Feature | The History Of Nintendo

AFTER THE CREATION of the worlds first light-gun in 1971 Yokoi-san had the idea of using technology to recreate the idea of clay pigeon shooting (a popular sport in Japan at the time). Yamauchi-san agreed and after destroying many bowling allies (don’t ask) across Japan, Nintendo’s Laser Clay Pigeon Shooting System was unveiled. The first steps into electronic entertainment had begun! Much research and talking was entered into and soon Nintendo had struck a deal with Mitsubishi to develop its own videogame console called the Color TV Game 6. Released in 1976 it was met with much enthusiasm in Japan, now Nintendo had got a taste for all things technological they wanted more.

Now all Nintendo needed some new ideas and so they recruited a young games designer to come up with the ideas that man was Shigeru Miyamoto. Originally posted to work on an arcade game called Radarscope, he had other ideas and set about a game featuring Popeye. However he couldn’t get the license so he created his own characters: Monkey Kong (who become Donkey Kong after a printing error), a moustached man called Jumpman (renamed Mario after a Nintendo worker). This game became Donkey Kong Arcade. Later it was decided that a new super-powerful, cheap and easy to make console for home use. After much research a cartridge system was developed, the NES was born. And as they say the rest is history!

See Page 2 for details on all the Nintendo consoles from NES to GameCube!

The GameBoy | Nintendo’s biggest success to date. Released in Japan in 1989, it spawned a number of mimic machines all of which were buried without a trace. Is the best selling games console in the world and remains so even today. Housed one of the worlds best ‘play anywhere’ titles, Tetris, one of the worlds best known titles. One problem the painfully dark screen made the ‘play anywhere’ slogan a bit iffy. To put it simply The Game Boy was a world beater.

SNES | Created as a more powerful version of the NES and to create opposition for SEGA’s MegaDrive the SNES (or Super Famicom in Japan) was released in 1990
and was a great success. Sold surprisingly well in the US, but failed a bit in Europe. Of note was Nintendo’s cancellation of the SNES-cd add on. Why was this so mportant? Well because it was being made by SONY and they went and turned it into the PlayStation. Arghh!

GameBoy Colour | The successor to the Game Boy housebrick, the GBC was smaller, cooler and had a bigger more colourful screen. Again was a total success and can still be found in games shops today. The GBC sold so well that the GBA had to be delayed so Nintendo could get maximum profits! Was also host the the Game Boy camera and printer (one of our favourite accessories ever) and the bizarre GBC sewing machine, which could sew all your favourite Nintendo characters!

N64 | First it was Project Reality, The the Ultra 64 and finally the very vanilla N64. Sticking two fingers up at the latest craze that was disks, Nintendo stuck with what they knew, cartridges. Sadly the strategy didn’t go according to plan. The N64 was riddled with problems: from lack of games, to poor sales it was never the success it deserved to be. Still it gave us some of the best games ever: Mario 64, Mario Kart, Zelda OOT and many more

GameBoy Advance | The successor to the successor of the Game Boy, the GBA is the partner to the GameCube. Thankfully we got it at just about the same time as the US (which made a nice change). The GBA has a full colour screen and is capable of graphics reminiscent of those on some PSone titles. The GBA has been a huge success and the GameCube connectivity added a nice twist to the console. Has such classics as Mario Kart Super Circuit, and many Mario remakes. Ace

Nintendo GameCube | N2000, Project Dolphin, StarCube and then finally the GameCube the life of Nintendo’s little purple box has been somewhat turbulent! The first Nintendo console to arrive without Mario, Luigi was given the chance to take centre stage. Three games of launch in Japan and twenty (count ‘em) for Europe. Now Mario is here and the controversial Zelda has been long revealed its no wonder that people are getting excited!