In 1975, Nintendo would enter the arcade game industry with EVR Race, which was designed by Nintendo’s first game designer, Genyo Takeda. Several more titles would follow. This venture met with some small success, but Nintendo’s fortunes would change dramatically in 1981 with the release of Donkey Kong, which was designed by Miyamoto.
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The game’s success brought Nintendo many licensing opportunities, including ports on the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision. This gave Nintendo a very large boost in profit, and around this time a game called Jumpman was introduced. It was the first iteration of Mario, the mascot of modern Nintendo.
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Video Games Success
In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi observed a fellow bullet train commuter passing the time by playing with an LCD calculator. This gave him the idea for a hand held gaming device, and the Game & Watch was born and would launch the following year. Game & Watch was a series of handhelds, each with a different game. This was because they did not have interchangeable cartridges like later systems would. The design of the modern D-Pad was created in 1982 for a Donkey Kong version of the Game & Watch by Yokoi. The Game & Watch is of course where the character Mr. Game & Watch came from.
A few years later in 1983, Nintendo would launch the Family Computer (or Famicom for short) game console, along with ports of some of their most popular arcade titles. It wasn’t until two years later, in 1985, when a cosmetically revamped version known as the Nintendo Entertainment System would come to areas outside of Japan. Their practice of bundling games with their systems would make Super Mario Bros. one of the best-selling video games ever.
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During this time period, Miyamoto would create two of the most well-known titles in gaming: Super Mario Bros. (mentioned above), and The Legend of Zelda. Most games of this time focused heavily on having players go for ever higher high scores. Miyamoto decided to focus more on gameplay instead for both of these games. He drew on his childhood experiences in Kyoto, Japan, where he explored nearby fields, woods, and caves.
“When I was a child,” Miyamoto said, “I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this.”
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In 1988 at Nintendo Research and Development 1, Gunpei Yokoi and his team would create the original Game Boy. It’s purpose was to merge the Game & Watch’s portability, with the NES’s interchangeability of games since each game came on a cartridge that could be inserted into the NES to play it. The Gameboy launched in Japan on April 21, 1989 and in North America on July 31, 1989. Nintendo’s then president, Minoru Arakawa, managed a deal to bundle the popular game Tetris with the Game Boy, and the pair was a big success.
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In August of 1989, the NES’s successor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was announced. It would launch in Japan as the Super Famicom on November 21, 1990, and in North America as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System on August 23, 1991, and in Europe in 1992. With its main competitor being the Sega Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis as it’s known in North America), a console war began between Nintendo and Sega. From 1990 to 1992, the company opened World of Nintendo stores in the United States, where fans could test and buy Nintendo’s wares.
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In August of 1993, Nintendo announced the SNES’s successor, which was code named “Project Reality”. It was planned to be out by the end of 1995 but was delayed. During this time Nintendo announced the SNES-CD, a CD drive peripheral for the SNES. The peripheral was headed for a 1994 release when it was controversially cancelled. However, during 1994, Nintendo announced that it had sold 1 billion game cartridges world-wide, and dubbed it “The Year of the Cartridge”. And furthering their support for cartridges, Nintendo announced that Project Reality, now renamed Ultra64, would not use a CD format as expected, but instead would use cartridges. The Ultra64 would of course come to be known as the Nintendo 64.
