Nintendo

Nintendo

運を天に任せる. (Un wo ten ni makaseru)
"Leave luck to Heaven."

Founded:	September 23, 1889
Founder:	Fusajiro Yamauchi
Headquarters:	Kyoto, Japan
Key people:	Shuntaro Furukawa (president) Shigeru Miyamoto
Services:	My Nintendo Nintendo Switch Online Nintendo eShop
Subsidiaries:	1-Up Studio iQue Monolith Soft NDcube Nintendo European Research & Development Nintendo Network Service Database Nintendo Software Technology Retro Studios Next Level Games
Website:	https://www.nintendo.com/

Nintendo (JP: 任天堂) is a Japanese company founded in 1889 as a playing card company. It is now among the most well-known video game companies of all time, making not only consoles but among some the most beloved I.P.s of all time.

Consoles Developed

Color TV Game (1977)
Nintendo Entertainment System (1985) / Famicom Disk System (1983)
Game Boy (1989)
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1991) / Super Famicom (1990)
Virtual Boy (1995)
Nintendo 64 (1996)
Game Boy Color (1998)
Nintendo GameCube (2001)
Game Boy Advance (2001)
Nintendo DS (2004)
Nintendo Wii (2006)
Nintendo 3DS (2011)
Wii U (2012)
Nintendo Switch (2017)

Why They Rock

Mario, the famous mascot and game series of the company.
Ended the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 and put many rules in place to prevent another video game crash.
Its first major console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, helped give birth to many great franchises that continue to this day.
They pretty much created Handheld Gaming with the Game and Watch series and the Game Boy. To this day, they're still the unquestionable kings of handheld gaming. Not even Sega or Sony could dethrone them. This culminated in the Nintendo Switch, being the first home game console that you could actually take with you, which is what the Game Boy series was trying to accomplish. (See 16)
They invented the Tactical Role-Playing genre through one of their subsidiaries, Intelligent Systems.
Many arcade classics like the original Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong.
Shigeru Miyamoto.
It has produced many memorable IPs, including Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kirby and Pokémon.
Defeated Sega in the legendary Console Wars.
Allowed Japan to dominate the video game market for decades (Japan is currently dominating the market once more).
Played a large role in the transition from 2D gaming to 3D with the Nintendo 64.
They have a deep love and protectiveness towards their IPs and use each one lovingly (although a bit too much as shown in BQ #1).
They have made many great consoles, especially the home consoles.
Care more about gameplay than graphics or technology because they follow a philosophy: "Lateral thinking with withered technology". Their consoles, while gimmicky, are unique and fun as a result.
Nintendo is often more family-friendly, making games that can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of age.
Their newest console, the Nintendo Switch, has combined handheld gaming (unarguably Nintendo's biggest strength) with home gaming.
They consistently publish great games.
They are famous for creating many great Local Multiplayer games, such as the Mario Kart series and Super Smash Bros series.
Amiibo are cool collectible figures based on Nintendo games (and 3rd party games in some cases) that can also unlock certain special items/features in compatible games.
They introduced the "Classic Edition" series of plug n' play systems modeled after their older consoles, which are a great way for people to revisit those old games.
They sometimes learn from their mistakes. After Mario Party 1's analog stick controversy, they made their analog sticks more comfortable and future Mario Party games no longer had mini-games that involved rotating the analog stick (or at least not to the extent that some of MP1's mini-games did), another mistake they learned from was the Wii U and its marketing.
Care more about the quality of the games rather than profit, which is a rare thing nowadays.
They started a relationship with Microsoft and ported Minecraft in their consoles (which now is the Bedrock Edition of the game). Additionally, Steve, the main character of the famous Mojang's game, appeared in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as DLC.
They granted Spookywoobler's (who was suffering from bone cancer) dying wish to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate early before his death on September 24th, 2018.
The LABO VR is a mass improvement unlike its other virtual predecessor. Even though it doesn't have a headstrap.
By responding to the controversy of Sony's censorship policy on their consoles, they stated that they won't censor third-party games on theirs, something that they used to do during the NES and SNES era.

Bad Qualities

Their home consoles (after the GameCube) and handheld consoles tend to be underpowered as third-party developers often struggle to make the more gimmicky aspects of them work properly. This results in less third-party support.
- Their consoles are also lacking a ton of major ports and important parts that their competitor's consoles have such as Ethernet, optical audio, replaceable hard drives and most importantly the ability to play DVD and Blu-Ray movies (not counting the Panasonic Q, which was only available in Japan).
- Nintendo's only consoles to have good online features were the Wii U, and to a lesser extent, the 3DS.
They have been using the artificial scarcity tactic for most of their products, such as the NES Classic Edition, Nintendo Switch (during its first few months), and amiibos, allowing scalpers to sell those products for higher prices.
They also have a tendency to censor or otherwise alter certain games during localization. Notable recent examples include Treehouse doing Fire Emblem Fates, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and more. This has also happened through updates to their games, such as when one of the Inkling Girl's animations was altered in the 1.10 update of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, as the gesture she made (which resembled the bras d'honneur gesture) could be interpreted as rude in certain countries, especially Europe. Before the introduction of the ESRB, Nintendo's censorship was far more strict (for example, games like Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein 3D had toned down violent content and (in the latter's case) removed all traces of Nazi symbolism and had Hitler redesigned and renamed to "Staatmeister").
- The game libraries for the NES and SNES were severely crippled due to the family friendly image they wanted to preserve which lead to many, many (Super) Famicom games never coming to the west. What games that did get released for the NES and SNES were censored to sometimes atrocious levels.
- GameCube ports for Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City were planned, but were canceled for reasons unknown, likely due to either their violent content or issues with disc space.
They have also been making many major mistakes with their video game consoles and business.
- Back in 1991, Nintendo and Sony were working on a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but Nintendo later chose to work with Sony's rival Phillips on the CD add-on thus completely humiliating Sony and giving them the idea to create their own video game console, which in turn sold extremely well and unfortunately for Nintendo the CD add-on for the Super Nintendo never came to be, if Nintendo and Sony continued working together we might have seen Crash and Mario together in one game, making this the biggest mistake Nintendo has ever made.
- They chose to stick with cartridges for their next powerful console, the Nintendo 64. However, this upset many third-party developers because cartridges could only hold 8-16 MB's of data compared to a CD, which can hold 700 MB's of data and also making a game on the Nintendo 64 would be a gamble; each cartridge costs them $10 to produce compared to a CD, which cost less than a dollar to produce leaving hundreds of third-party developers to make games for the Sony PlayStation.
  - A similar mistake is with the Nintendo GameCube where Nintendo was afraid of piracy, something that the Sony PlayStation suffered from and chose to use Mini DVD's which can only hold 1.5 GB's of data compared to a DVD, which can hold 4.7 or 8.5 GB's of data. Once again, this turned third-party developers away from the system and lead them to switch to Sony's PlayStation 2 as well as Microsoft's Xbox.
- The Virtual Boy was rushed out and the 3D technology wasn't properly implemented, as a result, the system was prone to causing the user headaches and eye strain very quickly.
- The Wii U was poorly marketed and underpowered, additionally the Gamepad proved to be too gimmicky and difficult for third-party developers to work with.
- Poor distrubution of classic games. Nintendo still thinks there is demand for more NES/SNES rereleases, so they hardly release games fans actually want on modern systems. One instance is the fact that it took them literal years just to port the arcade Donkey Kong (it made its way on the Nintendo Switch in 2018) to their home consoles (not counting the DK64 emulated version) as up to that point they have been releasing just the NES version which has cut content.
While they take risks on the consoles themselves, the same thing cannot be said for their games. For example, a good number of Wii U games are part of the Mario franchise.
Some of their mobile games such as Dr. Mario World and Mario Kart Tour are notorious for being filled with microtransactions and loot boxes, something that is normally against what they usually develop otherwise. While some previous console games like Team Kirby Clash Deluxe had this problem, this practice on console games died down nowadays and has heavily improved with later games and remakes such as Super Kirby Clash.
Lack of localisation of games and hardware on languages more popular than Dutch, such as Polish, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese-Brazilian, Vietnamese and sometimes Russian. This leads fans from Russia, Brazil, Poland, Vietnam and Arab World to download ROMs and translate them by themselves and play on emulators for PCs and PlayStation consoles.
At-times, Nintendo can be kinda greedy.
- Unlike Steam, they refuse to allow refunding in their digital stores, no matter what.
- Along with Sony, Nintendo is starting to copy Microsoft's bad habits such as paid online multiplayer, albeit cheaper than PS Plus or Xbox Live Gold but with fewer features (luckily, the prices for the memberships are lowered, so that's a plus).
- Their game, Super Mario 3D All-Stars, is only available for a limited time instead of an unlimited time (it is only available until March 31, 2021).
- Recently their games tend to be overpriced, such as New Super Mario Bros. U costing $60 even today despite being remastered and Fire Emblem Echoes having a Season Pass that's more expensive than the game itself.
  - Some of their Wii U games that were ported to Nintendo Switch still cost full price.
Overall, their business practices and it's North American division recently are infamous for being some of the most atrocious in gaming history, so bad that they've ended up on the Crappy Games Wiki.
They are way too overprotective of their IP's, while justified since they owns the rights and they could lose their trademarks when the creators illegally profit off them (for example, Pokémon Brick Bronze), they take them down in a harsh way.
Their consoles do not play DVD's, Blu-Rays, or audio CD's, unlike Sony's and Microsoft's.

Trivia

Former President, Reggie Fils-Amie resigned from Nintendo of America on April 15, 2019.

Comments

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Necromancer223

17 months ago

Score 5

Actually it is probably the best major company that exists these days and isn't fueled by greed and micro-transactions that much. However, they still make major mistakes from time to time.