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On November 18, Nintendo will rip the motion-sensing rug out from under the long international mystery that has been the thinking behind the Wii and unleash the Wii U to the gaming public. It's a revolutionary new console that takes Nintendo's love of two screens by, like, turning your TV screen into the top DS screen. Did you hear that popping sound? You just blacked out and hit your head on your desk, and are only regaining consciousness now, still barely able to wrap your mind around how revolutionary that is.
All kidding aside, as Nintendo leads the console race into the next generation, it's a chance to wipe the slate clean with a high-tech rag and start all over again. Who knows where Nintendo will go from there, and how Microsoft and Sony will react in kind. But it's also a chance to gaze into the past and go "huh!" at some of the strangest places that today's biggest video-game companies hailed from. After all, those who don't learn from history are doomed to end the introductory paragraphs they write with supremely lame clichés.
6. Eidos Interactive
This is positively riveting and also absolutely true: The company behind Thief, Deus Ex, and Tomb Raider started off in 1990 specializing in "video compression and non-linear editing systems." It particularly did this for Acorn Archimedes, Acorn Computers' first home computer that, according to my research, had a lot of circuits and junk in it. The company was so successful that it was even floated on the London Stock Exchange, and Eidos Sales/Marketing Director Nick Davis once boasted that the company's Edit One system "does for video what desk-top publishing does for print." (Yes, he actually hyphenated it.)
Folks, this is the same sort of excitement Eidos Interactive brought to its games -- games like Let's Edit Video In A Non-Linear Manner and Compression Hero.
5. Hudson Soft
Long before Hudson became Nintendo's first third-party software developer for the NES, the Sapporo, Japan company was a single shop founded by brothers Hiroshi and Yuji Kudo that sold art, photographs, and telecom devices. The brothers were still in college, and that was 1973. By 1975, it was selling computers. By 1978, the company was developing and selling video games as well. Part of what credited the shift in the company's output was Yuji visiting the U.S. to market the store's telecom devices, which, according to Hudson pitch man Takahashi Meijin, was the first time Yuji saw personal computers available to the public. Strangely, so often in America we think of Japan as being the technological leaders and visionaries, but many of the companies on this list had a similar experience: They saw computers in America, and saw their potential here.
4. Konami
In 1969, Kagemasa Kōzuki had a vision: To found a company in Osaka to repair and rent out jukeboxes. Over the years, the company started to manufacture "amusement machines" (read: not vibrators) for arcades, and by the early '80s that also included games like Frogger, Super Cobra, and Scramble. Somewhere in all there, or after, was a particularly horrible night for a curse.
3. Enix
The latter half of Square Enix has truly bizarre and humble beginnings: It was founded in 1975 by Japanese architect-turned-entrepreneur Yasuhiro Fukushima as a tabloids publisher to push real-estate ads. Fukushima tried to take the company nationwide in 1982, but when that failed, he changed its name to Enix (the name being a play on the words "phoenix" and "ENIAC," which was the world's first computer) and its focus to the gaming market. To build hype around the new company, Enix held a game-programming contest, which Yuji Horii won with Love Match Tennis. Horii went on to create Dragon Quest for the company, and here's a bonus tidbit about that game: Dragon Quest was originally conceived as an elaborate real-estate agent exam.
2. Sega
We can't discuss Nintendo without discussing its (once) biggest opponent: Sega. You don't have to do too much digging to find out the weird-ass truth about how Sega came to be. Fundinguniverse.com, as it tends to, reveals all: "Sega of America traces its roots to two companies -- Service Games Company and Rosen Enterprises, Ltd. -- both founded in Japan by Americans during the 1950s." Rosen Enterprises' roots laid in a two-minute photo booth business in Japan, and, well, you can't really run a business where you expect people to stick around for two minutes, can you?
So, David Rosen began to import coin-op arcade games, which, at the time were "largely unfamiliar to the Japanese public." The gist of what came in the next few decades is that Rosen wasn't satisfied with the games he imported so decided to merge with one of his contacts, Service Games, and produce better ones. That's actually where Sega gets its name from: Service Games. Fun fact: "Genesis does what Nintendon't" wasn't an advertising slogan at all but instead an elaborate typo they kept because they "thought it sounded cool."
1. Nintendo
Today, Nintendo is basically the video-game company equivalent of Rich Little: a completely inoffensive crowd-pleaser that Republicrats, Democrans, and Liberfarians alike can all enjoy.
But back when the company started in 1889, its message was a lot less define. To say that Nintendo dabbled before committing to consumer electronics would be a massive understatement, and also be doing a disservice to the notion of understating concepts. On Sept. 23, 1889 in Kyoto, Nintendo was founded -- its name meaning "leave luck to heaven," which makes a lot of sense considering the company started off manufacturing Hanafuda playing cards. By 1963, the company renamed itself to the Nintendo Playing Card Company (which was so successful it had licensed Disney characters to print on the cards), and within the next five years branched out further: Nintendo tried its hand at running a taxi company, a TV station, a food company that sold instant rice, and also a "love hotel" chain. (Love hotels are exactly what you think they are, and are nothing compared to maid cafés.)
None of these really caught on -- maybe people don't like having sex beneath giant playing cards adorned with images of Disney characters eating instant rice in cabs? -- and actually it's the light-gun game market that helped Nintendo gain its 20th footing. After tinkering with the "Laser Clay Shooting System," Nintendo found success with it in arcades and eventually use it for, yup, Duck Hunt.
The real question here, though: Where's all that risk-taking today, Nintendo?
"The real question here, though: Where's all that risk-taking today, Nintendo?" Nintendo took a huge risk with the Wii and the motion controllers, and pushed the other 2 major publishers to make their own version.
The Wii U is just the same. We now have a tablet controller, that both Sony and Microsoft are ALSO trying to do with Sony's storybook thing and glass window with Microsoft. Nintendo is awesome, and they will always take risks. I would say the ONLY two systems they didn't take risks with were the N64 and the Gamecube. The DS and 3DS were also huge risks for the company as well, and all have sold really well. If you need innovation, you go to Nintendo.
"The real question here, though: Where's all that risk-taking today, Nintendo?"
I think the Virtual Boy killed off a sizable chunk of it. It's actually impressive that Nintendo took a chance with the Wii's motion control considering how hard it failed the last time they tried something so outside-the-box for the time.
@Nikademus Nintendo might not have had a choice with the Wii. They'd tried keeping up in hardware with the Gamecube (which really only suffered in storage space, since they used a variation of the extremely short-lived mini-DVD), but still suffered from being pigeonholed by both developers and consumers. And that pigeonholing is a feedback death spiral.
Nintendo has indeed been fairly cautious for a while. Take the early days of the DS, when Nintendo repeatedly emphasized that the DS was not the GBA2. It was pretty obvious at the time that if the DS hadn't taken off, then Nintendo was ready to drop it in an instant and push out a more "traditional" GBA 2.
@mooglegiant@Ford_Thundercougarfalconbird Considering how mind-numbingly successful the launch of the wii was (particularly as compared to the middling success of the sega cd), I don't know if the comparison is valid
...Having said that, I have no real compulsion to buy a WiiU after waiting in line to buy a Wii many years ago.
omg can not believe nintendo before it really claimed dominance in the video game market even ran love hotels and was a card company plus komine was founded for juteboxes. interesting that even the video game companies gamers love and know so long have interesting origins
@FabioRezende they are filler - we're only getting them because someone (whose job updatingthis site is not) has taken time out of their busy day to update the site with generic articles from other sites in the family.
@Lithroe@Gallen_Dugall@FabioRezende clearly there seems to be a disconnect where the name is unattached to a picture - I suggest a simple Post No Bills photo to test the theory
@Gallen_Dugall@Lithroe I'm a lingerie kinda guy. Underwear, Bras, the more covered the better, nothing too skimpy. I like things left to the imagination. Full nude is overrated.
@Lithroe@Gallen_Dugall pah - I know for a fact they wear a garment under those skirts and over their underwear. Never really understood the underwear obsession anyway
@Lithroe@Gallen_Dugall Gosh - now I wish I'd paid attention to the what the cheerleaders were doing in those cheers rather than just staring at their boobies during those compulsatory pep-rallies
I recently read "Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America" by Jeff Ryan. A really interesting read that covers quite a bit of Nintendo history. Highly recommended if you're curious about exactly what it took to make it in the video game industry after the market crashed and how Nintendo still manages to remain successful when all others fail.
Even more shockingly, all these companies were once various elements scattered about the universe. I have it on good authority that only Atari has been making video games since the Planck epoch.
