Hi Steemians!!
In today’s blog we will be discussing in brief about the history of Nintendo. Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 to produce handmade Japanese playing cards. Between 1963 and 1968 Nintendo opened a taxi company , hotel chain and even a food company selling instant rice . All of these eventually failed .
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
The first few arcade titles by Nintendo was EVR race in 1975 , RadarScope in 1979 and Donkey Kong in 1981 . Nintendo's first handheld games were called Game & Watch . These started production in 1980 and forty three point four million units were sold worldwide.
Photo by Tomasz Filipek from Pexels
In July 1983 Nintendo released their Famicom system in Japan. This was their first cartridge based video game console. It sold over 500,000 units within two months. Unfortunately Nintendo decided to recall all the units due to a malfunctioning chip which ended up costing them around half a million dollars in 1985. Nintendo announced that they were bringing the Famicom system to the worldwide market It was sold under a different design and under a different name the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Photo by zengxiao lin on Unsplash
The same year a little game called Super Mario Brothers was released for this console in 1986. Metroid And Super Mario Brothers 2 were released ,and one year later The Legend of Zelda came out and gained popularity very quickly .In 1988 the first issue of Nintendo Power came out .It was a monthly news magazine from Nintendo that was used to advertise new games.
In 1989 the Game Boy premiered along with the accompanying game Tetris .The Gameboy eventually became the best-selling handheld game system of all time . The Super Famicom was released in Japan in 1990 and a year after to the US under the name Super Nintendo Entertainment System .
Photo by Dids from Pexels
In 1995 Nintendo issued the Virtual Boy. Nintendo sold it as the first portable 3d gaming system but it was a huge flop. They discontinued it one year later but that's okay because on June 23rd 1996 the Nintendo 64 was released in Japan and it sold over 500,000 units on the first day of its release. It's sported a 64-bit central processor and at the time awesome 3d visuals also .
In 1996 pocket monster was hatched from the egg .The first games for this series were pokemon red and pokemon green or blue for the international release .It's the second best video game franchise of all time with 260 million sales on October 13th 1998 . The Game Boy Color was released in Japan and in North America and Europe .
One month later Nintendo released the Gameboy advanced on March 21st 2001. They also released the Nintendo GameCube console in the same year .The GameCube is home to several popular titles such as Pikmin , Luigi's Mansion , Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Brothers and legend of zelda windwaker .
Nintendo Ds
Photo by Stas Knop from Pexels
The Nintendo DS came out in 2004 and received over 3 million pre-orders. In addition to the touchscreen the DS could create three-dimensional graphics similar to those of the n64 .The Nintendo Wii was released in November of 2006. The console sold extremely fast and was a huge breakthrough for Nintendo .
Nintendo 3ds
Photo by Dids from Pexels
The Nintendo 3ds was released in early 2011. The 3ds did not use 3d glasses for its 3d effect like many other products at the time and instead used an Auto stereoscopic display technology called a parallax barrier .
That's a mouthful as of June 2014 it has sold over 44.14 million units worldwide .The Wii U was released in late November 2012. It's Nintendo's first console to be able to play games in 1080p HD .It featured a new controller with a touchscreen ,an accelerometer, gyroscope, camera and a built-in microphone.
Nintendo Switch
That's a Lot of history I guess .
Thank you for reading my blog.
**Please upvote and comment if you liked my blog. **