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Nintendo

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Nintendo
Founded: 1889-09-23
Headquarters: Japan

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Nintendo (kanji: 任天堂; kana: ニンテンドー) is a multinational video game company based in Japan. Licensed versions of some of Nintendo's games were produced for NEC computers by third parties, and NEC Interchannel published games for some of Nintendo's platforms.

History

Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi to print hanafuda, a type of Japanese playing card. It stayed in the playing card business for a long time, even after family members took over after Fusajiro stepped down. Under the leadership of Fusajiro's grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo struck a deal with Disney to use their characters on their cards in 1959. Around the 1960s, Nintendo began to enter other businesses after card sales began to drop. It ultimately found success in the toy industry thanks to the Ultra Hand, an extendable plastic hand toy. Nintendo would eventually enter the video game industry, and ultimately made video games their main business thanks to games featuring Mario, an Italian plumber/carpenter who now serves as the company's mascot.

Nintendo launched its first cartridge-based game console, the Family Computer (or Famicom for short), in Japan on July 15, 1983. Hudson Soft was the first third-party publisher to support the Famicom with the release of Nuts & Milks on July 28, 1984, and other publishers like Namco, Jaleco and Taito would follow suit. This ultimately gave the Famicom an advantage over competing platforms such as Sega's SG-1000 and Epoch's Super Cassette Vision, which had no licensing model and relied solely on their first-party output. Around the same time they started supporting the Famicom, Hudson also produced licensed versions of Nintendo's early Famicom games for Japanese home computers, most notably Super Mario Bros. Special, a port of the first Super Mario Bros released for NEC's PC-8800 series and Sharp's X1.

Hudson Soft partnered with NEC to create the PC Engine after Hudson failed to sell advanced graphics chips to Nintendo. Though Nintendo executives were in no rush to produce a successor to the Famicom at first, this changed as Nintendo's dominance in the video game market started to slip partly due to the PC Engine's popularity. Nintendo eventually did release a successor, the Super Famicom, and Hudson would produce games for it and Nintendo's other existing platforms despite their hand in the creation of the PC Engine and its successors.

In later years, many PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 titles were digitally re-released on the Wii, as well as the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, as part of the Virtual Console lineup. Some titles that were only released in Japan at the time (such as Battle Lode Runner and Bomberman '94) ended up having Virtual Console releases outside Japan.

Softography

Not yet implemented

PC-8001

PC-8801

PC-6601

PC-6001 mkII

PC-8801 mkII SR

Third-party NEC titles

References

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