Nintendo

Nintendo is one of the oldest and most influential companies in gaming history, operating as both a hardware manufacturer and software developer with roots stretching back to 1889. Founded in Kyoto, Japan, as a playing card company, Nintendo transformed into a global entertainment brand through arcade games in the 1970s, the home console revolution of the 1980s, and a series of hardware innovations that repeatedly redefined what gaming could be. The Nintendo Switch 2, released June 2025, has sold nearly 20 million units in its first year and stands as one of the fastest-selling consoles ever made.

If you were a kid in the 80s then you know Nintendo was king back then. I remember staying up late and playing sick just to stay home and play my NES (I did that with every console though and still do). Nothing was more frustrating than Toad telling you that the princess was in another castle though.

Nintendo’s Founding and Early History

Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto on September 23, 1889, producing handmade hanafuda playing cards. The company remained in the card business for decades, producing Western-style playing cards by the 1950s under an agreement with Disney for licensed designs. Nintendo entered the toy business in the 1960s and began exploring electronic entertainment in the early 1970s, producing arcade games and eventually the Color TV-Game console for the Japanese market in 1977. The shift toward dedicated gaming hardware that followed positioned Nintendo for the global market that would define the next five decades of its history.

The NES and Saving the Gaming Industry

The Nintendo Entertainment System launched in Japan as the Famicom in 1983 and reached North America in 1985, arriving in the aftermath of the 1983 video game crash that had devastated the North American gaming market. Nintendo relaunched the concept of home gaming with a strict licensing program that controlled third-party software quality, a retail strategy that positioned the NES as a toy rather than a game console, and a launch lineup anchored by Super Mario Bros. The console sold over 61 million units worldwide and established Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Donkey Kong as franchise pillars that Nintendo still publishes today.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System followed in 1990 and 1991, expanding the hardware capabilities while delivering defining entries in every major Nintendo franchise. The SNES era produced Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong Country, titles that remain reference points for platform game design. Nintendo’s rivalry with Sega during this era, the console wars of the early 1990s that pitted the SNES against the Sega Genesis, defined how gaming was marketed and discussed for a generation.

Nintendo’s Major Franchises

Nintendo’s software catalog is its most durable competitive advantage. Super Mario is the best-selling video game franchise in history, spanning mainline platformers, kart racing, sports games, and a film that grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide. The Legend of Zelda has produced a continuous run of genre-defining action-adventure games since 1986, with Breath of the Wild in 2017 and Tears of the Kingdom in 2023 among the highest-rated games ever released. Pokémon, developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo through The Pokémon Company, is the highest-grossing media franchise in history across games, cards, animation, and merchandise.

Beyond those three, Nintendo’s catalog includes Metroid, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Star Fox, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Pikmin, and Xenoblade, each with dedicated fanbases and decades of history. Splatoon, launched in 2015, is Nintendo’s most successful original franchise in decades, growing from a Wii U exclusive into a series that has sold tens of millions of copies across three mainline entries. Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020 sold over 45 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling games in Nintendo’s history by landing at the precise moment during global lockdowns when its message of peaceful community building resonated most directly.

Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo’s Creative Philosophy

Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo’s most significant creative figure, the designer responsible for Donkey Kong, Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, and Star Fox. Miyamoto’s philosophy, that games should be designed around intuitive, physical interactions that anyone can understand within seconds, has shaped Nintendo’s hardware and software development across four decades. His insistence on finding the fun before building the game around it produced a body of work that competitors have studied and rarely replicated.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president from 2002 until his death in 2015, extended Miyamoto’s philosophy into hardware strategy. Iwata’s tenure produced the Nintendo DS, the Wii, and the 3DS, three consecutive hardware generations that expanded gaming’s audience by prioritizing accessibility and novel input methods over raw processing power. His concept of the Blue Ocean strategy, targeting non-gamers rather than competing directly for the existing gaming market, produced the Wii’s 101 million unit lifetime sales and changed how the industry understood its own potential audience. Shuntaro Furukawa has served as Nintendo’s president since 2018, overseeing the Switch’s commercial peak and the Switch 2 launch.

The Nintendo Wii and DS Era

The Nintendo DS launched in 2004 and sold 154 million units, making it one of the best-selling gaming devices ever produced. Its dual-screen design with a touchscreen on the lower display became the template for Nintendo’s handheld development through the 3DS era. The Wii launched in 2006 with motion controls as its central innovation, selling 101 million units by reaching players who had never considered gaming, from elderly retirement home residents to families who had never owned a console. The Wii Sports pack-in became the best-selling individual game in Nintendo’s history at the time and demonstrated what Iwata’s Blue Ocean approach could achieve at scale.

The Wii U followed in 2012 and struggled commercially, selling approximately 13.5 million units against competitors who outsold it significantly. Its GamePad controller, a tablet with a built-in screen that enabled off-TV play and second-screen experiences, was genuinely innovative but poorly communicated to consumers who were unsure whether it was a new console or an accessory for the original Wii. The Wii U’s commercial failure produced many of Nintendo’s most critically acclaimed games of the decade, including Super Mario 3D World, Splatoon, and Mario Kart 8, most of which found larger audiences when they were ported to the Switch.

The Nintendo Switch

The Nintendo Switch launched in March 2017 at $299.99, a hybrid console that operated as both a home console when docked to a television and a handheld device when taken on the go. The concept resolved the Wii U’s identity problem directly, communicating what the hardware was and why it was useful within a thirty-second advertisement. The Switch sold 155.92 million units over its lifetime, overtaking the DS as Nintendo’s best-selling hardware ever and becoming one of the five best-selling gaming devices in history.

The Switch’s library included The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus among its defining titles. The console sustained commercial momentum across eight years through a combination of first-party software releases, the Switch Lite variant for dedicated handheld players, and the Switch OLED model with an improved display, an unusually long and stable hardware lifecycle for the gaming industry.

Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 launched on June 5, 2025, at $449.99 in the United States, a $150 price increase over the original Switch’s launch price that generated significant skepticism ahead of release. The hardware features a custom Nvidia T239 processor, an 8-core ARM CPU, a 7.9-inch 1080p LCD display capable of 120Hz refresh rates, 256GB of internal storage, and 4K output at 60Hz when docked. The Joy-Con controllers added a magnetic attachment system and a new mouse-mode function for supported games.

The Switch 2 sold 19.86 million units in its first fiscal year ending March 31, 2026, with Mario Kart World selling 14.70 million copies and Donkey Kong Bananza selling 4.52 million units. The console outsold the PlayStation 5 by approximately one million units in a single quarter, and Nintendo’s net sales for the nine months ending December 2025 nearly doubled year-on-year, reaching approximately $12.2 billion USD. The $449.99 price point that concerned analysts before launch proved not to be a barrier, with the console remaining supply-constrained throughout its first year rather than requiring discounting to sustain demand.

Nintendo’s Legacy

Nintendo has been declared finished or irrelevant multiple times across its history, after the N64 lost ground to the PlayStation, after the GameCube underperformed, and after the Wii U’s commercial failure. Each time, the company has returned with a hardware concept or software release that reset the conversation. The consistency of that pattern is not luck. It is the product of a company that has maintained a coherent design philosophy across leadership changes and market shifts, one that prioritizes the experience of playing over the specifications of the hardware doing the playing. The Switch 2’s first-year performance suggests that philosophy remains commercially viable at a premium price point in a market that Nintendo’s competitors have spent decades trying to understand.