Nintendo is no mere game company. It’s a legacy. No name ever again will dominate the video-game industry as Nintendo did in the late 1980s and well into the 1990s. A generation grew up on a diet of NES games, and even the unswayed knew what it meant to “play Nintendo.” Acute business sense played an undeniable role in Nintendo’s rise, as the company built its empire with advertising, control, and licensing that gilded-age tycoons might envy or imitate. Yet there was more to it. Nintendo also dominated by introducing or sharpening up many innovations that endure in games today, and some innovations that aren’t so obvious.

Below are 11 gaming innovations we owe to Nintendo. They might not have been the first to try out any of this tech, but they're responsible for setting standards that endure to this very day.

The Directional Pad

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The directional pad was inevitable. Most arcade games preferred joysticks for an interface, and so did early consoles—if home versions didn’t look as good as the arcade games, they could feel the same in one tactile regard. Some arcade cabinets offered buttons for movement, but there was no standardized format to supplant the joystick. In 1980, the Intellivision explored new ground with its disc-like control interface, a 16-way circular alternative to the Atari and Magnavox Odyssey joysticks. Two years later, Nintendo’s Gunpei Yokoi perked up the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong with a flat, cross-shaped button.

Yokoi’s version of the d-pad became an industry standard. The Famicom adopted it for controllers upon its 1983 debut, and it wasn’t long before NES owners were figuring out the intuitive design. Every subsequent Nintendo console has a d-pad, and other systems adopted it in different ways, be it the square Sega Master System shape, the circular Genesis one, or the discrete four points of the PlayStation directional pad. Nintendo didn’t invent the directional pad, but the company is the reason we see it on game systems everywhere.

Battery Back-Up

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Most score-driven games of the Atari era didn’t need to save progress. Atari flirted with the idea of a 7800 cartridge that stored high scores, though it was limited in its compatibility and went unreleased until a fan revived it in 2000. By the mid-1980s, saving games was the stuff of computers, not consoles. If an early NES game let you track your progress, it was by writing down passwords.

Nintendo shook things up with The Legend of Zelda, which let players save their quest directly on the cartridge (and advised them to hold in the Reset button when turning off the console). The idea grew from the Famicom Disk System, which made saving an easy procedure for The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus. The Disk System never arrived in North America, but the base NES cartridge version of The Legend of Zelda did, complete with a battery-assisted save feature (Metroid and Kid Icarus made do with passwords on the NES). Other games, included Sega’s Miracle Warriors and Phantasy Star, had on-cartridge save features, but Zelda beat them to the U.S. market by mere months, and its success ensured that save systems were feasible. Once again, Nintendo’s popularity had refined a new idea into an industry-wide habit.

Shoulder Buttons

The directional pad wasn’t Nintendo’s sole contribution to controller design. The company’s next trend-setting addition came with the Super Nintendo. Aping the NES controller’s basic layout, the Super NES controller had four variable action buttons—one more than the three-button Genesis arrangement. But the real advantage came with the shoulder buttons on the Super NES controller. Left and right triggers added convenient new input combinations for games and technically gave the Super NES six action buttons (which came in handy when the system enjoyed Street Fighter II). It became a fixture of every later controller, including the Sony PlayStation’s double shoulder inputs to the triggers on the Sega Dreamcast and Xbox.

The Modern Side-Scroller

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The side-scroller’s evolution was gradual. Donkey Kong introduced its base elements: jumps to make, obstacles to avoid, and devilishly frequent ways to fall. Later arcade games enhanced the idea by moving their protagonist beyond the single-screen approach of Donkey Kong and into a side-scroller. Namco’s Pac-Land proved the most groundbreaking, with its hatted cartoon version of Pac-Man jogging through side-view levels that scrolled in both directions. Yet this was a mere appetizer compared to Nintendo’s treatment of the idea.

Super Mario Bros. was the standard-bearer in Nintendo’s pop-culture conquest, a weirdly accessible adventure full of evil mushrooms and warp zones. And it was a trend-setter. It wasn’t so much what Super Mario Bros. did, but rather how it did it. Beyond the limiting range of Kung-Fu and other horizontally oriented games, Super Mario Bros. combined power-ups, item collecting, a wealth of secrets, and an intuitive sense of physics to tie it all together. Mario’s running and jumping controls were accessible at first, but their complexities allowed for all sorts of trickery. And their influence appears in just about any side-scroller, from Puss n’ Boots to the likes of Braid, Super Meat Boy, and the latest smartphone game based on the latest Cartoon Network hit.

Portable Video Game Systems

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Handheld games were around long before Nintendo bothered with them, though they were normally primitive electronic trinkets. Nintendo’s entries were much the same for a good while; the company’s Game & Watch devices used basic graphics and provided only one type of game (with variations) per handheld. There was money to be made in releasing a single handheld unit with interchangeable cartridges, but early attempts were short-lived. Milton Bradley’s 1979 Microvision swapped faceplates to switch games, and the system lasted only two years. Epoch’s Game Pocket Computer (or “Pokekon”) proved decidedly advanced for a 1984 gadget, but the system survived only long enough to host half a dozen games.

Enter the Game Boy. Gunpei Yokoi drew from both the Game & Watch and the NES in crafting the little handheld, and it fit the Nintendo generation perfectly. While the Game Boy’s black-and-white (with that greenish tint) graphics were limited, the games looked close enough to their NES equivalents—and the Game Boy pleased both kids and parents who preferred buying new cartridges as opposed to entirely new handhelds. The Game Boy’s compact design and NES-controller layout became the blueprint for a host of successors and rivals.

Selfies

Companies had many ideas for expanding the Game Boy’s range. Counting the niches of the Japanese market, the Game Boy had cartridges that served as fish locators, translators, word processors, personal organizers, and sewing machine attachments. Yet the most visionary attachment for the handheld came from Nintendo. Released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera slipped into the handheld’s cartridge port and let players capture photos (in black and white, of course), edit them, play mini-games, or send them to a thermal-printer accessory. The Camera’s pixelly images were primitive even when compared to the digital cameras of that era, but pairing one with a handheld game system was a novel idea—and one perhaps ahead of its time. Today, cameras come standard on handheld game consoles and smartphones. In fact, Nintendo patented a Game Boy with phone features in 2001.

Rumbling Controllers

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The Nintendo 64 openly flouted progress in some ways. The Sony PlayStation, the PC, the Sega Saturn and even the doomed PC-FX used CDs for game formats. For shaky reasons, Nintendo stuck with cartridges when designing the heir to the Super NES empire. Yet the system wasn’t without new horizons. The expansion port on the Nintendo 64 controller first suited only a memory card (for cartridge games, no less), but with the release of Star Fox 64, it became the home to the Rumble Pak. A simple force-feedback attachment, the Pak shakes the controller to simulate damage, impacts, engine noise, or anything else that the game throws at the player. It was a simple idea, but one easily and widely replicated. Sony had previously backed away from putting a rumble motor into their Dual Analog Controller—the feature was removed from the European and North American versions of the pad. Yet once the Rumble Pak arrived, Sony soon switched tracks and rolled out the DualShock. Other companies were quick to follow, and today it’s hard to find a controller that doesn’t rumble.

Multiplayer Ports

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If the Nintendo 64 didn’t predict the move toward CDs in favor of cartridges, the system predicted one rising trend in consoles: multiplayer. Two-player games were commonplace on the NES, Super NES, and Sega Genesis, all of which had two controller ports. Games that invited three or more participants required an extra adapter. The Nintendo 64 dispensed with this by having four controller ports on the console, a feature not seen since the Bally Astrocade of the late 1970s. While no subsequent consoles adopted the Nintendo 64’s preference for cartridges, many took on the four controllers ports. Both the Xbox and Dreamcast have them, and modern systems all allow many wireless controller options.

Motion Control

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The game industry endured a rocky relationship with motion controls. The idea was a seldom-seen novelty in arcade games, while console attachments like the Power Glove and Activator died off rapidly. Facing an uphill battle against Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, Nintendo made a daring choice with the Wii, a console built largely around its motion-sensitive controller. Linked with a sensor strip, the Wii remote presented a novel method of controlling games, whether it was the golf swings and tennis serves of Wii Sports or the targeting reticles of Super Mario Galaxy and Sin and Punishment: Star Successor.

And it paid off. The Wii enjoyed tremendous success, outselling its competitors and snagging buyers well beyond the ranks of devoted game geeks. This would not go unnoticed, and Sony swiftly introduced the PlayStation Move while Microsoft rolled out the Kinect. The idea carried over to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well as the Wii U, suggesting that Nintendo’s latest major innovation is here to stay.

Avatars

Along with motion controls, the Wii introduced player-created avatars called Miis. The primitive huge-headed figures serve as playable characters in Wii Sports and other games, and Wii owners can craft many different analogues of friends, family, and fictional characters to send to others. Such avatars were commonplace in online games and communities, but Nintendo brought them to game-consoles in a compact, approachable fashion. Nintendo also made other companies make their own Mii facsimiles: Sony’s online nexus Home allowed many player-customized avatars, and Microsoft added a similar feature to Xbox Live in 2008.

VR Gaming

Not every Nintendo innovation took root, of course. The Virtual Boy stands as the company’s greatest failure: a gimmicky 3-D system caught in the fickle evolutionary dead-ends of the mid-1990s game industry. Not quite a handheld and not quite a TV-tied console, the Virtual Boy was the work of Gunpei Yokoi, inventor of the Game & Watch and Game Boy. Nintendo dubbed it the first dedicated 3-D system, projecting a depth of playfield with red-and-black graphics and a focused goggle viewpoint. Without full color or a true “virtual” element, the Virtual Boy foundered, and Nintendo abandoned the system in March of 1996—less than eight months after its launch.

Yet the Virtual Boy may have been ahead of its time. Games courted virtual reality throughout the 1990s, but the concept was too expensive and too limited in comparison to the payoff from convention games. Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was another halfhearted attempt, though it built on some fairly solid games and familiar genres: platformers, 3-D shooters, and action-puzzle games. As the press once again considers virtual reality a possible Next Big Thing in the game industry, one might remember just what the Virtual Boy meant along the way.

Nintendo has more innovation in its history than just what we've listed here. Fitness boards, controller microphones, and plenty more got their start on Nintendo platforms. Any memorable Nintendo firsts that stand out to you? Let us know in the comments below!