Nintendo

Nintendo began in 1889 making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto, Japan. Nearly a century later, the company’s Famicom—released internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System—pulled the video game industry out of the 1983 crash and established the template for modern console gaming.

Fast facts

Founded: 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda cards.
Transformation: under Hiroshi Yamauchi (president 1949–2002), Nintendo pivoted from cards to toys to electronics.
Diversions: before video games, Yamauchi tried taxis, love hotels, and instant rice—all failures.
Arcade entry: Donkey Kong (1981) introduced both Nintendo’s arcade ambitions and a young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto.
Console dominance: the Famicom (1983) and NES (1985) established Nintendo as the defining name in home gaming.

Key people

Hiroshi Yamauchi: transformed a card company into a gaming empire through sheer force of will and ruthless business strategy.
Gunpei Yokoi: inventor of the D-pad, Game & Watch series, and Game Boy. His philosophy—“lateral thinking with withered technology”—defined Nintendo’s approach.
Shigeru Miyamoto: creator of Donkey Kong, Mario, and The Legend of Zelda. The most influential game designer alive.
Masayuki Uemura: architect of the Famicom and Super Famicom hardware.

Saving the industry

The North American video game market collapsed in 1983. It did not destroy Atari — it broke the company in half. Warner sold the loss-making consumer division to Jack Tramiel in 1984, and the arcade side became Atari Games, which matters later in this entry because Atari Games is Tengen. Nintendo’s response to the wreckage:

Repositioned as a toy: marketed the NES with R.O.B. the robot to get shelf space in sceptical retailers.
Quality control: the “Official Nintendo Seal of Quality” and strict licensing ensured games met standards—no more E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial disasters.
First-party excellence: Super Mario Bros., bundled with the console, demonstrated what games could be.

The Nintendo difference

Nintendo’s approach differed from Western computer gaming:

Closed platform: tight control over who could publish, ensuring quality but limiting freedom.
Local multiplayer: games designed for the living room, not the bedroom.
Family focus: content kept accessible and broadly appealing.
Hardware innovation: the D-pad and the shoulder button are Nintendo’s; the company popularised the analogue stick and motion control on consoles, both of which predate its own implementations of them.

What dominance looked like, in numbers

ACE reported from a trade show in March 1990 and led with the summary — “Nintendo rules, OK? That was the message that was brutally rammed home at this show” — then gave the figures behind it:

Around 26 million NES machines sold in the US in just over three years.
The console in 22% of US households, with Nintendo intending to reach 29% by the end of 1990.
$30 million in advertising in the first half of 1990 alone.

And on the handheld, a comparison worth keeping for its scale:

In the last quarter of 1989, the Gameboy produced more revenue than the whole of the videogame industry in 1985. One million hardware units sold, three million carts sold. 5 million Gameboys are expected to be sold in 1990.

That last line is the cleanest measure of how completely the market had reformed after the crash. A single Nintendo handheld, in one quarter, out-earned the entire industry four years earlier.

Tengen, and the cost of a closed platform

The entry above describes the closed platform as quality control. The period record shows what enforcing it involved, and it was litigation on two fronts at once.

ACE, January 1990:

Nintendo has just won its long court battle with Tengen over [Tetris]. Nintendo now has exclusive rights to this addictive game — after some confusion over what company had what rights. Although this Nintendo vs Tengen court battle is over, there is still another $100 million lawsuit between the two companies — this time over alleged patent infringement. The final judgment in this case will be in the New Year.

Tengen was Atari Games’ console label — the arcade half of the 1984 split. So the two suits put Nintendo against a surviving piece of the company its console had displaced, over the rights to Tetris and over the lockout hardware that made the platform closed in the first place.

The same regime is what Codemasters worked around to publish unlicensed NES games, and what Nintendo invoked to get Rainbow Arts’ Great Giana Sisters withdrawn from British shelves. Three separate entries in this Vault run into the same licensing wall from three different directions.

Worth noting the other side of it too. By October 1990 ACE records Tengen as “the only software developer really supporting the Lynx” — the company Nintendo had spent two years suing was keeping Atari’s handheld alive.

Nintendo in Britain

The British arrival was later and smaller than the American story implies, and the period detail is specific.

The Game Boy’s UK debut came at the Earls Court Toy Fair in January 1990 — a toy fair, not a computer show — alongside its rival the Atari Lynx. ACE noted the handheld was already “doing a storm in Japan and USA with demand easily outstripping supply”, and that a colour model was rumoured, with “some cynics” suggesting Nintendo would delay announcing it “thus allowing them to soak up the [returns] from its phenomenally successful mono deck”.

By late 1990 the NES was on British shelves at £79.99, bundled with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartridge — against the Atari Lynx at £179.99 and Amstrad’s GX4000 at £99.99.

Nintendo also ran its own magazines in Europe. Club Nintendo appeared in German and Dutch editions carrying the Seal of Quality on the cover, with reader high-score tables listing children from Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria against each other on Gradius, Gunsmoke, Mega Man and Xevious. A console manufacturer publishing the magazine that reviewed its own platform is the opposite of the arrangement every entry in this Vault’s British publisher layer grew up under.

Legacy

Nintendo remains the only company from the 8-bit era still making consoles. Their franchises—Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, Metroid—define gaming itself. The bedroom coder culture that thrived on home computers never took root on Nintendo platforms, but their design influence reaches everywhere.

From playing cards to world domination