Nintendo: History and Key Facts

Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and manufactures both video games and video game consoles.

The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in 1889 to produce handmade hanafuda playing cards. After venturing into various lines of business and becoming a public company, Nintendo began producing toys in the 1960s, and later video games. Nintendo developed its first arcade games in the 1970s, and distributed its first system, the Color TV-Game in 1977. The company became internationally dominant in the 1980s after the arcade release of Donkey Kong (1981) and the Nintendo Entertainment System, which launched outside of Japan alongside Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

Since then, Nintendo has produced some of the most successful consoles in the video game industry, including the Game Boy (1989), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1991), the Game Boy Advance (2001), the Nintendo DS (2004), the Wii (2006), and the Nintendo Switch (2017). It has created or published numerous major franchises, including Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Super Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Metroid, Kirby, Star Fox, Fire Emblem, Pikmin, and Xenoblade. The company's mascot, Mario, is among the most famous fictional characters, and Nintendo's other characters—including Luigi, Princess Peach, Donkey Kong, Samus Aran, Link, Kirby, Pikachu, and Fox McCloud—have attained international recognition. Several films, shows and a theme park area based on the company's franchises have been created.

Nintendo's game consoles have sold over 860 million units worldwide as of May 2025, for which more than 5.9 billion individual games have been sold. The company has numerous subsidiaries in Japan and worldwide, in addition to second-party developers including HAL Laboratory, Intelligent Systems, and Game Freak. It is one of the wealthiest and most valuable companies in the Japanese market.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Nintendo by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.