This year Fusajiro Yamauchi who lived in Kyoto Japan founded Nintendo Koppai to begin producing and selling the special playing cards called "Hanafunda" (a.k.a. "Daitoryo" and "President") in Kyoto (Fusajiro was the great grandfather of the present Nintendo president). All the cards that Fusajiro produced was tenderly hand made using the bark from the mulberry or mitsu-mata trees.
The Hanafunda deck consisted of 48 cards divided in 12 different suits, one for each month of the year. Instead of numbers the cards had different symbols like the wind, a deer, the moon or the chrysanthemum. Different combinations of symbols and suits was worth different many points. The most popular Hanafunda game you could play was a simple matching cards game that could become very complex and was taken very seriously by the players. The cards was sold in Nintendo's own shops in both Kyoto and Osaka but they became most popular in the Kyoto region. In other regions Fusajiro sold other cards with different symbols like swords and mountains. At first the Hanafunda cards was only used as a domestic amusement and Fusajiro didnīt sold any big amounts of the handmade cards but after a while the cards began to be used in gambling and after a while the Yakuza (The Japanese Mafia) began using the Hanafunda cards in their high stake games and since all the professional players wanted to start a new game with a new fresh deck Fusajiro suddenly had problems keeping up with the demands! He had to start training apprentices to massproduce the cards.
1977 Nintendo enters the video game industry and Shigeru Miyamoto starts working at Nintendo!
Nintendo enters the videogame industry when they together with Mitsubishi Electrics releases their first videogame machine, the Color TV Game 6 in Japan. The system was designed to play 6 different versions of light tennis. The system sold in million copies. Shigeru Miyamoto started working at Nintendo as a games designer creating artwork for arcade games.
Back in 1980 The guidelines for a new, more powerful videogame system emerged when Hiroshi Yamauchi, Masayuki Uemura, and their engineers began work on a new console much more advanced than the Color TV Game systems Nintendo had sold before. The new system should be able to play many different games, each stored on different cartridges/disks. Nintendo wasn't the first company with that idea, however. Atari, Commodore, Bandai, Takara and Sharp had all released or were developing similar systems. Yamauchi told Uemura that they had to make a system that would be much better than all the competitors' machines but also cheaper so that anyone could afford it. Yamauchi set a goal for the price of the machine at 9.800 yen (about 75$). At first, Masayuki Uemura thought about using a 16-bit CPU, but that would have been way too expensive so he settled with a 8-bit CPU instead.
Famicom
The Famicom!
The "dream machine" shapes up. Masayuki spent a lot of time with his engineers looking at Nintendo's current arcade games, trying to find the most suitable key components for a fast, yet inexpensive console. At last he settled on a cheap, not so powerful CPU called the 6502. The 6502 CPU couldn't do all the graphical work by itself so a PPU (Picture Processing Unit) was needed. They met with representatives from many semi-conductor companies but most turned down their offers. Nintendo wanted components at rock bottom prices but promised enormous orders. Unfortunately, most companies couldn't afford "gambling" like that. The lucky one was a company called Ricoh, who's semiconductor division didn't have much to do at the time. Yamauchi wasn't willing to pay more than 2,000 yen/chip which Ricoh thought was an absurdly low price. However, after Yamauchi guaranteed them a 3 million chip order within a 2 year period, they agreed! The employees at Nintendo started wondering what the heck Hiroshi was thinking. A 3 million chips order?! The most Nintendo had ever sold was 1 million copies of their Color TV Games system! The memory of the new system had to be cut down to only 2,000 bytes (16 kilobits). The suggestion to include a keyboard, modem, and a disk slot was turned down because Yamauchi wanted the system to be as cheap as possible. However, he did add some pretty expensive circuitry with a connector that could send and receive an unmodified signal to the CPU. This later enabled the NES to be hooked up to any accessory plugged into the connector (eg. a modem, keyboard etc.). Yamauchi was a perfectionist when it came to the design of the NES, spending countless hours on it.
The Famicom rocks Japan! (1983) Nintendo released their first console for the home market, the Famicom or Nintendo Entertainment System as it was called when released in the west. Famicom is short for Family Computer. The console was sold for around $100 ($25 more than it was intended to in the first place, still it was less than half the price of the competitors' machines). The Famicom sold very well in Japan and became very popular but, due the video game crash of early 1984, Nintendo had a difficult time releasing the system in America. During this crash the market was flooded by mediocre games and e.g. Atari games were sold for 10% of the suggested retail price. The American retailers promised themselves to never again sell video game consoles or computers... To prevent the same thing from happening to Nintendo's console Nintendo included a software licensing program, the famous Nintendo Seal of Quality, so Nintendo would only license games that met their minimal standards of quality. Atari's fault was that they hadn't been able to control that the games from the third party developers were good enough. This was a part of Yamauchi's plan, he knew that if Nintendo released their system when the video game market was as good as dead, there would be no competition and if successful their NES would be the only choice for gamers around the states!
What few people know is that one of the first companies that Nintendo turned to, for help in the American launch of their console was Atari. Nintendo approached Atari, who by then had a big share of the American video&computer -game market, in 1983. They were ready to sell Atari the rights to distribute the NES everywhere outside Japan. They were so close to an agreement that they actually planned to sign the agreement on C.E.S. in June the same year.
However when Atari saw that Coleco demonstarted a (unlawful) prototype of Donkey Kong for their home computer Adam on the C.E.S. they refused to sign the deal since they assumed that Nintendo was also forging a deal with Coleco.
You might speculate what would have happened if Atari hadn't seen that Donkey Kong protype and actually signed the deal. The worst case scenary would that they would just have abandoned the Famicom. This way they would have elimiated one possible oponent on the video game / home computer -market and their own 8-bit system, the Atari 7800 ProSystem with backwars compability with the current library of Atari 2600 CVS games would have had a much better chance of success...
(Atari was in fact a doomed company when they were negotiating the deal with Nintendo. They were loosing the incredile amount of $2 million - Daily. The only thing that kept the already crashed company from going bankrupt was the fact that 20% of the company was owned by Wanrer Communications, which now is Time Warner.)
Nintendo continued to search for distributors for their console and in 1985, Mr. Arakawa (President at Nintendo of America) managed to persuade one retailer to release it as a test in New York, and you know the rest, don't you? Within 10 years of the release in February 1986, the NES sold around 30 million copies in the US only, and had approximately 90% of the 8-bit market! The NES was released in Europe 1986.
NES
The NES.
The Original NES Set
Different packages At first the NES was sold for 249 dollars in a package (Original Set) consisting of: the control deck, 2 controllers, the Zapper lightgun and the strange toy ROB (Robotic Operation Buddy), which came with the games Duck Hunt and Gyromite. Soon, Nintendo decided to change this set and simply release the Action Set (sold for $199 ), which did away with ROB and Gyromite, instead throwing in the best "platformer" the World has ever seen - Super Mario Bros. This must have been the most successful of the many different sets! The Power Set was like the Action Set but with a new improved controller called the Power Pad and a new NES game called World Class Track Meet.
Fun with History, Part 2 "Nintendo"
Linear Mode
