The History of Nintendo 4

NOA Is Established


Hiroshi Yamauchi’s daughter who was married to Minoru Arakawa went with her husband to America to start the company. Minoru would simply wander around in arcade rooms and watch how American gamers were and reacted with the games. He was especially interested in a kid who kept on putting money into a machine due to the frustration of losing on it. After a while, the kid noticed Minoru and his exact words were, “What the fuck do you want, mister?” This kid became the first employee of Nintendo of America and would become a very important and highly paid member of staff. So Nintendo of America started out in a shack-like building and moved their HQ to bigger better buildings as the big bucks started rolling in.


The Big Break


Hiroshi couldn’t help but become aware of how popular arcade machines were becoming, so he wanted in. When Shigeru was told to make arcade games, he stepped away from the customary shoot ‘em ups where you shot and killed and shot and killed some more. He came up with the legendary Donkey Kong! Here’s a piece of information that you could use to astonish your friends (so maybe you won’t, but what the heck, I think it’s cool). We all know it was Donkey Kong that put Nintendo above everyone else, but do we really know where it came from? You probably know that Donkey Kong was a translation error or something and it was supposed to be Monkey Kong, but that’s probably it. And what about Mario’s origin? Here’s the whole story, there were many small companies that wanted in on the booming video game industry, so to get their games to sell they would base the games on already famous characters. I assume that Nintendo were going to do the same, because they made a game based on Popeye the Sailor. Brutus had taken the girl like in so many Popeye episodes, and Popeye set out to save her. Eventually, licensing problems cropped up and Shigeru was forced to alter the characters and game a bit. Shigeru’s innovative mind changed Brutus to an ape, Money Kong that was then accidentally changed to Donkey Kong, and turned Popeye into a fat plumber, who at first had no name and was nicknamed Jumpman but then named Mario because of his resemblance to the landlord of where NOA was established, Mario Segali. Donkey Kong and Mario were Nintendo’s biggest hits yet and were the most popular arcade machines ever! It was also released as a Famicom game. Now Nintendo have more than enough money to start developing their next big thing, and believe me, it was going to be BIG!


Hiroshi was contemplating something big, better, and cheaper than anything gamers had seen before. He told Masayuki Uemura to gather up his engineers and start developing a game machine that was way better than the Color TV Game systems and worked on game cartridges and would cost $75(that was much cheaper than any other home console out on the market) so that practically anyone could buy it. In 1981 it was official, the Famicom was under development!


Donkey Kong Jr. was released in 1982 and was a big hit like its predecessor, but still it didn’t sell as many units. It sold about 20,000-30,000 compared to Donkey Kong that sold an astonishing 65,000 in America alone. This game was available as both an arcade game and a Famicom game. Universal Studios were about to sue Nintendo and Coleco (a company working with Nintendo on arcade machines) because they said Donkey Kong was a King Kong rip-off. Coleco avoided the lawsuit by paying Universal Studios 3% of their Donkey Kong sales until they found out that Nintendo went to court against Universal Studios and won.