This section will cover a brief and general history of Nintendo. Anything and everything from Nintendo's beginning with playing cards to their risky jump into the video game business. You never know, you might learn something here you never knew!

Nintendo has been the driving force behind videogames ever since the early 80's where Atari screwed up. Nintendo's success was safe. Nintendo's innovative gadgets and games have literally shaped the children around the world spend (or waste) their spare time. From there simple yet addictive Game And Watch series to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Nintendo has, for the better part of their existence, maintained the stronghold on the home consoles market around the world. It came as a heavy blow then, to Nintendo, when the rug was pulled from under their feet by electronics giant, Sony.

With no videogaming experience to their name, Sony managed to tear apart the rule books and show everyone how consoles should be sold. Worse still, Nintendo have previously worked with Sony to make a next generation console, but the partnership was shortlived. After many disagreements, Sony went ahead and released their own unasumming machine, calling it the PlayStation. It acheived atronomical sales. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, Sony knows how to market a product-regardless of what it is. Secondly, the electronics corperation allowed unlimited access to 3rd Party developers to produce games for their new mahcine. This resulted in a flood of low-quality titles but it ensured there was a large library of games available.

Lets go back in time about hundred years to determine what started it all, shall we? Fusajiro Uamauchi, great-grandfather of Hiroshi Yamauchi, current President of Nintendo of Japan, founded Marufuku in 1889 to manufacture Hanafuda playing cards, a type of card very similar to Western playing cards, except they are thicker and smaller and often include pictures similar to those found on Tarot cards. The business prospered very well, selling cards out of stores in Osaka and Kyoto. But it was in 1907 when Fusajiro changed the name of his business to "Nintendo Koppai". For the next 60 years, Nintendo, under the leadership of Fusajiro's great-grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, were THE company to buy playing cards from in Japan.

In 1964, playing cards started becoming less popular as electronic toys took their hold on the Japanese market. Nintendo recognizes this quickly and decided to get in on the action. In the early 1970s, Gunpei Yokoi created the company's first toy, the Ultra Hand, which was an arm-extending contraption that let children press on a handle to close a simple set of mechanical fingers. Nintendo got a lot of success with the simple toy, and pursued other toys under the "Ultra" moniker. They soon released the Beam Gun, a light gun that used opto-electric technology and allowed children knock over targets by shooting at them.

Nintendo would be the first to create what we now call a video arcade. As the bowling craze ended in Japan, Nintendo began buying out old bowling alleys and converting them into light-hun shooting galleries. Nintendo soon noticed the success in America with TV-based electronic games, Nintendo acquired the rights the sell the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan in 1975. In 1977 alone, Nintendo developed the TV-Game 6, with six variations of Pong, and later TV-Game 15.

1980 would be the year when Nintendo's magic would begin to appear. Early in the year, Nintendo had released several new arcade game, one of which was "Radar Scope", a game that was at the time a disaster but in the future would lead to the company's greatest success. Hiroshi Yamauchi's son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, was at the time working in the New York market distributing Japanese-made arcade games and toys. Radar Scope was not selling well there either. No longer depending on their arcade business, Nintendo began relying on Gunpei Yokoi's newest invention, the Game & Watch, a device which had only one game and used watch batteries and had an LCD screen. The Game & Watch would not use pixels, however, like the Game Boy he would later invent, but rather pre-drawn elements. The first games for the system were Ball, Parachute, and Fire. Later games included Popeye and Mickey Mouse.

In 1981, Hiroshi Yamauchi hired a friend's son as a staff artist. That man was Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who would single-handedly make Nintendo what it is today. Miyamoto's first task would be to improve upon the Radar Scope boards. So what he did was create an entirely new game where you play as a carpenter named Jumpman where you chased after a gorilla to rescue a blonde girl at the top of the screen. The name of that game was Donkey Kong. Jumpman would later be named Mario, after Mario Segali, the landlord of Nintendo of America's office. At first, Donkey Kong was mocked because distributors didn't understand what Nintendo was trying to sell. But once the game got on the arcade market, the demand grew into humongous proportions. Donkey Kong was actually one of the first games to be made into bootleg copies. Like Pac-Man which was released that same year, the name Donkey Kong would become inaugurated into a lexicon that few other games could compete with.

In 1982, a sequel to Donkey Kong was released, Donkey Kong Jr. In this game, Mario had imprisoned Donkey Kong in a cage at the top of the screen and you played as DK's son using ropes and keys to reach his father. While this was going on, Minoru Arakawa was moving into their new headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Coleco bought the rights to sell Donkey Kong for home systems, and Atari purchased the rights to Kong computer games, putting the Atari and Coleco names prominently on the cartridges. The game was still strong enough to become the pack-in cartridge for the ColecoVision game console and was a superb translation considering the limitations of game machines at the time. However, Universal Studios was now threatening to sue Coleco and Nintendo for name infringement on their 1920s movie, King Kong. This was a huge problem for Nintendo, as Universal was demanding profits from both companies on the name, while at the same time, Nintendo had been trying to gain rights to full ownership on the Donkey Kong liscense. Nintendo's corporate lawyer, Howard Lincoln, told Arakawa that Nintendo should not settle the case. Universal and Nintendo went to court, and Universal lost. The judge said that Universal had no claims on the name "Kong", and forced Universal to pay Nintendo $1.8 million because Universal knew that fact.

Towards the middle of 1983, Nintendo released Mario Bros., where you played as Mario or his green-clothed brother, Luigi. Your job was to survive sewers filled with turtles, lobsters, and fireballs. Another game that was released that year was Donkey Kong 3, where you played as Stanley the Gardener, Mario's cousin, who sprayed Kong in the rear with bug spray. If you could get Kong to climb to the top of the ropes, a beehive would fall on his head and he'd crash down to the ground.

Back in Japan, Hiroshi Yamauchi and his team of engineers had decided that their home console market was bringing in reasonable profit. And although new Game & Watch versions of DK and Mario were bringing in money, it just wasn't enough. So, Yamauchi decided to create his own console, the Family Computer(Famicom). Now that Nintendo had it's own console, Nintendo would no longer have to liscense games to Atari and Coleco. Donkey Kong 3 was the first game for the system.

The controls for the Famicom were quite simple. An A, B, Start, and Select buttons with a 4-way crosspad like on the Game & Watch models. The system launched in July of 1983 in Japan, with Donkey Kong 3, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye as launch titles. Other games such as Mario Bros. and several baseball games would make their way to the system by the years end. Nintendo had no third-party developers and sold more than a million Famicom systems solely on the strength of its own software.

In 1984, Nintendo would release very popular games such as F-1 Race, Excitebike and a couple of lights gun games such as Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley. In early 1985, big companies such as Konami and Namco decided they would develop for the system. Later, companies such as Taito, Capcom, Irem, and Hudson. And although Service Games(Sega) had just released their own console in Japan, Nintendo was already controlling more than 90% of the home game market. It was then that Yamauchi decided to release the Famicom in the US. 1983 Nintendo's first home videogame console is released and is called the Famicom (Family Computer) or Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) overseas. Donkey is one of the first converted to the system. 1987 Nintendo get serious about Australia and use Mattel to distrubute their products. 1990 The Super Famicom is released in Japan. Renamed the Super Nintendo and released a year later, this hot machine hits homes around the world. The Super Nintendo offered similar games to the NES but they looked much better and arcade perfect conversions of games like Street Fighter 2 were now possible. 1992 Owning over 80% of the of the world videogame market, Nintendo rules supreme, 40 million videogames have been sold worldwide and worldwide sales reach 7 billion. 1994 At this stage, one in every four houses in the USA has a Nintendo console. In Australia it is one in ten. Nintendo's playing cards only account for 1 percent of total sales. 1996 The N64 is released in Japan and changes the way we look at games. A year later the N64 in released in Australia and gives birth to many great things. 2000 Nintendo release information of there next generation console which will come up againth the PS2. Featuring processing power to the extreme, a great range in games and all of our favourite features, Nintendo ensures the future for gamers looks promising. The Future Ahead Of Us... Well, only time can tell what Nintendo has in store but we can expect a few suprises. With the utterly incredible PS2 being released, Nintendo's will have to show somthing very special come Christmas 2001.