Nintendo started near the end of 1889 as a small Japanese business by Fusajiro Yamauchi, the company produced and marketed handmade playing cards that quickly gained popularity. In 1956 Yamauchi went to the USA to talk with the United States Playing Card Company and was shocked to find that the worlds biggest playing card company was regulated to using a small office, during his stay in the USA Yamauchi gained access to Disney's characters and placed them on his cards to drive sales.

But let's jump a bit to the future, in 1970 Yamauchi began to realize how successful the video game industry was becoming and in between 1970 and 1975 Nintendo secured the rights to distribute Magnavox's Odyssey in Japan.

Nintendo's first video arcade game was Computer Othello which came out in 1978 and over the next several years Nintendo came out with a variety of other games such as Radar Scope and Donkey Kong. In 1985 Nintendo created the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) which sold over 60 million units worldwide.

Then in 1991 Nintendo released another console which was called the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) which had some competition with the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO, but Nintendo continued to release hit games such as Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country which kept them in the game.

Then came along the Nintendo 64 in September of 1996, Nintendo created this console to answer the growing dominance of the Sony Playstation but did not succeed as much as they would have liked to. One thing a lot of people do not know is that before this Nintendo and Sony were supposed to create a Hybrid console of the Nintendo Entertainment System but Nintendo pulled out of the deal leaving a bad business relationship between them, this in my mind eventually became a game console war between the two companies that is still going on today.

The Nintendo GameCube was released in November of 2001 and was Nintendo's fourth generation gaming console and was also the first Nintendo console to use optical media instead of cartridges.

This brings me up to the future November of 2006 Nintendo has just released there Wii game console however Sony Playstation has also released there newest console the PS3 and the game console war starts all over.

Throughout this article I've mentioned a few times about a game console war between Sony and Nintendo but this is just speculation on my part, I am unsure if Sony and Nintendo still have a bad business relationship but as for Nintendo's future they will continue to succeed.

You see Nintendo made a very smart business choice in regards to Sony, Nintendo changed there market direction and started to create more cartoon like games that are more targeted towards younger people (8 to 15) by doing this they have gained a hold in the video game market and has left Sony in competition with Microsoft for the older generation of gamers. I believe that the continued future for Nintendo will not be extreamly great and they wont be dominating the market any time soon however they are not going to stop making console games because of the smart choice of shifting their focus to a younger crowd.

Learn more about this author, Adam Losier.
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