Cards Nintendo was founded as a simple card shop in 1889. Playing cards in Japan were hard to come by after the government took a strong stance against gambling in 1633. So when the numberless, flower-themed card game called Hanafuda appeared and was miraculously allowed by the government, all that was needed was somebody to manufacture and distribute them. Entrepeneur Fusajiro Yamauchi, seizing the opportunity, founded Nintendo. For its first 60 years the company was fiercely traditional and family-run, passing from Yamauchi to his son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda, and from Kaneda (who changed his name to Yamauchi) to his grandson and only viable successor Hiroshi Yamauchi. The reluctant Hiroshi, who would be leaving a prestigious university to take the job, is said to have agreed on the condition that all other family members (his main rivals) working at Nintendo be fired. Hiroshi Yamauchi went on to lead Nintendo for more than 50 years. He made many immediate changes to the business on taking over in 1947, introducing plastic cards, signing a licensing deal with Disney to bring Hanafuda to "the whole family" and producing lines of cards featuring nude women for local and international markets. Nintendo still produces cards in Japan to this day. Lots of weird stuff

With card sales dwindling in the 1960s, Hiroshi Yamauchi experimented with a series of side-businesses, including instant noodles, plastic building blocks (over which Nintendo was unsuccessfully sued by LEGO), a taxi service, ball-point pens and a chain of short-stay hotels (the kind the ever-tactful Japanese refer to as "love hotels"), but none with any great success. The best-received ventures were in family entertainment. Engineer Gunpei Yokoi (who would go on to create the Game Boy) invented the extendable grabbing hand in 1966 that became an instant success. Yokoi was part of the team that put together Nintendo's very first video game machines in the 70s, rudimentary devices that connected to televisions to play games that very much resembled Pong. A young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto, working under Gunpei Yokoi, was charged with designing the machines' colourful cases. Donkey Kong and the arcades When President Hiroshi Yamauchi's plans to take Nintendo's successful Radar Scope arcade game to America failed, he was left with many unsold machines. Ever the savvy businessman, he tasked Miyamoto with writing a new game that could use the Radar Scope hardware, essentially repurposing the unsold stock. Miyamoto created Donkey Kong. The designer's lack of programming skills meant most of his work was conceptual and based on narrative, being translated into a game by the rest of his team. The resulting cartoon style was an immediate hit in American arcades, although with anti-Japanese sentiment still prominent in America, Nintendo was at pains to keep its company profile hidden. This would be the norm for Japanese video game makers right through until the mid 90s.

Miyamoto's approach to game design was one of the biggest early stepping stones on the way to making video games an artistic medium, as opposed to a strictly technical one, and he continues to oversee development of Nintendo games to this day. Game Boy, Super Nintendo and home video games Gunpey Yokoi produced the company's first game console to become popular worldwide with a line of LCD devices called Game & Watch. As the name suggests they were digital clocks that played games. The Donkey Kong version featured a cross-shaped control button for movement that has gone on to be imitated or reproduced on just about every video game console produced since. The Family Computer (or Famicom) was a machine designed to bring Donkey Kong and other arcade favourites into Japanese homes in 1983. Like some prior machines it was programmable, meaning players could buy new games on cartridges and play them on the one machine. A large, grey, toaster-like version was released in the West and called the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. With the stream of arcade ports supported by some of the most creative video games players had ever seen — Miyamoto alone was responsible for both Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda — the machines were a hit.

Some systems came packaged with a robot you could physically interact with to influence the games. In the US, the NES resurrected a gaming industry that had been all-but destroyed by rapid expansion and a lack of quality control years earlier. Gunpey Yokoi combined the idea of a cartridge-based video game system with the portability of Game & Watch to produce the Game Boy. Combined with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom in Japan), Game Boy helped Nintendo become a dominant force in the lives of families across the Western world. The company never stopped experimenting. The Nintendo 64 was a commercial under-performer that introduced the world to gaming in the third dimension, while gaming franchises like Super Mario continued to help Nintendo hardware find an audience despite growing competition from Sony. Yokoi developed Nintendo's first attempt at a stereoscopic 3D video game in 1995 with the nausea-inducing Virtual Boy. The colossal failure of the device would lead to Yokoi's departure from Nintendo, but the idea of 3D resurfaced as an ill-fated display for the Gamecube in 2001 and would eventually become part of the successful 3DS handheld released in 2011. Hiroshi Yamauchi retired in 2002 after more than 50 years at the reins as Nintendo's president. By 2008, he was the wealthiest man in Japan. He died in 2012.

Games for the masses In 2004 Nintendo released the Nintendo DS, and in 2006 the Wii. While Sony and newcomer Microsoft entered an arms race to serve bigger and brawnier experiences to a core gaming audience, Nintendo once again spotted and exploited an opening in the market by making games everybody could play. Touch- and motion-controlled titles like Brain Training on the DS and Wii Sports on Wii defined the platforms as much as their respective Mario titles did. Today Nintendo continues to chase new markets while still producing content that takes advantage of its unrivalled history. Within the games industry, a development from left field that sates a desire we didn't even know we had is often referred to as "very Nintendo". There have been rumblings of the company branching out further than games and into, as Nintendo calls it, "quality of life" systems. Loading