Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo

A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.

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Firstly, please apologise this piece being late today. I have had a very long week with little sleep, so will ill-prepped and behind on everything this week. Plus, I just wanted to make sure this one was good. Because, hell, itā€™s Nintendo after all. Probably (please vote so we can settle this) the greatest games console of all time.

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Truth be told, I was a Sega kid growing up. I did love Mario, and spent endless hours on Mario Kart over the years, but my first official Nintendo console wasnā€™t until the revolutionary Nintendo 64. This was a real treat to write this one. Very fun to research and hopefully itā€™s a story you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing!

šŸšØ PSA: I am so tired from writing this post I had no time to spell check. Enjoy the typos!

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Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo

Mario, PokĆ©mon, Zelda and Donkey Kong. If you are alive today, you either played these games, or your children did. And if I had a guess, Iā€™d say it was the former. I bet you romped through The Mushroom Kingdom with the brothers Mario by day, and chased Pikachu and swapped rare PokĆ©mon by nights. I know I did. But how did we get here? How did a Yakuza adjacent, trading card company become they who would embed themselves inside of every families living rooms for the last half century.

The moment you decide to take a quick under the proverbial hood of the Japanese gaming giant, you will be confronted over and over one one thing; creativity. The story of Nintendo is akin to the story of Pixar, if Pixar continued to reinvent itself every few years across platforms.

Itā€™s a real pleasure to present to you this here story today. As I began to wrote this piece, a thought came to me; ā€˜This company, across the last fifty years, may have added the most joy to children across the world.ā€™ Think about that. At their core Nintendo is really just a big, old, fat, smelly corporate monolith. With boards, investors, backstabbings, PR nightmares, links to the underworld; that just added pure joy to the world for decades on end.

Kinda gives you the warm and fuzzies when you think about it. So today we are taking a journey back in time. All the way back to 1889, in a humble side alley, near the banks of the Kamo River, in Japan's former imperial capital, Kyoto. From this starting point the story of Nintendo begins.

Playing cards, tobacco partnerships, ā€˜loveā€™ hotels & the Yakuza

If I were to tell you Nintendo had an ā€˜interestingā€™ past, Iā€™d probably be underselling things. Their original businessā€”launched 23 September 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchiā€”came from playing cards, which were long since looked down upon though the Edo Period of Japan due to their connection to gambling, and therefore by extension, Japanese organised crime, the Yakuza.

The cards Nintendo were developing were known as ā€˜Hanafuda Cards.ā€™ They were beautifully decorated and hand-made, 'flower cards,' divided into twelve suits, one for each month of the year. The cards themselves were hand-painted on mulberry wood pulp, and sold well all across Japan. Before too long though, hanafuda cards started to become affiliated with the criminal underworld, and manufacturers stopped making the cards in order to protect their image.

Unlike its rivals though, Nintendo saw this as an opportunity, and before long they were the most prominent hanafuda card manufacturer in all of Japan, with the Yakuza as its biggest customers. Rumour has it that members of the Yakuza even have tattoos that are inspired by the illustrations on the Nintendo cards. This was not the only partnership early Nintendo would share with the underworld.

Hanafuda set.

In what is a strange pre-cursor to Pokemon, the next sordid stage of Nintendoā€™s growth was their 1900s partnership with Yoshihiro ā€˜Tobacco Kingā€™ Murai. Each pack of Muraiā€™s cigarettes would hold one single card from the hanafuda deck, leaving early Nintendo fans collecting tobacco wrappers in-effect trying to ā€˜catch them all,ā€™ Pokemon style.

*Warning: Speculation and rumour incoming.

Where things get even dicier again in our story is where Nintendo (may have) went next with their product development: love hotels. And by ā€˜loveā€™ I am sure you know that I mean love in the proverbial sense. The type of love that is fleeting, in and out in under an hour. Yes, that type of love. The story goes that Nintendo's venture into love hotels was part of their business diversification in the 1960s through their real estate development branch. This happened during a period when Nintendo was searching for new business opportunities beyond their traditional playing card market.

Love hotels were (and still are) a legitimate and regulated part of Japanese urban infrastructure. They emerged as a practical solution in post-war Japan, where multiple generations often lived together in small homes, leaving couples with little privacy. These establishments offer short-term stays and maintain a high degree of discretion for their customers.

*Allegedly.

As the mid 1900s progressed, so did Nintendo, with Yamauchiā€™s grandson, 22-year old, Hiroshi Yamauchi, taking over the company. One of his first strategies upon taking the reigns was to obtain the rights to putting Disney characters on the companyā€™s playing cards, creating a license to print money for the brand in so doing.

And while Nintendo continued to produce hanafuda until they fell out of favour in the 1960s, the great-grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi began to craft his own master plan for the company, starting with diversifying into new ventures, including toys, and amusement arcades.

The rise of the (arcade) machines

Itā€™s the 1970s, disco is taking off, Star Wars, Jaws and Saturday Night Fever have been dominating the box office, and one fast-emerging technology is about to catapulted Nintendo to a global stage. That technology is video games. To contextualise this un poco, at $455 billion dollars annually, the video game industry is larger than television, music and film, combined.

But in the decade that brought us funny thing and funny thing, the industry looked a lot like the following: Little Johnny asks his mother for a few quarters to head down the local arcade to play a few rounds Pong and Space Invaders.

Pre-scrolling dopamine jacking.

In the late 70s the team at Nintendo began building our their first video game systems, starting a The Laser Clay Shooting Systemā€”also sometimes called the Beam Gun Seriesā€”which marked Nintendo's first venture into electronic gaming. Installed in converted bowling alleys across Japan, these setups used projectors and light-sensing technology to simulate clay pigeon shooting. Players used rifle controllers to shoot at on-screen targets, with sophisticated detection systems tracking their accuracy.

Though the 1973 oil crisis forced many installations to close, the project meant important experience in electronic gaming. This led to Nintendo developing the Beam Gun series of toys and their first home gaming product, the Color TV-Game series in 1977. These early experiments laid the foundation for Nintendo's transformation from a playing card company to a video game pioneer.

Laser Clay Shooting.

Color TV-Game.

Towards the close of the decade, in 1978, they produced Computer Othello, their first microprocessor-based arcade game. But in 1981, Nintendo would find its true breakthrough with a game featuring a villainous giant gorilla, and a hero in a red cap and overalls.

Konnichiwa, Shigeru Miyamoto

By the early 80s, Nintendo was throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. Playing cards, love hotels, clay-pigeon light gunsā€”it was a cocktail of weird ideas fueled by sheer survival instinct. But the gamble that changed everything wasnā€™t a corporate boardroom play. It came from a young developer with a sketchpad, a wild imagination, and a knack for creating magic: Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto wasnā€™t a conventional hire. A freshly minted industrial designer, he walked into Nintendo with dreams of creating toys. What he ended up doing instead was creating a legacy, with his first major project. What was that project? You guessed itā€”Donkey Kong.

Mario and his dad.

The whole thing was part necessity, part accident, with Nintendo needed a hit to salvage their failing arcade game Radar Scope, Miyamotoā€™s task was to rework the machines into something profitable. Instead of playing it safe, he concocted an idea that not only saved the company but cemented its future.

In Donkey Kong, Miyamoto turned a simple chase into a story. A barrel-tossing gorilla kidnapped a damsel in distress, and players guided the a hero carpenterā€”yes, thatā€™s right carpenterā€”then called Jumpman, through a maze of platforms to save her. It was the first time a video game felt like more than a game; it was a world, it was a narrative, and most importantly, it was fun.

As the game took off, Jumpman got a makeover. The or character would trade his hammer for a plunger, and go on to be renamed Mario, after Nintendo of America's short-tempered landlord, Mario Segale. Who would have ever guessed that this friendly little Italiano would become Nintendo's most famous face and gaming's most recognisable pizza-loving hero.

Mario Segale.

Jumpman.

The genius of Miyamoto was that he didn't just create games; he created entire universes. After Donkey Kong came The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and a parade of hits that would cement Nintendo's place in entertainment history. But perhaps more importantly, he showed that video games could be more than just high scores and flashing lightsā€”they could tell stories, create worlds, and capture imaginations.

The world meets the Famicom + NES + Game Boy

The latter half of the 1980s is where Nintendo really started to cook. It was July 15, 1983 that the world (well, actually Japan) was gifted the Famicom, a smooshed together version of the ā€˜family-computer.ā€™ This platform is what the larger world, starting with the United States, would know as the NES, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, from 1985 onwards.

*Note: The same year the Famicon was released, Nintendo would be listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange

Nintendo had really struck something here. In a few short years, it was obvious that Nintendo had some budding IP, and with the success of the 1977 launch of the Atari 2600, felt it was the right time for them to join the home console revolution.

When released, the games Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye were available on the platform, Mario and the debut of his leaner, meaner, and greener would come shortly after with the first official edition of Mario Bros.

As they prepared for their eventual U.S. launch the Nintendo team decided the quickest and safest way to get their system in the hands of consumers was via partnership with their competitor, Atari.

It what seemed like a wild stroke of bad fortune come good, Atari nixed the deal after they noticed a bootlegged copy of Donkey Kong being played on a rival system at the 1984 CES festival. They wrongly assumed Nintendo had been negotiating behind their back and with this, they forced the hand of for Nintendo to do this themselves, which they did launching the Nintendo Entertainment System at CES Las Vegas on January 5th, the following year.

The thing that would really propel Nintendo into the stratosphere though, is a new game that Shigeru Miyamoto and his team were working hard on in 1985ā€”Super Mario Bros. The original Mario Bross., game you see was just based around of favourite Italian brothers cleaning the sewers of New York City. This new incarnation raised the stakes.

Instead of our heroes sloshing around in the sewers of New York, they were transported to a new location, the mythical / mystical land of the Mushroom Kingdom, and tasked with saving the wonderful Princess Peach from grasps of the evil, Bowser character.

Original Mario Bros.

Bowser, or King Koopa, was a large fire-breathing reptilian beast, the King of the Koopas, and a worthy foe for our plunger wielder heroes. This story would catapult, Mario and Nintendo, and would go on to sell 40 million copies worldwide. Super Mario Bros. remains on of the absolute most re-playable in the world today.

Nintendo kept their momentum through the latter half of the eighties, releasing multiple huge releases you may remember such as; Metroid, Mega Man, and most impactfully, The Legend of Zelda, a franchise that is as popular today as it was in decades past.

And finally, with the last gigantic move of the 1980s, Nintendo finally released a product they had been working diligently on for many years, their handhelp version of their system, the Nintendo Game Boy. By this stage it was beginning to look like the video game world was Nintendoā€™s. And we were all just living in it.

Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat: The Console Wars

I could have led this section with a title along the lines of Mario versus Sonic the Hedgehog, but for me the Console Wars of the early nineties were really this dispute: were you a Ryu guy, or did you prefer Sub-Zero, or maybe even his evil arch nemesis from the Shirai Ryu clan, the "GET OVER HERE!" wielding, Scorpion. *Back, Back + High Punch

Anywho, by the 1990s, Nintendo wasnā€™t just running a gaming empire; it was fending off invaders. Sega, the brash upstart, had thrown down the gauntlet with the Genesis, a sleek machine that wasnā€™t afraid to call Nintendo ā€˜kid stuff.ā€™ The Genesis came roaring onto the scene with an aggressive marketing campaign and the attitude-packed Sonic the Hedgehog, promising speed, edge, and just enough rebellion to hook older kids whoā€™d outgrown the Mushroom Kingdom. It was effectively a pre vs post puberty throwdown.

And the fight was real. By 1994, Segaā€™s Genesisā€”or Mega Drive, if you were outside the U.S.ā€”had sold over 29 million units worldwide. Not bad, but still dwarfed by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which would ultimately move more than 49 million units globally. Segaā€™s moves, included a direct call-out to Nintendo in their ā€˜Genesis does what Nintendonā€™tā€™ ads, forced the gaming giant, Nintendo, to step up its game. The SNES countered with classics like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, and the Super Mario series, reminding everyone why Nintendo was still a force to be reckoned with.

But as the Sega-Nintendo showdown heated up, two new players entered the arena: Sony and Microsoft. Sonyā€™s PlayStation, launched in 1994, wasnā€™t just another consoleā€”it was a revolution. With sleek-AF design, CD-based games, and a killer libraryā€”Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, Crash Bandicootā€”the PlayStation became an instant hit. It sold over 102 million units, leaving both Sega and Nintendo scrambling. Sega tried to keep pace with the Saturn, but it fizzled at just 9.2 million units sold.

Meanwhile, Nintendo doubled down with the Nintendo 64, which introduced iconic titles like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Yet, it only managed to sell 32 million units, a solid performance but far behind Sonyā€™s juggernaut.

Then came the wild card: Microsoftā€™s Xbox in 2001. The Xbox, with its online play via Xbox Live and hits like Halo: Combat Evolved, changed the gaming landscape forever. It wasnā€™t an instant blockbuster, selling 24 million units compared to the PlayStation 2ā€™s staggering 155 million, but it signalled a shift. Gaming wasnā€™t just about nostalgia or cute mascots anymoreā€”it was becoming a serious entertainment medium.

For Nintendo, this was a wake-up call. Their GameCube, though beloved by fans, sold just 21 million units, falling behind even Microsoft. The Console Wars werenā€™t just about Sega vs. Nintendo anymore. Now, it was a battle royale, and Nintendo needed to find a way to stay relevant in a field that was suddenly more crowded and competitive than ever.

And in the years that followed, thatā€™s exactly what they did. But before the comeback, Nintendo would endure some lean times.

The lean years

The late 1990s and early 2000s marked a challenging era for Nintendo. As Sony's PlayStation dominated with mature titles and cutting-edge graphics, and Microsoft's Xbox muscled in with powerful hardware and online gaming capabilities, Nintendo found itself at a crossroads. The Nintendo 64, while beloved for classics like Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 007, sold only 32 million unitsā€”a sharp decline from the SNES's 49 million.

The company's next major console, the 2001 GameCube, struggled even more. Despite fun mainstay releases like Super Mario Sunshine and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, it managed just 21.74 million units sold. Nintendo was being outmanoeuvred by both Sony's PlayStation 2, which sold 55 million units, and Microsoft's original Xbox, which boasted adding 24 million units across households worldwide.

ā€œItā€™sa me guys ā€¦ guys?ā€

During this period, Nintendo's saving grace was its handheld division. The Game Boy Advance continued the company's portable gaming dominance, selling 81 million units. The Nintendo DS would later shatter even these impressive numbers, becoming one of the best-selling gaming systems of all time with 154 million units sold.

But the home console market remained a challenge. The 2006 release of the Wii seemed to reverse Nintendo's fortunes for a split, with its revolutionary motion controls and family-friendly approach, selling over 100 million units. But, the excitement around this success was short lived. The Wii U, launched in 2012, became one of Nintendo's biggest flops, selling just 13 million units over its lifetime.

Why did this all happen?ā€”well, one theory is Nintendo lost favour with its army of 3rd party game developers. When you have developers, you have the games. Their first self-inflicted wound was building under-performing hardware, Nintendo stubbornly stuck with cartridges for the N64 while competitors embraced CD-ROM technology. Even GameCube, as an example had a much smaller disc capacityā€”1.5GB vs DVD's 4.7GBā€”meaning developers had to compress or cut content for Nintendo versions altogether.

But it wasnā€™t just ā€˜contentā€™ that developers began to cut. Due to hardware limitations, and cost of productionā€”itā€™s much cheaper to press a DVD than to build for Nintendo. This meant many developers simply skipped Nintendo platforms entirely, focusing on creating games that could easily port between PlayStation and Xbox. Major franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy became PlayStation exclusives by default.

Add to the fact that many developers, frustrated with Nintendo's demanding licensing terms and censorship policies, jumped ship to Sony's more developer-friendly PlayStation. This is the business definition of biting your hand to spite your face.

Textbook ā€œOh shit, I think we fucked itā€ look.

Itā€™s safe to say that by 2016, many were questioning Nintendo's future in the home console market. The company needed something revolutionaryā€”a device that could bridge the gap between their successful portable systems and struggling home consoles. Luckily that innovation was afoot, with the pending release of a new hybrid system that would help restore Nintendo to its former glory.

ā€œMarrrriiooo ā€¦ this is for youuā€

On June 19th 2016, LeBron James won a championship for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the National Basketball Association, the NBA. Who cares right?! And more importantly, what the heck does this have to do with our story. A lot it seems.

It was not the fact that LeBron and the Cavs had won it, it was how they had won it. In the days leading up the 19th, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who LeBron has returned home to play for, had found themselves down 3-1 in a best of 7 series against MVP Steph Curryā€™s near insurmountable Golden State Warriors. A Golden State Warrior team that not only were the reigning champions, but had just set the regular season record of 73 wins and only 9 losses. Team that have been down in the NBA Finals by a 3-1 deficit on 32 occasions, and exactly 0 of them had managed to come back. It was a bridge too far.

But just as LeBron and the Cavs orchestrated one of sports' greatest comebacks, Nintendo was about to launch their own revolutionary response: the Switch. Released in March 2017, this hybrid console would go on to sell over 132 million units (as of late 2023), becoming Nintendo's best-selling home console ever.

The Switch succeeded by combining home console and portable gaming, offering both Nintendo's beloved franchises and strong third-party support, while its flexibility appealed to casual and hardcore gamers alike. The masterstroke that was the Switch, single-handedly rocketed the company back to place they had spent much of the the last decades; the very top of the cultural video game zeitgeist. Marrrriiooo ā€¦ this is for youu.

Nintendoā€™s intellectual property push

Now that Nintendo has its swagger back, their next likely foray is into other art forms. Case in point, the incredibly successful launch of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt as Mario, Jack Black as Bowser, and Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong. Expect more of this.

Even though Disney totally fucked it by turning the Marvel brand into a pile of stinking, slimy, gutter-trash by putting profits ahead of the people, companies saw what Disney achieved with the first half of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and are licking their lips. It really started with Marvel and Star Wars, but now franchises like Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones, the Batman universe and more are spreading their IP across more movies and tv (streaming) than ever before.

Only recently, Nintendo announced its plans for an upcoming feature film on the Legend of Zelda. Take a look at this treasure trove of IP Nintendo can and will likely call on in the not too distant future to exploit / extend their brand.

Franchise

First Game Entry

Latest Game Entry

Mario Bros.

Mario Bros.

Super Mario Wonder

The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Pilkim

Pilkim

Pilkim 4

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Yoshi

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

Yoshi's Crafted World

Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Kirby

Kirby's Dreamland

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

If the massive success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is anything to go by, Nintendo has only scratched the surface. Expect expansions into streaming series, theme parks, and maybe even more unexpected collaborationsā€”Iā€™d see Donkey Kong on Broadway, wouldnā€™t you? The skyā€™s the limit when your characters have already been etched into the cultural consciousness for generations.

Failure Innovation

Like all good companies though, it hasnā€™t always been purely up and to the right for Nintendoā€”they have also failed often. We mentioned earlier about the failure that was the Wii U, but who remembers the 1995 Virtual Boy, or the even more obscure R.O.B.ā€”the Robotic Operating Buddy that accompanied the 1985 NES release.

Virtual Boy.

R.O.B.

Nintendo has had its share of missteps: the Virtual Boy, R.O.B. the Robotic Operating Buddy, the clunky Power Glove, the short-lived Game Boy Micro, the Wii U, the PokƩwalker (yes, really), and even the ill-fated partnership with Sony that gave birth to their biggest rival, the PlayStation.

The fact of the matter is, companies like Nintendo need to failā€”at scaleā€”to eventually create something worthwhile. In my recent piece on Jeff Bezos, we highlighted his mantra of; ā€œFailure and invention are inseparable twins.ā€ The tricky part, is the dance Nintendo needs to do atop of a knifeā€™s edge. One step too far and you have a major loser on your hands. Two or three major losers in a row and you may have a bad decade. A bad decade may lead to a drain of the creative horsepower in the company, and then you are not really Nintendo anymore.

The company culture formed at that time largely endures to this day: daring to be innovative, which also includes accepting the occasional failure, and getting the maximum amount of fun out of clever use of modest technical means.

- Erik Voskuil, Before Mario

Nintendo know this. And they have been successful for so many decades now because they have managed to thread the innovation needle enough times to stay on top. Some companies do not.

Playbook / How you can apply this

Usually, when doing these deep dives and trying to apply some sort of a playbook to the subject itā€™s a little easier. SaaS tool that does X, consumer app that does Y. Itā€™s a little harder to break apart the success beacons attached to a company like Nintendo that: a) is 130 years old, b) is in video games and c) has reinvented itself so many times, but a few things come to mind, here they are.

  • Master storytelling: Nintendo are master storytellers, a skill that will only become more valuable over time as we continue to progress further into a content-rich world.

  • Make things fun: Nintendo focus on creating games that are fun, engaging, and accessible, prioritising these factors over performance hardware specs. This means Nintendo caters to a wide audience, from casual to hardcore gamers.

Nintendo has always followed a gameplay-first design philosophy: get something down thatā€™s fun to play, and then start thinking about the story, the characters.

- Chris Kohler, editorial director, Digital Eclipse
  • Double down on winners: Make sure you enable your winners to thrive, while cutting your losers. Leverage those winners across multiple brand touchpoints and platforms.

  • Relentlessly reinvent yourself: Users, trends, industries and technologies all change over time. Nintendo made sure to be nimble enough to roll with the punches and bring a brand new look to the market with every passing decade.

  • Donā€™t die: Most importantly, donā€™t die. Business is the act of outlasting the competition. Nintendo had been around for nearly 100 years before they really made it on the global stage.

Future

For me, the Nintendo is a story of continuous reinvention, decade after decade, and one that I personally hope to see play out for many decades more. Sure they may have done dealings with the Yakuza, but hey, weā€™re all young once.

The main thing Nintendo should be remembered for is how much joy it has brought to kids all around the world. And the exciting part is to think of how much more of this beautiful elixir it still has to serve up. Long live Mario, long live Luigi, hell even long live Bowser the cantankerous old fuck, and long live Nintendo.

Fun facts

  • Mario before Mario: French general, Napoleon, was the face of Nintendo for many years, and was featured on their ā€˜Presidentialā€™ line of cards (even though he was technically an emperor). You can still find the Napoleon cards for sale at toy shops today.

  • Mario makes cement: Nintendoā€™s little known first game hits was the Game & Watch title ā€˜Marioā€™s Cement Factory.ā€™ An oft-rumoured, but ill-proven homage to the Yamauchi families cement factory business.

  • Looking into the histories: On October 2, the first official Nintendo Museum is opened in Kyoto, Japan, inviting fans to dive into decades of gaming history.

Extra reading / learning

And thatā€™s it! I hope you enjoyed the piece, now go out and play some video games.

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