Nintendo Archives

Few gaming developers will leave a legacy behind them as rich as Nintendo’s. Founded in 1889, the Japanese giant started off selling all sorts of different things, including Hanafuda playing cards and even a taxi service before it moved into videogames in the mid Seventies, where it found great success with the release of Donkey Kong in 1981. Nintendo really hit it big with the release of its Famicom, or NES as it was known outside of Japan, and great games such as Metroid, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend Of Zelda quickly followed, becoming massive franchises in their own right. The NES turned Nintendo into one of gaming’s biggest publishers, and as the likes of Atari fell by the wayside, Nintendo grew ever more powerful. The company continued to make…

The games industry has undergone seismic levels of change over the past few decades, but since the Eighties one name has stood out as a constant in the ever-shifting sands of interactive entertainment: Nintendo. At one point, Nintendo was a brand totally and utterly synonymous with videogames as a medium, such was the company's domination of the console market. Since the glory days of the NES we've seen the Nintendo rollercoaster dip and rise; systems like the SNES, Game Boy and Wii have achieved the kind of critical and commercial success that their rivals could only dream of, while missteps such as the Virtual Boy and the Wii U have proven that, despite its legendary status, Nintendo is just as prone to mistakes as any other corporation. Arguably one of…

FUSAJIRO YAMAUCHI Yamauchi founded Nintendo in 1889 as a playing card business. The company grew rapidly, expanding to nearby Osaka. Yamauchi would retire in 1929, leaving his son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda in charge of the business. He died from the effects of a stroke in 1940. HIROSHI YAMAUCHI The grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi, Hiroshi became the third president of Nintendo in 1947 and would guide the company away from playing cards and into videogames. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO The creator of some of the most iconic games – including Super Mario, Zelda and Star Fox – Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 and his breakthrough success was the arcade smash-hit Donkey Kong. GUNPEI YOKOI Responsible for some of Nintendo’s most successful ventures. He came up with the Game & Watch, Game Boy and produced many famous games.…

DIGITAL CONTROL Joysticks were the input method for gaming of the Seventies and Eighties, but were too bulky to be used on portable devices. Nintendo came up with the D-pad and used it on the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong – it has become an essential control method ever since. MEMORY MANAGEMENT PC owners are used to adding in RAM to improve performance, and Nintendo applied this to the N64. Demanding titles like Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark and Zelda: Majora’s Mask worked with the 4MB RAM pack to offer better visuals. KIOSKS COULD BE USED TO PUT NEW GAMES ON OLD ONES The Famicom Disc System is another Japan-only peripheral, and Nintendo introduced kiosks which allowed users to wipe discs and write new games to them for a reduced…

Roger. "The idea of the GamePad was and still is revolutionary, but I do not feel that a killer title ever nailed the use of it. With the Wii, Wii Sports was a great demo of how to use Wii and really set a positive benchmark for the system. Wii U never really had this." Thomas feels that the Wii U is a great platform that was simply dealt a bad hand. "The more I consider the Wii U, the more I think it just got caught out by bad circumstances," he says. "I imagine at the design phase – when tablets were only just gaining popularity, the Wii was dominant – the idea of the name, GamePad and approach would have seemed right. Unfortunately the GamePad concept just wasn't exciting…

Masayuki Uemura, the NES’ creator, gives his head a little shake and laughs. “I thought the NES taking off was impossible,” he admits. “I think Mr. Arakawa, [first president of Nintendo Of America], never thought it would either. But in the entertainment industry, the unexpected happens. I feel so grateful people still play the NES. I can’t believe I’m here!” Professor Uemura is sitting opposite us in the conference room of the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham, speaking through his affable interpreter Akinori ‘Aki’ Nakamura. He has been invited by the NVA to give a talk about the creation of the Famicom, renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for its Western release, and seems genuinely surprised with the love that the console still generates three decades after it made it…