nations whose children now play its games. That story, spanning 135 years and encompassing playing cards, toys, arcade machines, and some of the most influential entertainment hardware ever built, is one of the most remarkable in business history.
This is the definitive account of how it all happened.
The Foundation: A Playing Card Company in Meiji-Era Japan
1889 — Nintendo Koppai Is Born
On 23 September 1889, a craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small workshop on Shomen-dori in Kyoto and began producing handmade playing cards called hanafuda — “flower cards.” The cards were beautifully illustrated with seasonal plants and animals, used for traditional Japanese gambling games, and Yamauchi’s craftsmanship quickly earned a loyal following.
The name he chose for his company — Nintendo — is most commonly translated from the Japanese as “leave luck to heaven,” a phrase that would prove oddly prophetic for a business that would spend the next century making calculated bets on entertainment technology.
Hanafuda became so popular that Nintendo caught the attention of the yakuza, Japan’s organised criminal networks, who used the cards heavily in gambling dens. Nintendo quietly supplied them without incident — an unusual early chapter for a brand later synonymous with family-friendly entertainment.
1902 — Western Playing Cards
Recognising an opportunity, Nintendo began producing Western-style playing cards (trump cards) in 1902, becoming Japan’s first domestic manufacturer of the Western deck. The company struck a deal with the Japan Tobacco & Salt Public Corporation to distribute cards in cigarette shops — an early example of Nintendo’s knack for using unconventional distribution channels to reach mass audiences.
1950s — Leadership Changes and Near-Collapse
Fusajiro Yamauchi died in 1929, passing the business to his son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda, who took the Yamauchi name. In 1949, amid financial difficulties, 22-year-old Hiroshi Yamauchi — grandson of the founder — took over as president, having negotiated aggressively to push aside other family members who wanted the role. He would run Nintendo for the next 53 years and transform it entirely.
Hiroshi’s early years were chaotic. A workers’ strike nearly destroyed the company. He diversified recklessly — a taxi service, a love hotel chain, a brand of instant rice — and nearly all of it failed. By the late 1950s, he had learned a harder lesson: Nintendo’s strength was entertainment, and entertainment alone.
The Pivot to Toys: Finding a New Voice
1963 — Nintendo Games Limited
In 1963, Hiroshi Yamauchi formally renamed the company Nintendo Co., Ltd. and refocused it on toy manufacturing. He hired a young maintenance engineer named Gunpei Yokoi — who had been tinkering with a mechanical hand toy in his spare time — and turned Yokoi’s invention into the Ultra Hand, an extendable gripping toy that sold 1.2 million units and gave Nintendo its first taste of mass-market consumer success.
This moment established a philosophy that Yokoi would later articulate as “lateral thinking with withered technology” — the idea of using cheap, proven components in unexpected ways to create genuinely new experiences. It became the underlying logic of the Game Boy, the DS, and arguably the Switch.
1966–1977 — From Toys to Electronic Games
Through the late 1960s and 1970s, Nintendo produced a string of electronic and optical toys, including the Beam Gun, a laser-clay shooting system installed in bowling alleys across Japan. In 1974, Nintendo secured the rights to distribute the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan — its first contact with the emerging home video game market.
In 1977, Nintendo produced the Color TV-Game series, its first domestically manufactured home gaming hardware. These were simple, dedicated-function devices — far from what was coming — but they introduced millions of Japanese households to the idea of video games as domestic entertainment.
The Golden Arcade Era: Donkey Kong Changes Everything
1979–1981 — Shigeru Miyamoto and the Birth of Mario
In 1979, Nintendo of America’s warehouse in New Jersey was full of unsold Radar Scope arcade machines. The company had missed its moment and needed a new game — fast. Hiroshi Yamauchi assigned the problem to an inexperienced young industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto.
Miyamoto had never designed a game before. What he produced — Donkey Kong, released in 1981 — became one of the most successful arcade games of its era. It introduced Jumpman (later renamed Mario), the barrel-throwing ape, and a princess to be rescued. Within a year, Donkey Kong had generated more than $180 million in quarters in North American arcades alone.
Miyamoto’s instinct — to build games around characters with personality rather than abstract mechanics — became the creative foundation of everything Nintendo would do for the next four decades.
The Console Revolution: NES and the Rescue of the Industry
1983 — The Famicom Launches in Japan
When the North American video game market crashed spectacularly in 1983, wiping out Atari and sending dozens of developers into bankruptcy, Nintendo launched the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan. It was a home console with interchangeable cartridges, powerful graphics for its time, and a launch lineup that included Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.
The Famicom sold 500,000 units within two months. Hiroshi Yamauchi had been confident enough in its quality to recall and replace the original hardware when a technical defect emerged — a decision that cost Nintendo millions but cemented consumer trust.
1985 — The NES Revives a Dead Market
Nintendo launched the Famicom in North America in 1985, cleverly rebranding it as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and positioning it not as a video game console (a toxic phrase after the 1983 crash) but as an “entertainment system” packaged with R.O.B., a robotic accessory designed to make it look like a toy. Retailers who had refused to stock video games accepted the NES as something different.
Super Mario Bros., bundled with the system, became the best-selling video game of all time at that point and remained so for decades. The NES sold over 61 million units worldwide and is credited with single-handedly revitalising the North American gaming industry.
Nintendo enforced strict quality controls on third-party developers through a controversial licensing scheme — the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” — that prevented the shovelware explosion that had killed Atari. Developers resented the restrictions; consumers trusted the logo. It was a defining commercial decision.
Handheld Dominance: The Game Boy Legacy
1989 — Game Boy: Simple, Cheap, Indestructible
Gunpei Yokoi’s Game Boy launched in 1989 and was, on paper, technically inferior to competitors like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear. It had no colour screen, no backlight, and comparatively sluggish hardware. It also had Tetris — licensed in a complex deal that Henk Rogers negotiated directly from the Soviet Union — and a battery life of roughly 30 hours compared to the Lynx’s 4–6 hours.
The Game Boy sold 118 million units across its lifetime, dwarfing every competitor. It was the dominant handheld gaming platform for over a decade, eventually succeeded by the Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001), and the Nintendo DS (2004).
The DS introduced dual screens and touch input and went on to sell 154 million units — the second best-selling gaming device in history. Its library included Nintendogs, Brain Age, and the entire Pokémon series from Diamond and Pearl onwards. It expanded gaming demographics dramatically, pulling in older casual players in a way no platform had managed before.
The Home Console Wars: SNES, N64, and the Stakes Rising
1990 — Super Nintendo and the Console Wars Begin
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), launched in 1990 in Japan and 1991 in North America, defined a generation. Its rivalry with the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) produced some of gaming’s most important creative works — Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II Turbo, Donkey Kong Country.
The “console wars” of the early 1990s were legitimately competitive. Sega’s aggressive marketing (“Genesis does what Nintendon’t”) chipped into Nintendo’s dominance, and the back-and-forth shaped industry norms around marketing, exclusivity deals, and franchise loyalty that persist today.
1996 — Nintendo 64 and the Move to 3D
The Nintendo 64, launched in 1996, introduced 3D gaming to a mainstream audience. Super Mario 64 is routinely cited as one of the most influential games ever made — it established the grammar of 3D platformers that every subsequent developer borrowed from. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) did the same for action-adventure games and is still frequently placed at or near the top of “greatest games of all time” lists.
The N64 era also marked Nintendo’s most consequential strategic mistake. Hiroshi Yamauchi chose to keep the N64 on cartridges while Sony’s PlayStation moved to CDs. Cartridges were faster and more reliable, but far more expensive to produce. Third-party developers — including Square, the maker of Final Fantasy — defected to PlayStation rather than pay cartridge manufacturing costs. Final Fantasy VII, planned for N64, became a PlayStation exclusive. Nintendo has never fully recovered those third-party relationships.
The Dark Years: GameCube and the Lessons of Failure
2001 — GameCube: Great Games, Wrong Strategy
The GameCube (2001) was quietly excellent — technically capable, with some of the era’s finest games (Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Pikmin, Wind Waker) — but it sold only 21.7 million units, dwarfed by Sony’s PlayStation 2 at 155 million and even Microsoft’s debut Xbox at 24 million. Nintendo’s decision to use a proprietary mini-disc format, its continued reluctance to support DVD playback, and its perception as a platform for children all contributed to the underperformance.
The era forced a strategic reckoning. Satoru Iwata, who had taken over as president in 2002 following Hiroshi Yamauchi’s retirement, concluded that Nintendo could not win a hardware arms race against Sony and Microsoft. It would have to compete differently — on originality of experience rather than raw power.
The Comeback: Wii and DS Redefine Who Games
2004–2006 — Expanding the Audience
Two launches — the Nintendo DS in 2004 and the Wii in 2006 — executed Iwata’s “Blue Ocean” strategy with remarkable precision. Rather than chasing the same audience as Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo deliberately designed hardware for people who had never gamed before.
The Wii’s motion controls made it the console for living rooms, retirement homes, family gatherings, and hospital rehabilitation programmes. Wii Sports — bundled with the hardware in most markets — became the second best-selling game of all time with 82.9 million copies sold. The Wii ultimately moved 101.6 million units.
Nintendo had proved that the audience for gaming was dramatically larger than the industry had imagined.
2011–2012 — The Stumble: 3DS and Wii U
Success created complacency. The Nintendo 3DS launched in 2011 at too high a price point and without compelling launch software. Nintendo cut the price by 40% within months. The subsequent library — including Super Mario 3D Land, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Pokémon X and Y — rebuilt momentum, and the 3DS family eventually sold 76 million units.
The Wii U (2012) was a more serious failure. Consumers were confused by its asymmetric GamePad controller, uncertain whether it was a console or an accessory, and Nintendo’s marketing failed to clarify the distinction. Third-party developers abandoned it quickly as its install base stagnated at 13.6 million units. It remains Nintendo’s worst-performing home console.
The Modern Era: Switch and a New Kind of Console
2017 — The Nintendo Switch Changes Everything
The Nintendo Switch launched on 3 March 2017 and immediately delivered on its central promise: a home console you could take anywhere. Sliding the Joy-Con controllers off the tablet and snapping them onto the included dock to play on a television, or clipping them to the sides for handheld use, felt genuinely new in a way that the Wii U’s gamepad never had.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a launch title, was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. It validated the hardware in a way that converted sceptics immediately.
The Switch went on to become one of the best-selling gaming platforms in history. By the time its successor launched, the Switch family — comprising the original model, the handheld-only Lite (2019), and the OLED model (2021) — had sold over 150 million units worldwide, generating more than $85 billion in lifetime platform revenue across hardware and software. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe alone sold 67 million copies, making it one of the best-selling games of all time. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released in March 2020 as the world entered pandemic lockdown, sold 47 million copies in conditions that were almost uniquely favourable.
The Switch also demonstrated that Nintendo’s intellectual property had a reach far beyond gaming. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, released in April 2023 and co-produced with Universal’s Illumination studio, grossed $1.36 billion worldwide — the highest-grossing film based on a video game ever made, and the most profitable film of 2023. A sequel is in production. Super Nintendo World theme park areas have opened at Universal Studios Japan, Hollywood, and Orlando.
2025 — The Nintendo Switch 2
On 5 June 2025, Nintendo launched the Nintendo Switch 2. The new console retained the hybrid home/portable philosophy of its predecessor but delivered substantially improved processing power, a larger 7.9-inch 1080p screen, redesigned Joy-Con 2 controllers with magnetic attachment and mouse-mode functionality, and a new GameChat voice and video communication system.
The Switch 2 sold over 3.5 million units immediately at launch and launched with Mario Kart World as its headline exclusive — an open-world evolution of the franchise that departed significantly from the circuit-based structure of previous entries. The Switch 2 is backward compatible with most Nintendo Switch games, protecting the enormous existing library accumulated over eight years.
The Switch 2 represents Nintendo’s most confident hardware launch in years, arriving with the lessons of the Wii U very much learned: clear messaging, a compelling launch title, and a feature set that feels immediately understandable to both existing Switch owners and newcomers.
Nintendo’s Place in the World Today
Nintendo is no longer simply a games company. It is a cultural infrastructure company — one whose characters are among the most recognised on earth, whose theme parks draw millions of visitors annually, and whose films have demonstrated an ability to translate digital nostalgia into billion-dollar cinema events.
The company employs approximately 7,300 people globally, a remarkably small headcount for a business of its scale. Its conservatism with intellectual property — refusing licensing deals for decades before carefully selecting partners — means that Mario, Link, Pikachu, and Samus have retained their integrity in ways that many comparable franchises have not.
Nintendo’s Nintendo Switch Online service had over 40 million subscribers as of mid-2024. Digital sales accounted for more than half of its software revenue for the first time in fiscal year 2024. The company is, by most measures, in the healthiest financial and creative position it has occupied in over a decade.
What Makes Nintendo Different: An Expert Perspective
Nintendo’s longevity owes to several structural advantages that competitors have consistently underestimated.
First, it owns its platform and its content. When Sony or Microsoft release a console, they are building a shop for other people’s goods. Nintendo’s first-party titles — the Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and Metroid franchises — exist nowhere else, giving it leverage that no third-party dependency can erode.
Second, it has never tried to win on specifications alone. The GameCube was powerful and lost. The Wii was weak and won. The lesson — repeated in the DS versus the PSP, and the Switch versus contemporary home consoles — is that Nintendo competes on experience, not benchmark tests.
Third, its creative culture has preserved flagship franchises for over 40 years without franchise fatigue. Zelda: Breath of the Wild was not simply a new instalment but a conceptual reinvention of what a Zelda game could be. Super Mario Odyssey did the same. This willingness to reimagine rather than iterate is unusual in entertainment at Nintendo’s scale.
The risk for Nintendo in the Switch 2 era is the same risk it has always faced at periods of success: complacency. The Wii’s dominance bred the Wii U. The DS’s success produced an overpriced 3DS launch. The company’s history suggests it is self-aware enough to avoid repeating those errors — but the gaming market in 2025 is more competitive, more global, and more mobile-influenced than at any previous point in Nintendo’s history.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Nintendo founded? Nintendo was founded on 23 September 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a manufacturer of handmade hanafuda playing cards.
What was Nintendo’s first video game console? Nintendo’s first domestically produced gaming hardware was the Color TV-Game series, released in Japan in 1977. Its first major international console was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), released in North America in 1985.
How many Nintendo Switch consoles have been sold? The Nintendo Switch family — comprising the original Switch, Switch Lite, and Switch OLED — sold over 150 million units worldwide by the time the Nintendo Switch 2 launched in June 2025, generating more than $85 billion in lifetime platform revenue.
When did the Nintendo Switch 2 come out? The Nintendo Switch 2 launched globally on 5 June 2025. It features a larger 1080p screen, magnetic Joy-Con 2 controllers with mouse functionality, improved processing power, and backward compatibility with most Nintendo Switch games.
What is Nintendo’s best-selling game of all time? Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch is Nintendo’s best-selling individual game title, with over 67 million copies sold. Across all platforms, the Mario Kart franchise is one of the best-selling game series in history.
Is Nintendo involved in theme parks and films? Yes. Super Nintendo World areas are open at Universal Studios Japan, Universal Studios Hollywood, and Universal Orlando Resort. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), co-produced with Universal’s Illumination studio, grossed $1.36 billion worldwide and is the highest-grossing video game film adaptation of all time. A sequel is in development.
Nintendo products and services are available across the UAE and wider Middle East through authorised distributors. The Nintendo Switch 2 launched globally in June 2025.