#tb7

HMMMMMMM!!! >8I

Charming is heeeeaaateeed! :o

Today, I felt like delving a little into Nintendo's history. As always, because I am very lazy, I will post links to articles explaining Nintendo's background in more detail. What I type here will be a brief summary.

Nintendo gets its name from a set of Japanese words that roughly translate to "leave luck to Heaven." They started out as a manufacturer of playing cards, in Japan known as hanafuda cards. Eventually, the market for playing cards became flooded, and Nintendo moved into other ventures, the majority of which were unsuccessful. This all changed when they hired Gunpei Yokoi, who invented the Ultra Hand.

I'll skip ahead to the good part, and get to when they started making video games. At some point they got the rights to begin distributing the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan, literally the first home console ever made. (The inventor of which died a few months back. May he rest in peace. Ralph Baer 1922-2014) They eventually moved into making their own video games, one of their first being the hugely successful Donkey Kong.

Time moved forward and they hired some engineers to produce the Famicom, which became hugely popular in Europe and America as the Nintendo Entertainment System, with titles such as Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid.

Gunpei Yokoi makes the Gameboy in 1989, literally the greatest thing ever in my opinion. Nintendo prioritizes battery life and cost over graphical power, or anything else. This makes them even more successful, as the low price makes it so everybody and their grandma owns a Gameboy handheld system before I'm even born three years later.

Yokoi fucks it all up when he makes the Virtual Boy, a failed foray into 3D gaming. He never recovers from the shame before his death in 1997, and he still remains my personal hero to this day. The Gameboy was what ignited my love for games. He is honorably remembered when the Gameboy Advance SP is released during a ceremony. I want to say that was during a GDC event, but I'm not 100% on that.

Shigeru Miyamoto may as well be a God. He is responsible for Mario, Metroid, Zelda, practically every Nintendo original title ever. He's still alive, thank God.

Nintendo was the first to really popularize motion controls with the Wii, and arguably, the only ones to ever really get it right, as Playstation's Move never really took off, and Kinect is still panned by critics today.