Twenty Nintendo facts

  1. Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards.
  2. “Nintendo” means “leave luck to heaven.”
  3. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel.
  4. Nintendo established a multitude of electronic companies such as Panasonic
  5. They currently own the majority share in the Seattle Mariners 
  6. As of October 2, 2008, Nintendo has sold over 470 million hardware units and 2.7 billion software units.
    According to Nintendo's Touch! Generations website, the name "Nintendo" translated from Japanese to English means "Leave luck to Heaven".
  7. During the production of Super Mario Bros. 3 there were plans to have a Centaur Mario.
  8. After the release of the SNES Nintendo also released a SNES arcade with the games Super Tennis, F-Zero and Super Mario World.
  9. In Super Mario RPG Bowser and Mario joined forces for the first time.
  10. Star Fox was originally just a tech demo for the SuperFX chip, but went on to become a full blown game.
  11. The SNES was the target of some criminals, for some time Nintendo only shipped the consoles late at night to avoid them being stolen. Too bad they weren't as careful with the Black Nintendo DS.
  12. "Who knows how Mario will look in the future. Maybe he'll wear metallic clothes!" -Shigeru Miyamoto (1991).
  13. Mario is named after Mario Segali a landlord in New York. What happened was that the NOA President of the time, Minoru Arakawa, saw 'Jump Man' he likened him to his landlord, Mario Segali.
  14. Nintendo ex-president (and nutcase) Hiroshi Yamauchi has been compared to the Mother Brain from Metroid and his office has been likened to the 'realm of the Mother Brain'.
  15. The street outside of the office of Nintendo's distributor in Sweden was renamed "Marios gata".
  16. Fujiko Takimoto who did the voice acting for Link as child is a woman, that explains Link's extremely light voice.
  17. Some 'concerned parents' were planning on suing Nintendo because their kids had sustained blisters from many a hour of Nintendo goodness.
  18. The Japanese version of Mario Kart 64 featured many signs advertising spinoffs of real world brands with Super Mario twists, the only one that made it to the US was 'Koopa Air' (i.e. 'Nike Air').
  19. In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi (the grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi) visited the U.S. to talk with the United States Playing Card Company, the dominant playing card manufacturer in that country. He found that the world's biggest company in his business was only using a small office. This was a turning point, where Yamauchi realized the limitations of the playing card business. He then gained access to Disney's characters and put them on the playing cards to drive sales. 
  20. The Japanese launch of the Super Famicom was filled with all sorts of problems. Some of the shops got so many orders that they ran lotteries to see which would be the happy ones to get a Super Famicom!
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