by Day Green

Created on: November 04, 2009   Last Updated: November 05, 2009

When Nintendo first announced the Wii, its latest home video game console, many predicted the upcoming pun-inspiring named machine would end up in the video game console hall of fail along with the Apple Bandai Pippin, Atari Jaguar, and Nintendo's very own Virtual Boy. Many, believing that the Wii was dead on arrival, placed an obituary in the newspaper, gave it a eulogy, dug a grave and were ready to bury it before it was even released. Too bad the Wii decided not to show up to its own funeral.

The success of the Wii was spurred greatly by its innovative controller, a concept that also made Nintendo's first major console success, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, Famicom in Japan) well...successful. After nearly eighty years of being exclusively a playing card producing company, and spending about a little over a decade doing everything from owning a "love hotel" chain to dabbling in the Japanese toy industry, Nintendo entered the video game console industry in 1974, when it gained rights to be the Japanese distributor of the Magnavox Odyssey video game console. The next year, the company expanded into the arcade industry, but returned focus on the console industry in 1977 with the Japanese only release of the first of six Color TV Game home video game consoles. But it was not until the decade of big hair and...more big hair that Nintendo finally hit its stride, starting with the release of the Game & Watch series of handheld LCD video games in 1980.

Right on the heels of the success of the Game & Watch, Nintendo took that prosperity to the next level with the release of Donkey Kong in arcades in 1981. The Big N continued to build on the momentum created by Game & Watch and Donkey Kong by launching the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan in 1983.

Two years later, a redesigned and renamed version (now dubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES) of the Famicom was released in America. Sporting photo-realistic 8-bit graphics (if the photo is of someone made of massive pixels); the NES was launched in a dying video game market here in the states. However, channeling its inner Superman, the NES single-handedly saved the American gaming world from imminent destruction.

One strategy Nintendo employed was developing a different type of controller than the type used by other consoles of the past. Nintendo decided to ditch the usual concept of a joystick altogether and use a unique and innovative method of control: The D-Pad (Direction Pad). Oh,

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