What do taxis,
playing cards,
love hotels,
and Game Boys have in common?
At one point, they were all a Nintendo venture.
These products are among the mega-hits and mega-flops in Nintendo’s 130 year history.
Whenever the end was near, they bounced back with an innovative, company-saving product.
And their secret to modern success: great games with classic characters.
This is how Nintendo periodically turned reports of its imminent demise into Nintendo mania.
From 2010 to 2015, Nintendo was in trouble.
Its most recent major console, the Wii U, was considered a flop next to its rivals.
Profits were tumbling, and its stock price was near a low.
Worse still, some analysts saw the surging popularity of mobile smartphone games as
a major threat to Nintendo’s cash cow: its portable gaming systems.
Another major blow came in July 2015 with the death of the company’s president, Satoru Iwata.
But then, Nintendo’s fortune suddenly reversed.
In late 2016, it released a mobile smartphone game, the wildly popular Super Mario Run,
and capitalized on fan nostalgia with the limited edition NES Classic.
Then in March 2017, the company released the long-awaited Nintendo Switch, which became
an instant hit.
It's just a very sleek and nicely
designed and pleasing hardware to have
in your hands.
But that said, it really comes down to the games and they had an incredibly strong lineup
of games from the start.
With the help of these reimagined classics, Nintendo sold more than 20 million units in
the first two years and it’s now become the fastest selling console in U.S. history.
They have this kind of Disney-like ability to introduce their characters in one
format and then maybe your interest in their products fades away a little bit and then
years later they'll reintroduce those same characters again with a new product.
The Switch was hardly the first time Nintendo had pivoted successfully to a new type of entertainment.
Nintendo began in Kyoto in 1889 with hand painted playing cards called "hanafuda"
or "flower cards".
Because western style playing cards were banned, Japanese gangsters, called “Yakuza” favored
these in their illegal gambling parlours.
And Nintendo made a killing.
They made every kind of playing card imaginable until 1963, dubbed “Nintendo’s experimental years.”
During this time they did everything from food, taxis, and love hotels, before circling
back to toys.
There was even a self made extending arm - called the Ultra Hand, The Love Tester, Ultra Machine,
and even a laser clay shooting system that would later morph into NES’s classic Duck Hunt.
The success of some of these toys cemented their place as a toy maker, leading them into
the gaming industry.
Nintendo only started developing home gaming consoles about 35 years ago - with the introduction
of the Famicom in Japan and Nintendo Entertainment System in the U.S.
Their timing however, couldn’t have been worse.
The gaming industry was crashing.
There were too many consoles and too many terrible third party games.
But Nintendo succeeded where others didn’t.
They bundled a hit game called Super Mario Brothers created by visionary game designer
Shigeru Miyamoto.
To date, this game has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, holding the record for
a full 18 years.
Miyamoto, who joined Nintendo in 1977, would go on to design other hits like Zelda, Mario
Kart, and Starfox.
“I like making games so much that I would like to do it for free.”
And each new gaming console over the next few decades had the key hit games to go with it:
The Game Boy had Tetris and Kirby’s Dreamland.
The Super Nintendo had Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country.
And the N64 had Mario Kart, Goldeneye and Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
They now have people like you and me who grew up playing with games
with Mario and Link in the case of Zelda.
It's pleasing to pass along those characters to your own children
But, they had their share of flops as well.
Like...the Virtual Boy: a headset that allowed the user to play games in virtual reality.
The Game Cube was also less than successful.
And while 2018 was the best year in over a decade - the forecast is once again not so positive.
In September of 2018, more than a decade after rivals Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo debuted
its first online subscription service.
But the reviews haven’t been great.
Gamers complain that Nintendo’s platform lacks must-have features like in-game chat.
They say it’s susceptible to cheating and get frustrated with its connectivity issues.
They seem to manage, whether it was the Wii or Game Boy or the Switch most recently.
They do seem to come back just when people have written them off, and they do seem to
come up with these new things to push things forward.
So it'll be interesting to see how they react to this shift to online multiplayer games.
They'll probably come up with something new in that arena too if you give them enough time.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Nintendo reinvented itself.