As coronavirus swept the world and many countries went into lockdown, many sought escapism through gaming. The release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch coincided with the pandemic, and players started to live their lives vicariously through the game, generating enormous sales figures for the company. This is far from being Nintendo’s only success story – click or scroll through for the story behind the world’s largest game company. 

Game Boys and other consoles like the DS spring to mind when you think of Nintendo, but the Japanese brand has actually been around for well over a century. Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Yamauchi Nintendo in 1889 in Kyoto, and the now-world famous company was passed through two generations of Yamauchis – Fusajiro’s grandson Hiroshi is pictured here.

As gaming consoles had yet to hit the market in the 19th century, Nintendo started out as a producer of Japanese playing cards, called Hanafuda. In 1902, the Yamauchis expanded into Western-style cards, and then into the less child-friendly realm of saucy pin-up cards…  

Nintendo continued to make money through more adult-targeted means, and by 1963, the company owned several "Love Hotels" and had designed the "Love Tester" device – an arcade game for determining couples’ compatibility. It was also involved in the production of a few vaguely pornographic games during the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES).

In the 1960s, Nintendo abandoned any previous venture it had and rebranded as Nintendo Co., Ltd. – a company producing playing cards, games, and eventually video games in the 1970s. The company was the first to introduce electronics into the toy industry in Japan, and the move paved the way for the company to become the biggest name in gaming.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) became a huge hit in the 1980s, and is one of the best selling consoles of all time. Revolutionary games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros went global via NES and nearly 62 million consoles have sold worldwide, making it the most popular gaming device of its time.

Unsurprisingly, Super Mario Bros became the best-selling Nintendo game ever made, with over 40 million copies selling worldwide. Across the 19 titles in the main Super Mario Bros series, over 330 million copies have been bought across the globe, making it a big part of Nintendo’s success story. 

The character so synonymous with the series’ brand did actually exist in real life. Mario Segale leased Nintendo one of his warehouses in its early days, and it was decided that "Mario" had more of a personality than "Jumpman", which was the character’s name to start with. Segale needed to chase up company administrators for the rent each month, so it’s unlikely that the use of his name was intended as a compliment.

Between 1996 and 1997, Nintendo launched the Nintendo 64 games console. Success wasn't immediate however, as games were delayed in their release and competitors Sega and Sony were seeing huge uptake in their new consoles, the Saturn and the PlayStation. It started to look as though Nintendo was losing ground to up-and-coming rivals in the market…

Enter the Wii in 2006. The new console, which was based on remote motion controls and a balance board, targeted a whole new audience as it promoted casual fitness with gaming – an until-then unexplored avenue in the market. A must-have on every child’s Christmas list in the late 2000s, Nintendo sold over 100 million Wii consoles. The Wii’s success allowed Nintendo to regain its title as the gaming industry's top dog, and new games are still popular today. The Just Dance series for example originally launched in 2009 and has since released another ten discs. The 2020 edition includes songs from Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish.

Due to the increasingly competitive digital market, Nintendo did briefly toy with making a phone, which would essentially work like a smartphone merged with a Game Boy. Nintendo has sold over 154 million DS units worldwide, which suggests a phone also could've been a hit, but could the company have taken on smartphone giant Apple, which has produced more than 2.2 billion iPhones? We'll never know.

Nintendo decided to dodge the smartphone market in the end, and has since become notorious for its criticism of mobile games. In 2011, the company's president Satoru Iwata, was quick to attack the mobile industry’s game offerings, claiming they were “substandard” and a threat to traditional electronic entertainment companies (including his own).

Nintendo's main focus was family games, so when attention turned to mobile apps for casual gamers, the company suffered. The early 2010s saw a huge boom in mobile gaming, with the likes of Angry Birds and Candy Crush drawing players from their more traditional consoles towards smartphone apps.

Confident that it would see big sales of its Wii U and 3DS consoles, Nintendo refused to give in to industry pressures to develop games for smartphones. But it didn’t quite work out for the company, and Wii U ended up being Nintendo’s worst selling console, only selling 13.6 million units before it ceased production. The 3DS was a bigger hit at 75.8 million sold units, but both paled in comparison to the more retro consoles.

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Finally, Nintendo said it would start to develop smartphone apps and games, releasing Miitomo, a smartphone social networking app, in March 2016. It also adapted some of its bigger hits like Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart to bring them to mobile users.

But it's first big mobile hit came in the form of Pokémon Go. Over 20 years after the first Pokémon game was released, the new Pokémon Go smartphone game came onto the scene and took the world by storm. The augmented reality game uses a phone’s camera to superimpose animated Pokémon creatures onto the real world, encouraging people to travel around and catch them, just as in the original game.

Pokémon Go is estimated to have brought in a record-breaking revenue of $207 million (£164m) in its first month, which is more than any other mobile game. That said, Nintendo is only indirectly involved with the game that quickly became a global sensation, but it does own 33% of the Pokémon company, which develops it. It also has a stake in Niantic, the former Google subsidiary that developed Pokémon Go, meaning that the game's success can only mean good things for the Japanese company, despite its initial aversion to all things smartphone.

While Nintendo may have given in and dipped its toe in the waters of mobile app gaming, it didn't completely abandon what it does best and released a new console in 2017. The Nintendo Switch is a hybrid console that allows both home gaming and playing on the go, filling a gap in the market that some gaming experts have dubbed "the best of both worlds".

Mobile gaming continues to boom, and while "trainers" – people catching the Pokémon – aren’t as common a sight as they were back in 2016, Pokémon Go had its best financial year yet in 2019 when the game made an estimated $900 million (£715m) through in-app purchases. Lockdown rules imposed by the coronavirus pandemic may have stopped gamers going out and about to play, but the timing of one of Nintendo’s newest releases couldn’t have been more perfect…

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released for Nintendo Switch in March this year, and sales went through the roof. The game sold over 12.6 million copies within six weeks of its launch – a feat which took its predecessor, Animal Crossing: New Leaf​, six years to accomplish. While the release even boosted sales of the Switch console itself, which more than doubled in March 2020 compared to the same month in 2019. The Animal Crossing game is a social simulation of real-life with anthropomorphic animal neighbours and gamified versions of everyday activities, such as going to the shop and fishing. 

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Lockdown has certainly boosted sales of the game, and some fans have gone as far as hosting cancelled real-life events on their animated islands. June marks the game's official wedding season, which might be adding salt to the wounds of those who had intended to get hitched this month, but on the brightside characters can tie the knot virtually surrounded by friends, family, and animal neighbours.

Nintendo is currently worth $49.7 billion (£39.5bn) according to Forbes, making it the world’s largest video gaming company. For now, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is continuing to rule supreme, but Nintendo has other exciting Switch releases up its sleeve, including Paper Mario: The Origami King (pictured) set for release in July, and puzzle adventure game I Am Dead, which fans will be able to get their hands on later this year. The word Nintendo is roughly translated from Japanese to English as "leave luck to heaven” – but if its recent resurgence is anything to go by, little luck is going to be needed!

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