1983

Nintendo Entertainment System

Fusajiro Yamauchi (1859–1940), Hiroshi Yamauchi (1927–2013)

Founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889 as Nintendo Koppai, a maker of Japanese Hanafuda playing cards, this company went from a small, paper-based game publisher to a behemoth consumer electronics institution known for its iconic game titles, including Pokémon®, Super Mario Bros.®, Tetris®, and Donkey Kong®.

Nintendo® has had a profound impact on both the gaming industry and how people interact with computer gaming technologies. It practically created mobile electronic gaming and helped to introduce the fusion of entertainment and mobile, as well as the concept of multiplayer engagement across computer devices. Few other companies were following this strategy at the time Nintendo was pushing such concepts.

First sold in 1983 in Japan as the Famicom or Family Computer, the Nintendo Entertainment System hit the US market in 1985 and the European market in 1986. In South Korea, it was called the Hyundai Cowboy. That cowboy would go on to reinvigorate the US gaming industry, which had been in a decline since 1983. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi is credited with making the Nintendo Entertainment System a success, in part by insisting that the company sell a low-cost, cartridge-based game console, rather than a more expensive home computer complete with keyboard and floppy disk drive.

The Nintendo Game Boy®, released in 1989, was one of the first portable consoles and helped to introduce the idea of having a mobile entertainment experience rather than a TV-tethered one. Revolutionary at the time, despite its monochrome screen, the Game Boy helped lay the foundation for the gaming experiences on smartphones today. Nintendo also produced the first device to have a satellite modem add-on for a game console. It was a 1995 feature offered on the Super Famicom console in Japan. Called Satellaview, it broadcast games between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. and offered a variety of titles, including a few exclusives that were available only during a specific time slot.

Nintendo software has also proved useful for real-world applications: in 2009, the Japanese police used the “Mii” feature on the Wii® that allows people to create their own avatars to create a picture of a hit-and-run suspect for a wanted poster.

Graffiti by an unidentified artist of Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi, from Super Mario Bros., on a wall in the city center in Bristol, England.