68 Facts About Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 as Nintendo Karuta by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards.

Nintendo has multiple subsidiaries in Japan and abroad, in addition to business partners such as The Pokemon Company and HAL Laboratory.

The name "Nintendo" is commonly assumed to mean "leave luck to heaven", but the assumption lacks historical validation; it can alternatively be translated as "the temple of free ".

Nintendo subsisted and, in 1907, entered into an agreement with Nihon Senbai—later known as the Japan Tobacco—to market its cards to various cigarette stores throughout the country.

In 1959, Nintendo contracted with Walt Disney to incorporate his company's animated characters into the cards.

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Nintendo developed a distribution system that allowed it to offer its products in toy stores.

When Disney card sales began to decline, Nintendo realized that it had no real alternative to alleviate the situation.

Nintendo's restructuring preserved a couple of areas dedicated to card manufacturing.

Nintendo partnered with Magnavox to provide a light gun controller based on the Beam Gun design for the company's new home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1971.

In 1974, Nintendo released Wild Gunman, a skeet shooting arcade simulation consisting of a 16 mm image projector with a sensor that detects a beam from the player's light gun.

Two key events in Nintendo's history occurred in 1979: its American subsidiary was opened in New York City, and a new department focused on arcade game development was created.

Nintendo entered the arcade video game market with Radar Scope, released in Japan in 1980.

In 1983, Nintendo opened a new production facility in Uji and was listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

At this time, Nintendo adopted a series of guidelines that involved the validation of each game produced for the Famicom before its distribution on the market, agreements with developers to ensure that no Famicom game would be adapted to other consoles within two years of its release, and restricting developers from producing more than five games per year for the Famicom.

Nintendo implemented a lockout chip in the Game Paks for control on its third party library to avoid the market saturation that had occurred in the United States.

Around this time, Nintendo entered an agreement with Sony to develop the Super Famicom CD-ROM Adapter, a peripheral for the upcoming Super Famicom capable of playing CD-ROMs.

The following year, as with the NES, Nintendo distributed a modified version of the Super Famicom to the United States market, titled the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

In 1992, Nintendo acquired a majority stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, and sold most of its shares in 2016.

Nintendo ceased manufacturing arcade games and systems in September 1992.

The Nintendo 64 was marketed as one of the first consoles to be designed with 64-bit architecture.

In 1995, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy, a console designed by Gunpei Yokoi with stereoscopic graphics.

In 1997, Nintendo released the Rumble Pak, a plug-in device that connects to the Nintendo 64 controller and produces a vibration during certain moments of a game.

In May 1999, with the advent of the PlayStation 2, Nintendo entered an agreement with IBM and Panasonic to develop the 128-bit Gekko processor and the DVD drive to be used in Nintendo's next home console.

In 2001, two new Nintendo consoles were introduced: the Game Boy Advance, which was designed by Gwenael Nicolas with stylistic departure from its predecessors, and the GameCube.

Nintendo collaborated with Sega and Namco to develop Triforce, an arcade board to facilitate the conversion of arcade titles to the GameCube.

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In 2003, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance SP, an improved version of the Game Boy Advance with a foldable case, an illuminated display, and a rechargeable battery.

Nintendo released the Game Boy Player, a peripheral that allows Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games to be played on the GameCube.

Later that year, Nintendo released the Nintendo DS, which featured such innovations as dual screens – one of which being a touchscreen – and wireless connectivity for multiplayer play.

In 2005, Nintendo released the Game Boy Micro, the last system in the Game Boy line.

Nintendo considered the relative failure of the GameCube, and instead opted to take a "blue ocean strategy" by developing a reduced performance console in contrast to the high-performance consoles of Sony and Microsoft to avoid directly competiting with them.

In 2010, Nintendo celebrated the 25th anniversary of Mario's debut appearance, for which certain allusive products were put on sale.

In 2011, Nintendo celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda with the orchestra concert tour The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses and the video game The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

In January 2015, Nintendo ceased operations in the Brazilian market due in part to high import duties.

Nintendo reached an agreement with NC Games for Nintendo's products to resume distribution in Brazil by 2017, and by September 2020, the Switch was released in Brazil.

Nintendo announced plans in June 2021 to convert its former Uji Ogura plant, where it had previously made playing and hanafuda cards, into a museum for the company to be completed by the 2023 fiscal year.

In July 2022, Nintendo announced the acquisition of Dynamo Pictures, a Japanese CG production company who mainly works on game and anime, including the Pikmin shorts released by Nintendo in the 2010s.

Nintendo's central focus is the research, development, production, and distribution of entertainment products—primarily video game software and hardware and card games.

Since the launch of the Color TV-Game in 1977, Nintendo has produced and distributed home, handheld, dedicated and hybrid consoles.

Nintendo promoted its Nintendo DS handheld with the tagline "Touching is Good".

The Nintendo Switch uses the slogan "Switch and Play" in North America, and "Play anywhere, anytime, with anyone" elsewhere.

Since 2006, in conjunction with the launch of the Wii, Nintendo changed its logo to a gray variant that lacks a colored background inside the wordmark, making it transparent.

Nintendo established The Pokemon Company alongside Creatures and Game Freak to manage the Pokemon brand.

Bergsala were the only non-Nintendo owned distributor of Nintendo's products, until 2019 when Tor Gaming gained distribution rights in Israel.

Nintendo has partnered with Tencent to release Nintendo products in China, following the lifting of the country's console ban in 2015.

Nintendo founded its North American subsidiary in 1980 as Nintendo of America.

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Nintendo Treehouse is NoA's localization team, composed of around 80 staff who are responsible for translating text from Japanese to English, creating videos and marketing plans, and quality assurance.

Many years, Nintendo had a policy of strict content guidelines for video games published on its consoles.

Nintendo allowed the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat II to ship uncensored the following year with a content warning on the packaging.

Video game ratings systems were introduced with the Entertainment Software Rating Board of 1994 and the Pan European Game Information of 2003, and Nintendo discontinued most of its censorship policies in favor of consumers making their own choices.

Nintendo has generally been proactive to assure its intellectual property in both hardware and software is protected.

Nintendo did seek legal action to try to stop release of these unauthorized clones, but estimated they still lost in potential sales to these clones.

Nintendo had witnessed the events of a flooded game market that occurred in the United states in the early 1980s that led to the 1983 video game crash, and with the Famicom had taken business steps, such as controlling the cartridge production process, to prevent a similar flood of video game clones.

Nintendo took to creating its "Nintendo Seal of Quality" stamped on the games it made to dissuade consumers from purchasing these bootlegs, and as it prepared the Famicom for entry to Western regions as the NES, incorporated a lock-out system that only allowed authorized game cartridges they manufactured to be playable on the system.

Nintendo has used emulation by itself or licensed from third parties to provide means to re-release games from their older platforms on newer systems, with Virtual Console, which re-released classic games as downloadable titles, the NES and Super NES library for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, and with dedicated consoles like the NES and Super NES Classic Editions.

However, Nintendo has taken a hard stance against unlicensed emulation of its video games and consoles, stating that it is the single largest threat to the intellectual property rights of video game developers.

Nintendo had taken issue with the tournament using emulated versions of Super Smash Bros.

Fangames that reuse or recreate Nintendo assets have been targeted by Nintendo typically through cease and desist letters or DMCA-based takedown to shut down these projects.

Nintendo has defended these actions as necessary to protect its intellectual property, stating "just as Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of others, we must protect our own characters, trademarks and other content.

In recent years, Nintendo has taken legal action against sites that knowingly distribute ROM images of its games.

On 19 July 2018, Nintendo sued Jacob Mathias, the owner of distribution websites LoveROMs and LoveRetro, for "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights".

Nintendo settled with Mathias in November 2018 for more than along with relinquishing all ROM images in their ownership.

Nintendo won a separate suit against RomUniverse in May 2021, which offered infringing copies of Nintendo DS and Switch games in addition to ROM images.

Nintendo successfully won a suit in the United Kingdom in September 2019 to force the major Internet service providers in the country to block access to sites that offered copyright-infringing copies of Switch software or hacks for the Nintendo Switch to run unauthorized software.

Nintendo sought enforcement action against a hacker that for several years had infiltrated Nintendo's internal database by various means including phishing to obtain plans for games and hardware for upcoming shows like E3.

The leak may have been related to BroadOn, a company that Nintendo had contracted to help with the Wii's design, or to Zammis Clark, a Malwarebytes employee and hacker who pleaded guilty to infiltrating Microsoft's and Nintendo's servers between March and May 2018.

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The seal is displayed on any Nintendo-licensed merchandise, such as trading cards, game guides, or apparel, albeit with the words "Official Nintendo Licensed Product.

In 1992, Nintendo teamed with the Starlight Children's Foundation to build Starlight Fun Center mobile entertainment units and install them in hospitals.

Nintendo has consistently been ranked last in Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener Electronics" due to Nintendo's failure to publish information.