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group=lower-alpha is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both and video game consoles.
The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company to produce handmade hanafuda playing cards. After venturing into various lines of business and becoming a public company, Nintendo began producing toys in the 1960s, and later video games. Nintendo developed its first in the 1970s, and distributed its first system, the Color TV-Game in 1977. The company became internationally dominant in the 1980s after the arcade release of Donkey Kong (1981) and the Nintendo Entertainment System, which launched outside of Japan alongside Super Mario Bros. in 1985.
Since then, Nintendo has produced some of the most successful consoles in the video game industry, including the Game Boy (1989), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1991), the Nintendo DS (2004), the Wii (2006), and the Nintendo Switch (2017). It has created or published numerous major franchises, including Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Pokémon. The company's mascot, Mario, is among the most famous fictional characters, and Nintendo's other characters—including Luigi, Donkey Kong, Samus Aran, Link, Kirby, and Pikachu—have attained international recognition. Several films and a theme park area based on the company's franchises have been created.
Nintendo's game consoles have sold over 860 million units worldwide as of May 2025, for which more than 5.9 billion individual games have been sold. The company has numerous subsidiaries in Japan and worldwide, in addition to second-party developers including HAL Laboratory, Intelligent Systems, Game Freak, and the Pokémon Company. It is one of the wealthiest and most valuable companies in the Japanese market.
According to Nintendo, the business' first western-style card deck was put on the market in 1902, although other documents indicate the date was 1907, shortly after the Russo-Japanese War. Although the cards were initially intended to be exported, they quickly gained popularity within and without Japan. During this time, the business styled itself as Marufuku Nintendo Card Co. The war created considerable difficulties for companies in the leisure sector, which were subject to new levies such as the ("playing cards tax"). Nintendo subsisted and, in 1907, entered into an agreement with Nihon Senbai—later known as the Japan Tobacco—to market its cards to various cigarette stores throughout the country. A Nintendo promotional calendar from the Taishō era dated to 1915 indicates that the business was named group=lower-alpha but still used the Marufuku Nintendo Co. brand for its playing cards.
Japanese culture stipulated that for Nintendo to continue as a family business after Yamauchi's retirement, Yamauchi had to adopt his son-in-law so that he could take over the business. As a result, Sekiryo Kaneda adopted the Yamauchi surname in 1907 and headed the business in 1929. By that time, Nintendo was the largest playing card business in Japan.
World War II negatively impacted the company as Japanese authorities prohibited the diffusion of foreign card games, and as the priorities of Japanese society shifted, its interest in recreational activities waned. During this time, Nintendo was partly supported by a financial injection from Hiroshi's wife Michiko Inaba, who came from a wealthy family. In 1947, Sekiryo founded the distribution company group=lower-alpha responsible for Nintendo's sales and marketing operations, which would eventually go on to become the present-day Nintendo Co., Ltd., in Higashikawara-cho, Imagumano, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto.
In 1950, due to Sekiryo's deteriorating health, Hiroshi Yamauchi assumed the presidency and headed manufacturing operations. His first actions involved several important changes in the operation of the company: in 1951, he changed the company name to group=lower-alpha and in the following year, he centralized the manufacturing facilities dispersed in Kyoto, which led to the expansion of the offices in Kamitakamatsu-cho, Fukuine, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto. In 1953, Nintendo became the first company to succeed in mass-producing plastic playing cards in Japan. Some of the company's employees, accustomed to more cautious and conservative leadership, viewed the new measures with concern, and the rising tension led to a call for a Strike action. However, the measure had no major impact, as Hiroshi resorted to the dismissal of several dissatisfied workers.
In 1959, Nintendo moved its headquarters to Kamitakamatsu-cho, Fukuine, Higashiyama-ku in Kyoto. The company entered into a partnership with Walt Disney Productions to incorporate its characters into playing cards, which opened it up to the children's market and resulted in a boost to Nintendo's playing card business. Nintendo automated the production of Japanese playing cards using backing paper, and also developed a distribution system that allowed it to offer its products in toy stores. By 1961, the company had established a Tokyo branch in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and sold more than 1.5 million card packs, holding a high market share, for which it relied on televised advertising campaigns. In 1962, Nintendo became a public company by listing stock on the second section of the Osaka Exchange and the Kyoto Stock Exchange. In the following year, the company adopted its current name, group=lower-alpha and started manufacturing games in addition to playing cards.
In 1964, Nintendo earned . Although the company experienced a period of economic prosperity, the Disney cards and derived products made it dependent on the children's market. The situation was exacerbated by the falling sales of its adult-oriented playing cards caused by Japanese society gravitating toward other hobbies such as pachinko, bowling, and nightly outings. When Disney card sales began to decline, Nintendo realized that it had no real alternative to alleviate the situation. After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Nintendo's stock price plummeted to its lowest recorded level of .
In 1965, Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its playing cards.
In 1970, the company's stock listing was promoted to the first section of the Osaka Stock Exchange, and the reconstruction and enlargement of its corporate headquarters was completed. The year represented a watershed moment in Nintendo's history as it released Japan's first electronic toy—the Beam Gun, an Optoelectronics pistol designed by Masayuki Uemura. In total, more than a million units were sold. Nintendo partnered with Magnavox to provide a light gun controller based on the Beam Gun design for the company's new home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1971. Other popular toys released at the time included the Ultra Hand, the Ultra Machine, the Ultra Scope, and the Love Tester, all designed by Yokoi. More than 1.2 million units of Ultra Hand were sold in Japan.
In 1974, Nintendo released Wild Gunman, a skeet shooting arcade simulation consisting of a 16 mm image projector with a sensor that detects a beam from the player's light gun. Both the Laser Clay Shooting System and Wild Gunman were successfully exported to Europe and North America. However, Nintendo's production speeds were still slow compared to rival companies such as Bandai and Tomy, and their prices were high, which led to the discontinuation of some of their light gun products. The subsidiary Nintendo Leisure System Co., Ltd., which developed these products, was closed as a result of the economic impact dealt by the oil crisis.
Yamauchi, motivated by the successes of Atari and Magnavox with their video game consoles, acquired the Japanese distribution rights for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1974, and reached an agreement with Mitsubishi Electric to develop similar products between 1975 and 1978, including the first microprocessor for video games systems, the Color TV-Game series, and an arcade game inspired by Reversi. During this period, Takeda developed the video game EVR Race, and Shigeru Miyamoto joined Yokoi's team with the responsibility of designing the casing for the Color TV-Game consoles. In 1978, Nintendo's research and development department was split into two facilities, Nintendo Research & Development 1 and Nintendo Research & Development 2, respectively managed by Yokoi and Uemura.
Shigeru Miyamoto brought distinctive sources of inspiration to the company, ranging from the natural environment and regional culture of Sonobe, to popular culture influences like Westerns and detective fiction, and to folk Shinto practices and Christian media. They are seen in most of Nintendo's major franchises which developed following Miyamoto's creative leadership.
Nintendo entered the arcade video game market with Sheriff and Radar Scope, released in Japan in 1979 and 1980 respectively. Sheriff, also known as Bandido in some regions, marked the first original video game made by Nintendo, and was published by Sega and developed by Genyo Takeda and Shigeru Miyamoto. Radar Scope rivaled Galaxian in Japanese arcades but failed to find an audience overseas and created a financial crisis for the company. To try to find a more successful game, they put Miyamoto in charge of their next arcade game design, leading to the release of Donkey Kong in 1981, one of the first platform game that allowed the player character to jump. The character Jumpman would later become Mario and Nintendo's official mascot. Mario was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo's offices in Tukwila, Washington. Donkey Kong was a financial success for Nintendo both in Japan and overseas, and led Coleco to fight Atari for licensing rights for porting to home consoles and personal computers.
In 1983, Nintendo opened a new production facility in Uji and was listed in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Uemura, taking inspiration from the ColecoVision, began creating a new video game console that would incorporate a ROM cartridge format for video games as well as both a central processing unit and a picture processing unit. The Family Computer, or Famicom, was released in Japan in July 1983 along with three games adapted from their original arcade versions: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye. Its success was such that in 1984, it surpassed the market share held by Sega's SG-1000. That success also led to Nintendo leaving the Japanese arcade market in late 1985. At this time, Nintendo adopted a series of guidelines that involved the validation of each game produced for the Famicom before its distribution on the market, agreements with developers to ensure that no Famicom game would be adapted to other consoles within two years of its release, and restricting developers from producing more than five games per year for the Famicom.
In the early 1980s, several video game consoles proliferated in the United States, as well as low-quality games produced by third-party developers, which oversaturated the market and led to the video game crash of 1983. Consequently, a recession hit the American video game industry, whose revenues went from over $3 billion to $100 million between 1983 and 1985. Nintendo's initiative to launch the Famicom in America was also impacted. To differentiate the Famicom from its competitors in America, Nintendo rebranded it as an entertainment system and its ROM cartridge as Game Paks, with a design reminiscent of a VCR. Nintendo implemented a lockout chip in the Game Paks for control on its third party library to avoid the market saturation that had occurred in the United States. The result is the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, which was released in North America in 1985. The landmark games Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were produced by Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Composer Koji Kondo reinforced the idea that musical themes could act as a complement to game mechanics rather than simply a miscellaneous element. Production of the NES lasted until 1995, and production of the Famicom lasted until 2003. In total, around 62 million Famicom and NES consoles were sold worldwide. During this period, Nintendo created a copyright infringement protection in the form of the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality, added to their products so that customers may recognize their authenticity in the market. By this time, Nintendo's network of electronic suppliers had extended to around thirty companies, including Ricoh (Nintendo's main source for ) and the Sharp Corporation.
The first issue of Nintendo Power magazine, which had an annual circulation of 1.5 million copies in the United States, was published in 1988. In July 1989, Nintendo held the first Nintendo Space World Trade fair with the name Shoshinkai to announce and demonstrate upcoming Nintendo products. That year, the first World of Nintendo stores-within-a-store, which carried official Nintendo merchandise, were opened in the United States. According to company information, more than 25% of homes in the United States had an NES in 1989.
In the late 1980s, Nintendo's dominance slipped with the appearance of NEC's PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 and Sega's Sega Genesis, 16-bit game consoles with improved graphics and audio compared to the NES. In response to the competition, Uemura designed the Super Famicom, which launched in 1990. The first batch of 300,000 consoles sold out in hours. The following year, as with the NES, Nintendo distributed a modified version of the Super Famicom to the United States market, titled the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Launch games for the Super Famicom and Super NES include Super Mario World, F-Zero, Pilotwings, SimCity, and Gradius III. By mid-1992, over 46 million Super Famicom and Super NES consoles had been sold. The console's life cycle lasted until 1999 in the United States, and until 2003 in Japan.
In March 1990, the first Nintendo World Championship was held, with participants from 29 American cities competing for the title of "best Nintendo player in the world". In June 1990, the subsidiary Nintendo of Europe was opened in Großostheim, Germany; in 1993, subsequent subsidiaries were established in the Netherlands (where Bandai had previously distributed Nintendo's products), France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and Australia. In 1992, Nintendo acquired a majority stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, and sold most of its shares in 2016. On July 31, 1992, Nintendo of America announced it would cease manufacturing arcade games and systems. In 1993, Star Fox was released, which marked an industry milestone by being the first video game to make use of the Super FX chip.
The proliferation of graphically violent video games, such as Mortal Kombat, caused controversy and led to the creation of the Interactive Digital Software Association and the Entertainment Software Rating Board, in whose development Nintendo collaborated during 1994. These measures also encouraged Nintendo to abandon the content guidelines it had enforced since the release of the NES. Commercial strategies implemented by Nintendo during this time include the Nintendo Gateway System, an in-flight entertainment service available for airlines, cruise ships and hotels, and the "Play It Loud!" advertising campaign for Game Boys with different-colored casings. The Advanced Computer Modeling graphics used in Donkey Kong Country for the Super NES and Donkey Kong Land for the Game Boy were technologically innovative, as was the Satellaview satellite modem peripheral for the Super Famicom, which allowed the digital transmission of data via a communications satellite in space.
In February 1996, Pocket Monsters Red and Green (known internationally as Pokémon Red and Blue) was developed by Game Freak and released in Japan for the Game Boy, establishing the popular Pokémon franchise. The game went on to sell 31.37 million units, with the video game series exceeding a total of 300 million units in sales as of 2017.
The Nintendo 64 was released in June 1996 in Japan, September 1996 in the United States and March 1997 in Europe. Though planned for release in 1995, the production schedules of third-party developers influenced a delay, The console was in development since mid-1993, when Nintendo and Silicon Graphics announced a strategic alliance to develop the console. NEC, Toshiba, and Sharp also contributed technology to the console. The Nintendo 64 was marketed as one of the first consoles to be designed with 64-bit architecture. In 1997, Nintendo released the Rumble Pak, a plug-in device that connects to the Nintendo 64 controller and produces a vibration during certain moments of a game. By the end of its production in 2002, around 33 million Nintendo 64 consoles were sold worldwide, and it is considered one of the most recognized video game systems in history. 388 games were produced for the Nintendo 64 in total, some of which – particularly Super Mario 64, , and GoldenEye 007 – have been distinguished as some of the greatest of all time.
In 1998, the Game Boy Color was released. In addition to backward compatibility with Game Boy games, the console's similar capacity to the NES resulted in select adaptations of games from that library, such as Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. Since then, over 118.6 million Game Boy and Game Boy Color consoles have been sold worldwide.
A series of administrative changes occurred in 2000 when Nintendo's corporate offices were moved to the Minami-ku neighborhood in Kyoto, and Nintendo Benelux was established to manage the Dutch and Belgian territories.
In 2002, the Pokémon Mini was released. Its dimensions were smaller than that of the Game Boy Advance and it weighed 70 grams, making it the smallest video game console in history. Nintendo collaborated with Sega and Namco to develop Triforce, an arcade board to facilitate the conversion of arcade titles to the GameCube. Following the European release of the GameCube in May 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi announced his resignation as the president of Nintendo, and Satoru Iwata was selected by the company as his successor. Yamauchi would remain as advisor and director of the company until 2005. Iwata's appointment as president ended the Yamauchi succession at the helm of the company, a practice that had been in place since its foundation.
In 2003, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance SP, an improved version of the Game Boy Advance with a foldable case, an illuminated display, and a rechargeable battery. By the end of its production cycle in 2010, over 43.5 million units had been sold worldwide. Nintendo also released the Game Boy Player, a peripheral that allows Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games to be played on the GameCube.
Nintendo's next home console was conceived in 2001, although development commenced in 2003, taking inspiration from the Nintendo DS. Nintendo also considered the relative failure of the GameCube and instead opted to take a "Blue Ocean Strategy" by developing a reduced performance console in contrast to the high-performance consoles of Sony and Microsoft to avoid directly competing with them. The Wii was released in November 2006, with a total of 33 launch games. With the Wii, Nintendo sought to reach a broader demographic than its seventh-generation competitors, with the intention of also encompassing the "non-consumer" sector. Nintendo invested in a $200 million advertising campaign to that end. The Wii's innovations include the Wii Remote controller, equipped with an accelerometer system and infrared sensors that allow it to detect its position in a three-dimensional environment with the aid of a sensor bar; the Nunchuk peripheral that includes an analog controller and an accelerometer; and the Wii MotionPlus expansion that increases the sensitivity of the main controller with the aid of . By 2016, more than 101 million Wii consoles had been sold worldwide, making it the most successful console of its generation, a distinction that Nintendo had not achieved since the 1990s with the Super NES.
Several accessories were released for the Wii from 2007 to 2010, such as the Wii Balance Board, the Wii Wheel and the WiiWare download service. In 2009, Nintendo Iberica S.A. expanded its commercial operations to Portugal through a new office in Lisbon. By that year, Nintendo held a 68.3% share of the worldwide handheld gaming market.
In 2012 and 2013, two new Nintendo game consoles were introduced: the Wii U, with high-definition graphics and a GamePad controller with near-field communication technology, and the Nintendo 2DS, a version of the 3DS that lacks the clamshell design of Nintendo's previous handheld consoles and the stereoscopic effects of the 3DS. With 13.5 million units sold worldwide, the Wii U is the least successful video game console in Nintendo's history. In 2014, a new product line was released consisting of figures of Nintendo characters called .
On 25 September 2013, Nintendo announced its acquisition of a 28% stake in PUX Corporation, a subsidiary of Panasonic, to develop facial, voice, and text recognition for its video games. Due to a 30% decrease in company income between April and December 2013, Iwata announced a temporary 50% cut to his salary, with other executives seeing reductions by 20%–30%. In January 2015, Nintendo ceased operations in the Brazilian market due in part to high import duties. This did not affect the rest of Nintendo's market due to an alliance with Juegos de Video Latinoamérica. Nintendo reached an agreement with NC Games for Nintendo's products to resume distribution in Brazil by 2017, and by September 2020, the Switch was released in Brazil.
On 11 July 2015, Iwata died of bile duct cancer, and after a couple of months in which Miyamoto and Takeda jointly operated the company, Tatsumi Kimishima was named as Iwata's successor on 16 September 2015. As part of the management's restructuring, Miyamoto and Takeda were named creative and technological advisors, respectively. The financial losses caused by the Wii U, along with Sony's intention to release its video games to other platforms such as , motivated Nintendo to rethink its strategy concerning the production and distribution of its properties. In 2015, Nintendo formalized agreements with DeNA and Universal Parks & Resorts to extend its presence to and respectively.
In March 2016, Nintendo's first mobile app for the iOS and Android systems, Miitomo, was released. Since then, Nintendo has produced other similar apps, such as Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes, , Mario Kart Tour, and Pokémon Go, the last being developed by Niantic and having generated $115 million in revenue for Nintendo. In March 2016, the loyalty program My Nintendo replaced Club Nintendo. The NES Classic Edition was released in November 2016. The console is a version of the NES based on emulation, HDMI, and the Wii remote. Its successor, the Super NES Classic Edition, was released in September 2017. By October 2018, around ten million units of both consoles combined had been sold worldwide.
In 2018, Shuntaro Furukawa replaced Kimishima as company president, and in 2019, Doug Bowser succeeded Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé. In April 2019, Nintendo formed an alliance with Tencent to distribute the Nintendo Switch in China starting in December.
In April 2020, Reuters reported that ValueAct Capital had acquired over 2.6 million shares in Nintendo stock worth over the course of a year, giving them an overall stake of 2% in Nintendo. Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused delays in the production and distribution of some of Nintendo's products, the situation "had limited impact on business results"; in May 2020, Nintendo reported a 75% increase in income compared to the previous fiscal year, mainly contributed by the Nintendo Switch Online service. The year saw some changes to the company's management: outside director Naoki Mizutani retired from the board, and was replaced by Asa Shinkawa; and Yoshiaki Koizumi was promoted to senior executive officer, maintaining his role as deputy general manager of Nintendo EPD. By August, Nintendo was named the richest company in Japan.
Super Nintendo World, a theme park area, opened at Universal Studios Japan in 2021. Nintendo co-produced an animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie alongside Universal Pictures and Illumination, with Miyamoto and Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri acting as producers. In 2021, Furukawa indicated Nintendo's plan to create more animated projects based on their work outside the Mario film, and by 29 June, Meledandri joined the board of directors as a non-executive outside director. According to Furukawa, the company's expansion toward animated production is to keep "the business of thriving and growing", realizing the "need to create opportunities where even people who do not normally play on video game systems can come into contact with Nintendo characters". That day, Miyamoto said that "Meledandri really came to understand the Nintendo point of view" and that "asking for his input, as an expert with many years of experience in Hollywood, will be of great help to" Nintendo's transition into film production. Later, in July 2022, Nintendo acquired Dynamo Pictures, a Japanese CG company founded by Hiroshi Hirokawa on 18 March 2011. Dynamo had worked with Nintendo on digital shorts in the 2010s, including for the Pikmin series, and Nintendo said that Dynamo would continue their goal of expanding into animation. Following the completion of the acquisition in October 2022, Nintendo renamed Dynamo as Nintendo Pictures.
In February 2022, Nintendo announced the acquisition of SRD Co., Ltd. (Systems Research and Development) after 40 years, a major contributor of Nintendo's first-party games such as Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda until the 1990s, and then support studio since. In May 2022, Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had purchased a 5% stake in Nintendo, and by January 2023, its stake in the company had increased to 6.07%. It was raised to 7.08% by February 2023, and in the same week by 8.26%, making it the biggest external investor. In November 2024, Saudi Arabia's PIF dropped back to 6.3%.
In early 2023, the Super Nintendo World theme park area in Universal Studios Hollywood opened. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was released on 5 April 2023, and has grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, setting box-office records for the biggest worldwide opening weekend for an animated film, the highest-grossing film based on a video game and the 15th-highest-grossing film of all-time.
Nintendo reached an agreement with Embracer Group in May 2024 to acquire 100% of the shares in Shiver Entertainment, a company that has specialized in porting triple-A games like Hogwarts Legacy and Mortal Kombat 1 to the Switch, making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo, subject to closing conditions. In October 2024, the company opened the Nintendo Museum on the site of its former Uji Ogura plant, where it had manufactured playing and hanafuda cards. The same month, Nintendo announced Nintendo Music, a mobile application enabling one to listen to soundtracks from Nintendo games. By November 2024, Nintendo gained full ownership of Monolith Soft, a first-party developer behind Xenoblade Chronicles and provided support for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
In late 1980, NoA contracted the Seattle-based arcade sales and distribution company Far East Video, consisting solely of experienced arcade salespeople Ron Judy and Al Stone. The two had already built a decent reputation and a distribution network, founded specifically for the independent import and sales of games from Nintendo because the Japanese company had for years been the under-represented maverick in America. Now as direct associates to the new NoA, they told Arakawa they could always clear all Nintendo inventory if Nintendo produced better games. Far East Video took NoA's contract for a fixed per-unit commission on the exclusive American distributorship of Nintendo games, to be settled by their Seattle-based lawyer, Howard Lincoln.
Based on favorable test arcade sites in Seattle, Arakawa wagered most of NoA's modest finances on a huge order of 3,000 Radar Scope cabinets. He panicked when the game failed in the fickle market upon its arrival from its four-month boat ride from Japan. Far East Video was already in financial trouble due to declining sales and Ron Judy borrowed his aunt's life savings of $50,000, while still hoping Nintendo would develop its first Pac-Man-sized hit. Arakawa regretted founding the Nintendo subsidiary, with the distressed Yoko trapped between her arguing husband and father.
Amid financial threat, Nintendo of America relocated from Manhattan to the Seattle metro to remove major stressors: the frenetic New York and New Jersey lifestyle and commute, and the extra weeks or months on the shipping route from Japan as was suffered by the Radar Scope disaster. With the Seattle harbor being the US's closest to Japan at only nine days by boat, and having a lumber production market for arcade cabinets, Arakawa's real estate scouts found a warehouse for rent containing three officesone for Arakawa and one for Judy and Stone. This warehouse in the Tukwila suburb was owned by Mario Segale, after whom the Mario character would be named, and was initially managed by former Far East Video employee Don James. After one month, James recruited his college friend Howard Phillips as an assistant, who soon took over as warehouse manager. 10:00, 11:50, 17:25. The company remained at fewer than 10 employees for some time, handling sales, marketing, advertising, distribution, and limited manufacturing of arcade cabinets and Game & Watch handheld units, all sourced and shipped from Nintendo.
Arakawa was still panicked over NoA's ongoing financial crisis. With the parent company having no new game ideas, he had been repeatedly pleading for Yamauchi to reassign some top talent away from existing Japanese products to develop something for Americaespecially to redeem the massive dead stock of Radar Scope cabinets. Since all of Nintendo's key engineers and programmers were busy, and with NoA representing only a tiny fraction of the parent's overall business, Yamauchi allowed only the assignment of Gunpei Yokoi's young assistant who had no background in engineering, Shigeru Miyamoto.
NoA's staffexcept the sole young gamer Howard Phillipswere uniformly revolted at the sight of the freshman developer Miyamoto's debut game, which they had imported in the form of emergency conversion kits for the overstock of Radar Scope cabinets. The kits transformed the cabinets into NoA's massive windfall gain of from Miyamoto's smash hit Donkey Kong in 1981–1983 alone. They sold 4,000 new arcade units each month in America, making the 24-year-old Phillips "the largest volume shipping manager for the entire Port of Seattle". Arakawa used these profits to buy of land in Redmond in July 1982 and to perform the $50 million launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 which revitalized the entire video game industry from its devastating 1983 crash. A second warehouse in Redmond was soon secured, and managed by Don James. The company stayed at around 20 employees for some years.
On August 10, 1993, Nintendo of America rolled out the Nintendo Gateway System.
The organization was reshaped nationwide in the following decades, and those core sales and marketing business functions are now directed by the office in Redwood City, California. The company's distribution centers are Nintendo Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia, and Nintendo North Bend in North Bend, Washington. , the Nintendo North Bend facility processes more than 20,000 orders a day to Nintendo customers, which include Retail that sell Nintendo products in addition to consumers who Online shopping Nintendo's website. Nintendo of America's Canadian branch, Nintendo of Canada, is based in Vancouver with a distribution center in Toronto. Nintendo Treehouse is NoA's localization team, composed of around 80 staff who are responsible for translating text from Japanese to English, creating videos and marketing plans, and quality assurance.
Nintendo of America announced in October 2021 that it will be closing its offices in Redwood City, California, and Toronto and merging its operations with its Redmond and Vancouver offices. In April 2022, an anonymous quality assurance worker filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Nintendo of America and contractor Aston Carter had engaged in union-busting activities and surveillance. The employee had been fired for mentioning unionizing efforts in the industry during a company meeting. The companies agreed to a settlement with the employee in October 2022. In March 2024, Nintendo of America restructured its product testing teams, resulting in the elimination of over 100 contractor roles. Some of the affected contractors were given full-time roles.
Nintendo (Hong Kong) Limited was incorporated on 7 April 2005. It marketed the Wii in Hong Kong, after Nintendo could not market the console in Mainland China under iQue for being unable to circumvent the ban on foreign-made consoles imposed by the Chinese government. It currently handles distribution of Nintendo consoles in Hong Kong and Macau. Taiwan was also included under the division from 2014 until 2025.
Most external first-party software development is done in Japan, because the only overseas subsidiaries are Retro Studios and Shiver Entertainment in the United States (acquired in 2002 and 2024, respectively) and Next Level Games in Canada (acquired in 2021). Although these studios are all subsidiaries of Nintendo, they are often referred to as external resources when being involved in joint development processes with Nintendo's internal developers by the Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD) division. 1-Up Studio and NDcube are located in Tokyo, Japan, and Monolith Soft has one studio located in Tokyo and another in Kyoto.
Nintendo established The Pokémon Company alongside Creatures and Game Freak to manage the Pokémon brand. Similarly, Warpstar, Inc. was formed through a joint investment with HAL Laboratory, which was in charge of the animated series as well as the web series It's Kirby Time. Both companies are investments from Nintendo, with Nintendo holding 32% of the shares of The Pokémon Company and 50% of the shares of Warpstar, Inc.
Other notable subsidiaries include:
Its 1994 "Play It Loud!" campaign played upon teenage rebellion and fostered an edgy reputation. During the Nintendo 64 era, the slogan was "Get N or get out". During the GameCube era, the "Who Are You?" suggested a link between the games and the players' identities. The company promoted its Nintendo DS handheld with the tagline "Touching is Good". For the Wii, they used the "Wii would like to play" slogan to promote the console with the people who tried the games including Super Mario Galaxy and Super Paper Mario. The Nintendo 3DS used the slogan "Take a look inside". The Wii U used the slogan "How U will play next". The Nintendo Switch uses the slogan "Switch and Play" in North America, and "Play anywhere, anytime, with anyone" elsewhere.
Another Nintendo Switch-focused store, Assemble, is located in Wan Chai. This store opened on November 14, 2024. This store features a dedicated section to third-party developer and publisher Cygames.
A second store, located in Eilat, was opened by TorGaming for the Summer of 2022.
Since Nintendo Tokyo's opening, two additional Nintendo stores have opened in Japan. Nintendo Osaka opened on November 11, 2022, located on the thirteenth floor of the Daimaru Umeda department store in Kita-ku, as a store-within-a-store. Nintendo Kyoto, located within the Takashimaya building in Kyoto, opened on October 17, 2023.
Nintendo opened its second US store called Nintendo San Francisco in the city's Union Square neighborhood on May 15, 2025.
The Nintendo of America headquarters in Redmond, Washington has a private store which is open only to employees and invited guests.
Nintendo's content policy is responsible for the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat having more than double the unit sales of the Super NES version, largely due to Nintendo forcing its publisher Acclaim to recolor red blood to look like white sweat within the game and to tone down its gorier and more violent graphics. By contrast, Sega allowed blood and gore to remain in the Genesis version (though a code is required to unlock the gore). Nintendo allowed the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat II to ship uncensored the following year with a content warning on the packaging.
Video game ratings systems were introduced with the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) of 1994 and the Pan European Game Information of 2003, and Nintendo discontinued most of its censorship policies in favor of consumers making their own choices. Today changes to the content of games are done primarily by the game's developer or, occasionally, at the request of Nintendo. The only clear-set rule is that ESRB AO-rated games will not be licensed on Nintendo consoles in North America, a practice which is also enforced by Sony and Microsoft, its greatest competitors in the present market. Nintendo has since allowed several mature-content games to be published on its consoles, including Perfect Dark, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Doom, Doom 64, BMX XXX, the Resident Evil series, Killer7, the Mortal Kombat series, , BloodRayne, Geist, , Bayonetta 2, Devil's Third, and .
Certain games have continued to be modified, however. For example, Konami was forced to remove all references to cigarettes in the 2000 Game Boy Color game Metal Gear Solid (although the previous NES version of Metal Gear, the GameCube game , and the 3DS game , included such references), and maiming and blood were removed from the Nintendo 64 Porting of Cruis'n USA. Another example is in the Game Boy Advance game Mega Man Zero 3, in which one of the bosses, called Hellbat Schilt in the Japanese and European releases, was renamed Devilbat Schilt in the North American localization. In North American releases of the Mega Man Zero games, enemies and bosses killed with a saber attack do not gush blood as they do in the Japanese versions. However, the release of the Wii was accompanied by several even more controversial games, such as Manhunt 2, No More Heroes, , and MadWorld, the latter three of which were initially published exclusively for the console.
The last rule was circumvented in several ways; for example, Konami, wanting to produce more games for Nintendo's consoles, formed Ultra Games and later Ultra Games to produce more games as a technically different publisher. This disadvantaged smaller or emerging companies, as they could not afford to start more companies. In another side effect, Square Co. (now Square Enix) executives have suggested that the price of publishing games on the Nintendo 64 along with the degree of censorship and control which Nintendo enforced over its games, most notably Final Fantasy VI, were factors in switching its focus towards Sony's PlayStation console.
In 1993, a class action suit was taken against Nintendo under allegations that their lockout chip enabled unfair business practices. The case was settled, with the condition that California consumers were entitled to a $3 discount coupon for a game of Nintendo's choice.
In 2008, game designer Sid Meier cited the Seal of Quality as one of the three most important innovations in video game history, as it helped set a standard for game quality that protected consumers from shovelware.
Like many other electronics companies, Nintendo offers a recycling program for customers to mail in unused products. Nintendo of America claimed 548 tons of returned products in 2011, 98% of which became reused or recycled.
Its social responsibility policy and philosophy focused on quality and innovation have already led to Nintendo being classified as a "consumer-centric manufacturer", something that has allowed it to differentiate itself from its direct competitors, Sony and Microsoft. Forbes magazine has since 2013 included Nintendo in its list of the "World's Best Employers", which takes into consideration work environment and staff diversity. Time magazine in turn chose Nintendo in 2018 as one of the "50 Genius Companies" of the year, saying that "resurrection" has become a "habit" of the company and highlighting the success of the Nintendo Switch over the Wii U. Its capital in 2018 exceeded ten billion yen and net sales were over nine billion dollars, mostly in the North American market, making it one of Japan's richest and most valuable companies.
Nintendo characters have had a significant impact on contemporary popular culture. Mario has gone from being just a corporate mascot to a "cultural icon", as well as one of the most famous characters in the industry. According to John Taylor of Arcadia Investment Corp. the character "is by far the biggest single property in electronic gaming." Other prominent company characters include Princess Peach, Pikachu, Link, Donkey Kong, Kirby, and Samus Aran.
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