The Hanafunda cards. Nintendo's first product!

In this documents you will be able to follow Nintendo´s more than 100 year history from their first products, the "Hanafunda" cards in 1889 to 1997 when the Nintendo 64 was finally released worldwide!

Choose an era:

The early years - (1889 -1968)
Read about what the heck Nintendo did before they began making toys and video games... Learn about how Nintendo who in 1889 only was a small company selling Hanafunda playing cards managed to become Japan's biggest playing card company, with contacts with e.g. Walt Disney!

Toys & Arcades - (1969 -82)
Nintendo begins producing toys and later arcade machines. Later they strikes a deal with Mitsubishi Electrics to sell their Color TV Game 6 and later Color TV Game 15 in Japan. Shigeru Miyamoto is employed and comes up with Nintendo's first real smash hit Donkey Kong including Mario! Nintendo begins developing their new Famicom...

The Famicom rules the world! - (1983 -89)
The beginning of Nintendo's era of greatness, when they had nearly complete control over the video game industry of the world with their Famicom (NES)! This is if you ask me the most interesting part of Nintendo's history.

A new era ... (1990 -97)
One year after that Sega has released their Genesis (a.k.a. Mega Drive)  in USA Nintendo releases their Super Famicom (SNES). 1993 Nintendo starts planning on their new "Ultra 64" (Later renamed Nintendo 64). Later (around christmas 1995) Sony releases their Playstation and Sega their Saturn and in 1996 Nintendo enters the 64 bit market with their Nintendo 64.

Articles/Misc
Here you'll find articles about different things about Nintendo and it's history that just didn't fit in under any of the periods for different reasons.

"Inventory management"
Read about Nintendo's tactics against it's retailers (in 1987 -90), how Nintendo managed to control them and make them dependant Nintendo instead of the other way around!

The SNES CD-Rom plans...
Read all about the plans Nintendo had to release a SNES CD-Rom machine in between the years  91 to 94. Read about their negotiations with both Philips and Sony and read a presentation of the addon, based on the released techspecs and info about it. In the end we have also added a section called Outcome where we have tried to explain why Nintendo did what they did and what affects that might had...

Inside Nintendo of America (Coming Soon)
Take a sneak peak inside the NOA office around the year 1990 and check out how they worked and lots of other interesting details!

Other historical Nintendo info:

You might wanna check out our profiles section that contains info about many famous Nintendo employees and members of the Yamauchi family.

Consoles
If you want to get more info about any of these consoles just click on the pictures to be transported to the menu for each console. From there you can get technical info and a more detailed history for each console (except for the SNES because it isn't written yet!).

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