Vin Lauria, who is a freelance graphic designer, spent three weeks creating this family tree for Nintendo products and games. Lauria says he designed the stunning infographic not only because he loved Nintendo, but it served as a way to inform people who have moved on to other systems about Nintendo’s history.

“To me, it always seemed like Nintendo is the tree trunk that everyone else in the industry just branches off of. PlayStation came out of a failed SNES CD add-on. A major part of SEGA’s claim to fame was their big Gen4 war with Nintendo. The Xbox was essentially Microsoft making a new console out of the corpse of the SEGA Dreamcast, which they assisted in creating. Nintendo’s the longest-surviving major player in the industry and a big catalyst in so many goings-on, but… I just see so much ignorance about them. I talked to one guy about a week ago – on a gaming message board – who upon hearing of Mario Kart 8, was surprised to know there were even Mario Karts 2-7. He didn’t even know there was anything after the first one he played all those years ago. Mario Kart, of all things. That’s just one extreme example, but this kinda stuff just keeps happening everywhere I look. Even that Reddit thread I posted, you have comments like “Wow, there was all that stuff for the GameCube? I got out before the N64 was over. I didn’t know their output remained so high.” It’s Nintendo!”

“And that’s the main point. Continuing from my point above, for the most lucrative medium in the world at the moment, the video game industry appears to care so little about its own history. Oh sure, you have all those retro-esque indie games and occasionally big companies porting their old stuff. And you get a few earnest efforts every now and then like the “Did You Know Gaming?” YouTube series, or a page on Wikipedia on the (fairly abridged) history of Nintendo. But no one’s really explored this stuff in-depth. And with the medium attracting more newcomers than ever, there’s barely any archival efforts or attempts to teach all these people about everything they missed. And this is a history that many of us were here for. This isn’t ancient stuff, y’know. This is recent. This is a history that there are millions of first-hand accounts of from damn well near its inception and no one’s paying attention to it.”

Thanks, David B