The History of Nintendo: From Hanafuda Cards to Switch 2, 1889 to 2026
A Kyoto card maker that became the most durable company in video games: 137 years, three family presidents, two hardware collapses, and the lawsuits that shaped what a console maker may and may not control. Sales figures are Nintendo's own reported shipments, current to 30 June 2026. Photographs of hardware, buildings and people are from Wikimedia Commons; no game artwork or characters are reproduced. Nintendo, the console names and the game titles mentioned are trademarks of Nintendo Co., Ltd. or their respective owners. This is an independent history; Boromlia is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo.
A Card Shop in Kyoto
On 23 September 1889 Fusajiro Yamauchi, a craftsman, opened a shop in Kyoto called Nintendo Koppai to make hanafuda, the flower-card game that had survived the government's periodic bans on Western cards and gambling. The cards were printed on mulberry-bark paper and sold to gamblers, who replaced decks often. The meaning of the name is disputed; the reading usually given, "leave luck to heaven", has never been confirmed by the company. In 1902 Nintendo began making Western-style playing cards, reportedly the first Japanese firm to do so, and sold them through tobacco shops across the country.
The Son-in-Law
Fusajiro Yamauchi had no son. In 1929 he retired and handed the company to his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda, who had married into the family and taken the Yamauchi name, a common practice for keeping a Japanese house in the male line. Sekiryo ran Nintendo for twenty years.
The Office on Shomen Street
In 1933 Sekiryo reorganised the business as a partnership, Yamauchi Nintendo & Co., and built a new head office of concrete and brick near the Kamo River. It stayed the company's headquarters until 1959. The building survived the war and the company's later moves, and in 2022 it reopened as Marufukuro, a hotel named after the trademark the Yamauchi family once stamped on its cards.
A Law Student Takes Over
In 1949 Sekiryo had a stroke, and his grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, a 22-year-old law student at Waseda University, left his studies to become president. He had been raised largely by his grandparents after his father left the family. Older employees doubted him; he replaced managers who resisted and centralised every significant decision on himself. He would run Nintendo for 53 years.
Plastic Cards and a Disney License
In 1953 Nintendo produced Japan's first mass-market plastic playing cards. In 1959 it signed a licence to print Disney characters on its cards, which turned a gambling product into a children's one and sold in unprecedented numbers. The company renamed itself Nintendo Playing Card Co. and moved its head office out of the Shomen building.
Listed, and Looking for a Second Business
In 1962 Nintendo listed on the second section of the Osaka Securities Exchange and the Kyoto Stock Exchange, and in 1963 it became Nintendo Co., Ltd. The card market was saturating, and Yamauchi went looking for other businesses. He tried a taxi company, Daiya, and instant rice, among other ventures. None of them lasted.
The Ultra Hand
Gunpei Yokoi, a maintenance engineer at the card factory, built an extending lattice arm in his spare time. Yamauchi saw it and ordered it into production for the 1966 Christmas season as the Ultra Hand. It sold more than a million units and moved Yokoi into product development, where he would stay for thirty years. His working rule became known as lateral thinking with withered technology: cheap, well-understood parts used in new ways.
The Beam Gun
In 1970 Nintendo released the Beam Gun series, light-gun toys that used solar cells supplied by Sharp to register hits. The engineer who brought the Sharp connection was Masayuki Uemura, who would later lead the design of the Famicom.
Laser Clay and the Oil Shock
In 1973 Nintendo scaled the light gun up into the Laser Clay Shooting System, installed in disused bowling alleys where players fired at projected clay pigeons. Orders came in quickly. Then the oil crisis of late 1973 hit the Japanese economy, the orders were cancelled, and Nintendo was left carrying heavy debts from the build-out.
Color TV-Game
In 1977 Nintendo and Mitsubishi Electric released the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15, home consoles playing variations of tennis. They were Nintendo's first home video game hardware. The series that followed sold in the millions in Japan.
Miyamoto Is Hired
In 1977 Shigeru Miyamoto, a 24-year-old industrial design graduate of the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts, joined Nintendo through a family acquaintance of Yamauchi. He was taken on as the company's first staff artist, drawing casings and graphics. He had never designed a game.
Game & Watch
Yokoi reportedly got the idea watching a commuter on the bullet train play with a calculator to pass the time. On 28 April 1980 Nintendo released Ball, the first Game & Watch: one game on a calculator-grade LCD screen, with a clock. The line ran for eleven years and sold 43.4 million units. Its 1982 cross-shaped directional pad became the standard controller layout of the industry.
Nintendo of America
In 1980 Yamauchi sent his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, an MIT-trained engineer, to open Nintendo of America in New York. Arakawa ordered some 3,000 cabinets of the arcade game Radar Scope; most failed to sell. In 1982 the subsidiary moved to the Seattle area, where its headquarters, now in Redmond, remain.
Donkey Kong
To use up the unsold Radar Scope cabinets, Yamauchi gave Miyamoto his first game to design. Donkey Kong, released in July 1981, was a conversion kit: new chips and new artwork in the old cabinets. It introduced the carpenter later named Mario and became Nintendo of America's first large success in the arcades.
The Family Computer
Nintendo released the Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan on 15 July 1983 at ¥14,800, less than half the price of most rivals. Masayuki Uemura's team built it around an inexpensive Ricoh processor. A fault in early units led to a recall at the end of the year. By the time production ended in 2003, the Famicom and its American version had shipped 61.91 million units.
Universal City Studios v. Nintendo
In 1982 Universal claimed that Donkey Kong infringed its rights in King Kong and demanded royalties; several licensees paid. Nintendo refused. In December 1983 Judge Robert W. Sweet of the Southern District of New York ruled for Nintendo, finding no likelihood of confusion and noting that Universal had itself argued in an earlier case that the King Kong story was in the public domain. The Second Circuit affirmed on 4 October 1984. Nintendo's lead counsel was John Kirby.
Super Mario Bros.
On 13 September 1985 Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom, designed by Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka with music by Koji Kondo. It sold more than 40 million copies, most of them bundled with the console, and fixed the side-scrolling platform game as a genre.
The NES Opens in New York
The American market for home consoles had collapsed in 1983, and retailers would not stock them. On 18 October 1985 Nintendo test-launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in the New York area, redesigned as a grey front-loading box and sold with a plastic robot, R.O.B., so that shops could file it under toys. It went national in 1986. A security chip, the 10NES, let Nintendo decide which third-party cartridges could run on it, and licensees were held to a limited number of titles a year.
The Disk System and Zelda
On 21 February 1986 Nintendo released the Famicom Disk System, a floppy-disk add-on that allowed larger, cheaper, rewritable games, and with it The Legend of Zelda, which let players save their progress. Falling cartridge prices and piracy of the disks limited the add-on's life.
Game Boy
Yokoi's team released the Game Boy on 21 April 1989: a monochrome screen, four AA batteries, roughly fifteen hours of play. In North America it came bundled with Tetris, licensed after a contest over the rights with the Soviet state agency ELORG. The Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, shipped 118.69 million units.
Super Famicom
The Super Famicom went on sale in Japan on 21 November 1990 and sold out its first shipment of some 300,000 units in hours. The North American version, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, followed in August 1991, a year behind Sega's Genesis. The platform shipped 49.10 million units.
The Price-Fixing Settlement
In April 1991 Nintendo of America settled charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of all 50 states that it had pressured retailers to keep NES prices high. Without admitting wrongdoing, it agreed to send $5 coupons to buyers of its console and to pay the states' costs. Nintendo's American market share at the time was estimated at around 80 per cent.
The Sony Snub
Sony had been developing a CD-ROM drive for the Super Famicom. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1991, the day after Sony announced the project, Nintendo announced that it would work with Philips instead. The Philips drive was never released for Nintendo. Sony's engineer on the project, Ken Kutaragi, went on to lead the development of the PlayStation.
Lewis Galoob Toys v. Nintendo
Galoob's Game Genie plugged in between an NES cartridge and the console and altered game values, giving players extra lives or new abilities. Nintendo argued that this created unauthorised derivative works. On 21 May 1992 the Ninth Circuit disagreed: the device made no permanent copy, and players' private, altered play was fair use. The decision remains a reference case on software modification.
The Seattle Mariners
In 1992, with the baseball club at risk of leaving Seattle, Hiroshi Yamauchi bought a majority stake in the Mariners, becoming the first Japanese owner of a Major League team. He never attended a game. Nintendo of America took over his interest in 2004 and sold most of it in 2016, keeping a 10 per cent share.
Atari Games v. Nintendo
Atari's subsidiary Tengen had obtained a copy of the 10NES lockout code from the US Copyright Office by telling it the code was needed for litigation, and used it to make unlicensed NES cartridges. On 10 September 1992 the Federal Circuit held that reverse engineering to understand a program can be fair use, but that Atari could not rely on that defence for code it had copied from a copy obtained through misrepresentation.
Virtual Boy
Yokoi's stereoscopic headset went on sale in Japan on 21 July 1995. It displayed red images on black, had to be played on a table stand, and gave some players headaches. It was discontinued within a year after about 770,000 units, Nintendo's worst-selling console. Yokoi left the company in 1996.
Pokémon Red and Green
On 27 February 1996 Nintendo published Pocket Monsters Red and Green for the Game Boy, developed over six years by Satoshi Tajiri's studio Game Freak. The two versions, and the trading of creatures between them over a link cable, revived a console seven years into its life. In 1998 Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures set up a jointly owned company to manage the brand, now The Pokémon Company.
Nintendo 64
The Nintendo 64 launched in Japan on 23 June 1996 with Super Mario 64 and a controller built around an analogue stick. Nintendo stayed with cartridges when Sony used CDs, which kept loading fast but cost several third-party publishers, including Square, which moved Final Fantasy VII to the PlayStation. The N64 shipped 32.93 million units.
Gunpei Yokoi Dies
On 4 October 1997 Gunpei Yokoi, 56, was killed on the Hokuriku Expressway when he left his car after a minor collision and was struck by a passing vehicle. He had left Nintendo the year before and founded his own company, Koto, which was developing the WonderSwan handheld for Bandai.
Game Boy Advance
On 21 March 2001 Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance, a 32-bit handheld with a wide colour screen that played the old Game Boy cartridges as well. The family shipped 81.51 million units.
GameCube
The GameCube launched in Japan on 14 September 2001, using small proprietary optical discs that could not play DVDs. It finished third in its generation behind Sony and Microsoft, with 21.74 million units shipped, but stayed profitable.
Iwata Succeeds Yamauchi
On 31 May 2002 Hiroshi Yamauchi retired after 53 years, and Satoru Iwata, 42, became Nintendo's fourth president and the first from outside the family. Iwata was a programmer who had run HAL Laboratory, a Nintendo affiliate, and joined Nintendo in 2000. Yamauchi became an adviser and remained the largest individual shareholder.
The European Commission Fine
On 30 October 2002 the European Commission fined Nintendo €149 million for colluding with its European distributors between 1991 and 1998 to stop consoles and games moving from cheaper countries to dearer ones. Seven distributors were fined as well. In 2009 the Court of First Instance reduced Nintendo's fine to €119.2 million.
Nintendo DS
The DS went on sale in North America on 21 November 2004, ahead of Japan. It had two screens, one of them touch-sensitive, and a microphone. Titles such as Brain Age and Nintendogs sold to people who had never owned a console. The DS family shipped 154.02 million units, then the most of any Nintendo hardware.
Wii
The Wii launched in North America on 19 November 2006. It was less powerful than its rivals and cheaper, and its motion-sensing remote made Wii Sports, bundled in most regions, playable by anyone who could swing a tennis racket. It shipped 101.63 million units. In 2007 Nintendo's market value briefly passed Sony's.
3DS and the Price Cut
The 3DS, a handheld with a glasses-free 3D screen, launched in Japan on 26 February 2011. Sales were poor, and in August Nintendo cut the American price from $249.99 to $169.99, giving earlier buyers twenty free downloadable games in compensation. Iwata cut his own pay by half. The 3DS family went on to ship 75.94 million units.
The First Loss
For the year to March 2012 Nintendo reported an operating loss of about ¥37 billion, its first annual operating loss, as Wii sales fell away, the 3DS was sold near cost and the strong yen cut the value of overseas revenue.
Wii U
The Wii U launched in North America on 18 November 2012 with a tablet-style controller. Consumers struggled to tell it apart from the Wii, and third-party support thinned. It shipped 13.56 million units, the fewest of any Nintendo home console.
Hiroshi Yamauchi Dies
Hiroshi Yamauchi died of pneumonia on 19 September 2013, aged 85. He had taken a card company with a declining market and left the largest game maker in Japan. At his death he was among the richest people in the country.
The DeNA Alliance
On 17 March 2015 Nintendo, which had refused for years to put its games on phones, announced an alliance with the mobile company DeNA. Each bought about ¥22 billion of the other's shares, and they agreed to develop smartphone games and a new membership service together.
Satoru Iwata Dies
Satoru Iwata died on 11 July 2015, aged 55, of a bile duct tumour. He had continued working through treatment and had overseen the early design of Nintendo's next console. Tatsumi Kimishima, a former banker who had run Nintendo of America, became president in September.
Pokémon Go and the Share Price
Pokémon Go, developed by Niantic with The Pokémon Company, was released on 6 July 2016. Investors assumed Nintendo would take most of the profit, and its share price roughly doubled in two weeks. On 22 July Nintendo said the game's impact on its earnings would be limited, since it owned about a third of The Pokémon Company and had not made the game. The shares fell 18 per cent on the next trading day.
Nintendo Switch
The Switch launched on 3 March 2017, a tablet with detachable controllers that worked both as a handheld and as a home console. It restored Nintendo's hardware business after the Wii U. By 30 June 2026 it had shipped 156.59 million units, passing the DS to become Nintendo's best-selling hardware.
Furukawa Becomes President
On 28 June 2018 Shuntaro Furukawa, 46, succeeded Kimishima as president. He had joined Nintendo in 1994 in accounting and had worked on the company's stake in The Pokémon Company. Under him Nintendo turned its characters into a business outside games: theme parks, films and a museum.
Super Nintendo World
Super Nintendo World, built with Universal, opened at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka on 18 March 2021 after a pandemic delay. Further sites opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in February 2023 and at Epic Universe in Orlando in May 2025.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
The animated film produced by Illumination with Nintendo and released by Universal opened on 5 April 2023 and grossed about $1.36 billion worldwide, the most for any film based on a video game. Miyamoto was a producer.
Nintendo v. Tropic Haze
On 26 February 2024 Nintendo sued Tropic Haze, maker of the Switch emulator Yuzu, in federal court in Rhode Island, alleging it facilitated piracy by circumventing the console's encryption. On 4 March the developers settled for $2.4 million, agreed to a permanent injunction and shut the project down.
The Palworld Patent Suit
On 19 September 2024 Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair, the maker of Palworld, in the Tokyo District Court for infringing three Japanese patents covering game mechanics such as capturing a creature by throwing an object at it and riding creatures in the field. The suit concerned patents, not character designs. Pocketpair contested it and changed the disputed mechanics; the plaintiffs later narrowed the claims to earlier versions of the game. In a separate proceeding a US examiner rejected all 26 claims of a related Nintendo patent in March 2026, in a non-final action. As of September 2026 the Tokyo court had not ruled.
The Nintendo Museum
On 2 October 2024 Nintendo opened a museum in Uji, south of Kyoto, in the converted Uji Ogura plant, which had made playing cards and later repaired consoles. The exhibits run from the hanafuda of 1889 to the Switch.
Switch 2
Revealed on 16 January 2025 and launched on 5 June at $449.99 in the United States, the Switch 2 kept the hybrid design, added a larger 1080p screen and played most original Switch games. It sold more than 3.5 million units in its first four days, Nintendo's fastest launch, and 19.86 million by 31 March 2026.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
The sequel opened on 1 April 2026 and, in its tenth weekend, became the first film of the year to pass $1 billion worldwide. Across two films the franchise has grossed about $2.3 billion.
A Price Rise for Switch 2
In May 2026 Nintendo announced its first price increase for the Switch 2. In Japan the price rose to ¥59,980 on 25 May; in the United States it went from $449.99 to $499.99 on 1 September, with increases in Canada and Europe the same day and in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea soon after. Nintendo cited market conditions expected to last over the medium to long term. Furukawa put the added cost to the company, from components and tariffs, at around ¥100 billion and said the increase would not cover all of it.
Passing the GameCube
Results published on 6 August 2026 put Switch 2 shipments at 23.68 million by 30 June, past the GameCube's lifetime 21.74 million in about thirteen months. Hardware sales for the quarter were down on the launch quarter a year earlier, and Nintendo kept its forecast of 16.5 million Switch 2 units for the year to March 2027.