Nintendo is a Japanese company founded on September 23, 1889, by Fusajirō Yamauchi to produce hanafuda cards for the Japanese game of the same name. Within a few decades, the company tackled the console game market and became one of the giants in the field. 1)
Jumping was invented for the game Donkey Kong, as it was the primary skill of the game's playable character Jumpman, who is now known as Mario. This was a huge accomplishment in 1981. 2)
Almost anyone who had a Nintendo Entertainment System enjoyed Duck Hunt, which included the Zapper, a lite-gun gadget. While everybody remembers the Zapper's signature red and grey color scheme, the original version was much more realistic, resembling a revolver. 3)
Shigeru Miyamoto, the developer of the original Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda (along with a slew of other classics), is now considered gaming royalty, but he didn't start with any of those titles. In reality, his first game, Devil World, was never published in the United States! Nintendo of America used to have some fairly stringent rules about game material, particularly when it came to religious imagery. 4)
If Nintendo had stuck with the character's original name, Tinkle Popo, Kirby, the pink puffball, would have done worse in America and wouldn't appeal as much to the Western audience. 5)
In 1995, GameBoy console designer Gunpei Yokoi designed a console that would take us into Virtual Reality. Virtual Boy generated a monochrome image, but for this - black and red. The result? Users complained en masse of dizziness and migraines. Under the pressure of accusations - Nintendo decided to use an automatic pause activated every 10 or 15 minutes of gameplay. As a result, the console was quickly withdrawn from the sale anyway, and today it mainly falls prey to game and console collectors. 6)
The best-selling game in the Mario series is Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console in 1985. The number of copies sold can turn heads, as it is as high as 40.24 million! Today that number would probably be higher, as the game was ported to more consoles like GameBoy Advance, Color, GameCube, and Wii not to mention clones and pirate editions. Probably no guy in the world of electronic entertainment is more popular! 7)
During the design work on the first Xbox - Microsoft was panicking about studios that wanted to develop games for its hardware. If you can't encourage them to do so, you have to buy them. That's how the MS Nintendo meeting came about. The Japanese, however, did not want to hear about such a conversation. 8)
In 2019, the Xbox division led by Phill Spencer wanted permission to release the Xbox Game Pass service on the Nintendo Switch console. This time the talks were prepared well in advance, so several games from the “green” portfolio like Ori and the Blind Forest, Super Lucky Tale, and Cuphead landed on the Switch. And this time MS was dismissed! 9)
Gunpei Yokoi the man who would go on to create Donkey Kong, Metroid, and the Game Boy started working at Nintendo as a member of the janitorial staff. 10)
Donkey Kong was the first game to feature the skill of jumping. 11)
Shigeru Miyamoto's very first game, Devil World, was never published in the USA! Back in the day, Nintendo of America had some pretty strict policies on content in games, especially when it came to religious imagery. 12)
In Japan, the NES Zapper resembled a real gun. Anyone who had the Nintendo Entertainment System also enjoyed Duck Hunt, which utilized a lite-gun gadget called the Zapper. 13)
Shigeru Miyamoto is big at Nintendo, as was already mentioned. He is so crucial to the business, in fact, that even speculation about his impending retirement has in the past led to a decline in the stock price. As a result, Nintendo has taken steps to guarantee that Miyamoto continues to come in to work his magic, to the point where they've literally forced that he drive to work rather than walk or ride a bike as he'd prefer, according to an extensive New Yorker feature from 2010. 14)
Kirby's original name was Tinkle Popo, as the late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata acknowledged during the company's GDC 2011 keynote address. Kirby's name was finally changed to Kirby after Nintendo realized that the former moniker wouldn't appeal to American consumers. 15)
One of the most significant video games ever created, Final Fantasy VII helped establish the original Sony PlayStation as the platform to use for rich, theatrical gaming experiences in the late 1990s. Although the first six Final Fantasy games were all released on Nintendo hardware, any fan of the iconic RPG brand will tell you that Nintendo and Final Fantasy were synonymous for a long time. Therefore, it shouldn't be a huge surprise to find that FFVII was originally intended to be a Nintendo game and be launched on the SNES. 16)