Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto, Japan on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. The company made handmade hanafuda playing cards. The name "Nintendo" is commonly translated as "leave luck to heaven." The playing card business was successful enough that Nintendo became the first company to produce Western-style playing cards in Japan, in partnership with Disney in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, Nintendo tried to diversify beyond playing cards. The company launched a taxi service, a chain of love hotels, and attempted to market instant rice. All three ventures failed. The company nearly went bankrupt. It was a period that taught Nintendo's leadership they had only one genuine competency: entertainment.

Nintendo entered the video game business in 1977. Hiroshi Yamauchi hired a young engineer named Shigeru Miyamoto in 1977. Miyamoto would go on to create Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Star Fox.

The North American video game market crashed catastrophically in 1983 — collapsing from $3 billion to $100 million in two years. Nintendo launched the NES in North America in 1985, packaging it with R.O.B. the robot to avoid it being classified as a toy. The NES revived the entire industry.

When Sony and Microsoft were competing on raw processing power, Nintendo went in the opposite direction. The Wii used motion controls to make gaming accessible to people who had never played before — grandparents, families, nursing home residents. It outsold the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 combined in its first two years.

Nintendo's Wii U console sold fewer than 14 million units in five years — a disaster. Nintendo responded with the Switch in 2017: a hybrid console that worked both as a home console and a handheld. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe became the best-selling racing game in history.