THE BEGINING

Welcome to Page 2! On this page we will go over Nintendos history up to the creation of donkey kong. September 23rd 1889. There was a man named Fusahiro Yammauchi. Yammauchi made a hanafuda card company called Nintendo kopai. Nintendo was a small company making art based cards instead of numbers like traditional playing cards, these cards had drawings instead. A few years later Disney approached Nintendo offering a deal to put disney characters on the Hanafuda cards. Nintendo accepted this deal and it gave them a ton of revenue.

THE EXPERIMENTAL ERA

Nintendo had a ton of money from the Disney hanafuda cards. I should add that Fusahiro Yammauchi was no longer the president. At this point the president was Hiroshi Yammauchi. he remained the president until 2002. Yammauchi realized that hanafuda cards can only take the company so far, so they decided to experiment. Yammauchi decided to change the name Nintendo kopai to just Nintendo at this point. Nintendo tried all sorts of weird ideas like taxis, food, and vaccum cleaners. All of these goods and services failed. One day Yammauchi saw a ware house employee playing with a grabber device that he made at home. Yammauchi saw it and he was impressed. He was so impressed that he decided to mass produce it. The man behind this was Gunpei Yokoi and his toy which was dubbed "The Ultra Hand" became a massive success! Now Nintendo was a toy Company.

THE ARCADE ERA

Around 12 years later these new places called arcades opened up. Nintendo wanted to capitalize on this new market so they released a game called Radar Scope. This game failed. Nintendo had so many unsold cabinets in several warehouses. They wanted to make a new hit game to get rid of them. Luckily one man named Shigiru Miyamoto had an idea. Miyamoto wanted to make a game based off popeye but unfortunatly he couldnt get the license. So Miyamoto decided to make up his own characters. He replaced olive oil with a character named pauline, Popeye with a character nemed jumpman, and bluto with a character named Donkey Kong. This game was an instant success it made Nintendo millions. around 23 million. 2 things happened as a result. Nintendo became a video game company and Shigiru Miyamoto became one of Nintendos lead game designers.

If you want to learn more about this part of Nintendos history click HERE.