Nintendo's current logo
Nintendo (任天堂株式会社) is a video game company and a co-owner of the Fire Emblem series.
History
Early History
Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, Nintendo began its life as a hanafuda card manufacturing company in 1889, founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi. The kanji of the company name is commonly translated as "leave luck to heaven." Most of Nintendo's earlier business ventures revolved around card and board games. Under the leadership of Fusajiro's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, the company expanded the scope of its business and experimented with various short-lived ventures into other lines of products and services such as instant rice and a taxi service.
Among these experiments were the marketing and sale of a series of gimmicky toys such as their Ultra Hand, Ultra Scope, and Love Tester, which began their journey into the electronics industry. Magnavox partnered with Nintendo to develop a light gun for their Magnavox Odyssey home console system. With the success of the Atari and Magnavox systems in the west, Nintendo acquired the rights to distribute the latter in Japan in 1974.
Early Arcade Era and First Home Consoles
Nintendo would begin developing video games starting in 1979 with the handheld Game & Watch using technology commonly used in calculators. They also began developing arcade cabinet games including Radar Scope and Donkey Kong. With their success in arcades, Nintendo subsequently licensed out the rights to develop home console ports of titles such as Donkey Kong, which appeared on both the Atari 2600 and the ColecoVision.
Development of the first Nintendo-designed home console began in the early 1980's, resulting in the Family Computer or Famicom. The Famicom launched in 1983 in Japan, the same year that North America was affected by a crash that cratered the industry in that market. To avoid most of the negative impact of the crash and entice skittish retailers into selling their console, Nintendo developed a redesigned version of the Famicom and promoted the system as a family entertainment system or a toy. The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, launched as Nintendo's first home console in the west on October 18th, 1985.
Industry Leader
The NES proved to be a massive success for Nintendo, and in succeeding years, the company built on that success with successive generations of console and handheld gaming hardware and an extensive library of software both internally and externally produced. Over the decades, the company has faced fierce competition in the home console space, and in response have released platforms with the intention of bucking industry trends. In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired and was succeeded by Satoru Iwata, who began his career as a programmer and game designer. Rather than conform to trends of the competition, Nintendo stuck to various unique principals when designing both hardware and software, mainly a emphasis on family entertainment. Nintendo is widely considered one of the most prominent video game hardware developers, playing a large hand in the various "console wars" over the years such as their rivalries with the likes of Sega and Atari. Ironically, their botched first foray into Compact Disc software indirectly lead to the development of the PlayStation by Sony, one of their largest competitors in the modern market. In modern iterations, their main rivals are Sony through their PlayStation consoles and Microsoft through their Xbox consoles.
Unlike most of their competitors, Nintendo became renowned for its unorthodox approaches to hardware development. One particular aspect was the emphasis on the handheld consoles such as their first one, the Gameboy, leading to a near complete dominance over the handheld hardware market until the Nintendo 3DS, the last purely handheld Nintendo hardware system. Nintendo's most notable era in the home console wars was during the "Seventh War", a period marked by Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360, both of which held higher processing and graphical power than anything Nintendo had to offer from the Nintendo GameCube and before. Rather than directly compete with them in these regards, Nintendo invested into their family-friendly image and developed the Wii, a console, while lacking in processing and graphics, emphasized on it through the Motion Controls of its hardware, a first major success in the gameplay style in the industry, which also lead to Sony and Microsoft also investing into that market, leading to their respective developments of the PlayStation Move and Kinect respectively to notably less success.
Nintendo became particularly noted for its protectiveness to many of its first-party developers with many widely beloved series from Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon as these franchises have been exclusive to Nintendo hardware. The Fire Emblem franchise is one of Nintendo's first-party franchises that saw mostly mediocre sales over its initial lifespan and was nearly shelved permanently. However, the push in the early 2010's by Nintendo to revive floundering series resulted in the surge in interest and popularity in Fire Emblem in particular, making it one of the series to most benefit from this endeavor.
Era of Transition
Nintendo saw brief struggles in the early 2010s, especially in 2011 and 2014, which resulted in Iwata voluntarily halving his sallary in order to keep the company afloat and keep most of its staff. In particular, Nintendo suffered one of its greatest commercial failures in their hardware consoles in the Wii U, the biggest failure in nearly 30 years since the Virtual Boy. Largely due to the success of notable software such as Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, Nintendo was able to recover from this period.
Iwata would eventually pass away in 2015, marking the end of one of Nintendo's most notable eras in leadership. His last acts in his final months would be several initiatives that immediately impacted the company. One of the software requests was to Masahiro Sakurai to develop the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate title and the final Nintendo owned and developed software title to release under his tenure was Fire Emblem Fates. His second initiative was the development of the Nintendo Switch, a hybrid home/handheld console sold as part of the eighth generation of home consoles. In the wake of his death, the company underwent significant internal changes to modernize their executive ranks and corporate structure, and the task of launching the Nintendo Switch was put in the hands of new CEO Tatsumi Kimishima. Kimishima served only a short term as head of the company, and after the successful launch of the Switch, retired and was succeeded by Shuntaro Furukawa.
Furukawa, still in the role of CEO as of 2025, led the company through the majority of the Nintendo Switch era. Over its lifetime, the Switch became one of the best-selling video game consoles in history. In June of 2025, Nintendo launched a successor in the Nintendo Switch 2.
Nintendo also began to stray away from Iwata's hesitation to enter the Mobile games market, first leading to the partnership between Nintendo and Niantic which produced Pokémon Go. Since then, numerous Nintendo mobile app titles would be developed by Nintendo directly, leading to various successful mobile games from Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Fire Emblem Heroes.
Outside of video game hardware and software, Furukawa has also presided over Nintendo's branching into other forms of media and entertainment. In 2022, Nintendo purchased the animation studio Dynamo Pictures, now renamed Nintendo Pictures. The studio produces animation for video games, television, and other platforms.
In October of 2024, Nintendo opened the Nintendo Museum. Located in Kyoto, the Nintendo Museum features galleries and exhibits that cover Nintendo's history as a video game and console developer, as well as the company's history in entertainment predating its entry into the video game market.
A series of Nintendo theme parks, christened Super Nintendo World, have also been opened in partnership with Universal Studios. The Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan was the first to open in 2021, and locations in Hollywood, California and Orlando, Florida opened in 2023 and 2025 respectively. A fourth location in Singapore is still under construction as of 2025.
Software Development and Partnerships
Across their generations of hardware, Nintendo has internally developed and nurtured franchises including Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing. They have also worked with a number of third-party studios to develop games that have likewise blossomed into successful franchises. The biggest and most successful of these franchises is the Pokémon series, created in tandem with the studio Game Freak. Pokémon grew to be such a phenomenon that management of the franchise was spun-off into a separate entity in the The Pokémon Company, in which Nintendo has a partial ownership stake.
Intelligent Systems began as a hardware development team within Nintendo that in the early 1980s broke away, forming into independent third-party studio that, in an unusual arrangement, remained an exclusive partner of Nintendo and whose office space is maintained on Nintendo property. Among the franchises that Intelligent Systems created include the Wars series, with IS co-developing the original Famicom Wars with Nintendo R&D 1 in 1988. Following this, Intelligent Systems created the first entry in the Fire Emblem series, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, which released on April 20, 1990. The Fire Emblem intellectual property is co-owned between Nintendo and Intelligent Systems.
Nintendo has published seventeen main series Fire Emblem titles produced by Intelligent Systems, with the most recent title being Fire Emblem Engage. An eighteenth entry, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, is slated for release in 2026. In addition to the core series, Intelligent Systems has also produced a number of Nintendo-published spin-offs including the mobile title Fire Emblem Heroes, and the action game Fire Emblem Warriors, created in conjunction with with Koei Tecmo.
Platforms & Fire Emblem Games
Consoles | |
|---|---|
| NES/Famicom | |
| SNES/Super Famicom | |
| Nintendo 64 | Fire Emblem: Ankoku no Miko (cancelled) |
| Nintendo GameCube | Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance |
| Wii |
|
| Wii U | Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE |
| Nintendo Switch | |
| Nintendo Switch 2 | Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave |
Handheld Systems | |
| Game Boy Advance | |
| Nintendo DS | |
| Nintendo 3DS |
|
Gallery
See also
- Nintendo on Wikipedia.