Nintendo

Nintendo (任天堂株式会社) is a video game company and a co-owner of the Fire Emblem series.

History[]

Early History[]

Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, Nintendo began its life as a hanafuda card manufacturing company in 1889, founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi. The kanji of the company name is commonly translated as "leave luck to heaven." Most of Nintendo's earlier business ventures revolved around card and board games. Under the leadership of Fusajiro's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, the company expanded the scope of its business and experimented with various short-lived ventures into other lines of products and services such as instant rice and a taxi service.

Among these experiments were the marketing and sale of a series of gimmicky toys such as their Ultra Hand, Ultra Scope, and Love Tester, which began their journey into the electronics industry. Magnavox partnered with Nintendo to develop a light gun for their Magnavox Odyssey home console system. With the success of the Atari and Magnavox systems in the west, Nintendo acquired the rights to distribute the latter in Japan in 1974.

Early Arcade Era and First Home Consoles[]

Nintendo would begin developing video games starting in 1979 with the handheld Game & Watch using technology commonly used in calculators. They also began developing arcade cabinet games including Radar Scope and Donkey Kong. With their success in arcades, Nintendo subsequently licensed out the rights to develop home console ports of titles such as Donkey Kong, which appeared on both the Atari 2600 and the ColecoVision.

Development of the first Nintendo-designed home console began in the early 1980's, resulting in the Family Computer or Famicom. The Famicom launched in 1983 in Japan, the same year that North America was affected by a crash that cratered the industry in that market. To avoid most of the negative impact of the crash and entice skittish retailers into selling their console, Nintendo developed a redesigned version of the Famicom and promoted the system as a family entertainment system or a toy. The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, launched as Nintendo's first home console in the west on October 18th, 1985.

Industry Leader[]

The NES proved to be a massive success for Nintendo, and in succeeding years, the company built on that success with successive generations of console and handheld gaming hardware and an extensive library of software both internally and externally produced. Over the decades, the company has faced fierce competition in the home console space, and in response have released platforms with the intention of bucking industry trends. In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired and was succeeded by Satoru Iwata, who began his career as a programmer and game designer. Under Iwata's leadership, Nintendo released the Wii, which while underpowered compared to its contemporaries in Sony's PlayStation 3 and MIcrosoft's Xbox 360, proved to be a sales juggernaut due to a novel motion-control focus, a more affordable price point, and games popular with mass audiences including Wii Sports, which was a console pack-in title in some parts of the world.

Era of Transition[]

Though Nintendo's successes have included some of the best-selling consoles and handhelds of all-time, including the aforementioned Wii, the Game Boy, and the Nintendo Switch, they have also released commercial failures such as the Virtual Boy and Wii U. In 2015, in the midst of Nintendo's work to recover from the Wii U's failure, Iwata passed away. In the wake of his death, the company underwent significant internal changes to modernize their executive ranks and corporate structure, and the task of launching the Nintendo Switch was put in the hands of new CEO Tatsumi Kimishima. Kimishima served only a short term as head of the company, and after the successful launch of the Switch, retired and was succeeded by Shuntaro Furukawa.

Software Development and Partnerships[]

Across their generations of hardware, Nintendo has internally developed and nurtured franchises including Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing. They have also worked with a number of third-party studios to develop games that have likewise blossomed into successful franchises. The biggest and most successful of these franchises is the Pokémon series, created in tandem with the studio Game Freak. Pokémon grew to be such a phenomenon that management of the franchise was spun-off into a separate entity in the The Pokémon Company, in which Nintendo has a partial ownership stake.

Intelligent Systems began as a hardware development team within Nintendo that in the early 1980s broke away, forming into independent third-party studio that, in an unusual arrangement, remained an exclusive partner of Nintendo and whose office space is maintained on Nintendo property. Among the franchises that Intelligent Systems created include the Wars series, with IS co-developing the original Famicom Wars with Nintendo R&D 1 in 1988. Intelligent Systems created the first entry in the Fire Emblem series, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, which released on April 20, 1990. The Fire Emblem intellectual property is co-owned between Nintendo and Intelligent Systems.

Nintendo has published seventeen main series Fire Emblem titles produced by Intelligent Systems, with the most recent title being Fire Emblem Engage, as well as a variety of spin-offs including the mobile title Fire Emblem Heroes, and Fire Emblem Warriors, created in conjunction with with Koei Tecmo.

Platforms & Fire Emblem Games[]

Gallery[]

See also[]

• Nintendo on Wikipedia.