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     Did you know Nintendo used to be a Japanese playing card company founded in1889? Yes, the same company that made Mario and Luigi. It's crazy that one of the most successful video game companies ever just started making playing cards. I’m here to tell you how that happened. 

  Now first, like I said, Nintendo was a playing card game company founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. They also sold toys at some point from 1889 to 1970. After that they started to move to the electronic side at the start of 1970. They made some electronic toys and most importantly, arcade machines. They released a few arcade machines and even their own console called The Color TV-Game console in 1977. But things got interesting in the 1980s. 

  In 1981, Nintendo released an arcade game called "Donkey Kong”. This is a pretty famous game which I'm sure you've heard of. It featured the character Mario going through levels to try and save a princess captured by Donkey Kong. This created a global hit which caused Nintendo to release the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. This console has Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda and over 600 more. In 1989, the Gameboy was released which introduced handheld consoles. This was a huge step for Nintendo, selling over 118 million copies! 

     In the 90’s, Nintendo released a lot of consoles, so I’m going to list them for you. 

1. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released in 1991 and sold over 50 million copies. 

2. The NES-101 (Top Loader) was released in 1993 

3. The Virtual Boy was released in 1995 and only sold 770,000 units. 

4. The Nintendo 64 was released in 1996 and sold over 32.93 million consoles. 

5. The Game Boy Color updated the Gameboy by having a color screen that was released in 1998. 

     There were even more video games released in the era with some famous ones being Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64 and even more. Nintendo made over 3.2 billion dollars alone in the 90’s. That's a lot of money. 

  In the 2000s, many iconic consoles were introduced to the market. Like the GameCube, which was released in 2001 and struggled to compete with the PS2 and Xbox. But the GameCube still managed to sell 21.74 million units. I think the GameCube is known for its iconic intro. Just like the Wii released in 2006. It sold over 101 million units! This was insane because the GameCube only sold 21.74million units. It also came with the game Wii sports. I forgot to talk about the Nintendo DS, which is a dual screen and touchscreen handheld, being one of the biggest selling consoles of all time. Not only did all of this happen in the 2000s, but Mario Galaxy, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Mario Kart Wii and various Pokémon games were released. 

  But in 2010-2025 this is where all the modern stuff was released. The 3DS was released in 2011 which was good for Nintendo, but the Wii U flopped horribly in 2012. They made up with it in 2017 and released the Nintendo Switch along with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons which caused Nintendo to release one of the biggest selling consoles of all time. They released the Switch Lite and Switch Oled in 2019-2021. But their newest console released in June of 2025 is Switch 2. The was a bigger and better version of the Switch that was released with Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bonanza and more. 

  Well, that is all the best history of Nintendo that I thought of. Did you learn something? 

Sources: google.com