Nintendo was founded in Japan, 1889, by Fusajiro Yamauchi, an artist and craftsworker during the Meiji period. Founded as a playing card company, Nintendo virtually meant "leave luck to heaven." Nintendo entered into the video game market in the 1970s by joining with Coleco, an American videogame company, Nintendo would achieve moderate success through such arcade games as Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers. They would also produce a majority of games for the Third Generation system ColecoVision.

When the videogame market crashed in the early 1980s several companies were destroyed, including Coleco, leaving Nintendo's future in the videogame industry uncertain. They then teamed up with Mitsubishi to produce watches with simple LCD games built in, Nintendo would tread water for a few years, unable to truly achieve any kind of lasting prosperity. While learning of the success that other companies, such as Sega, were having in the U.S., Hirosi Yamauchi, a descendant of Fusajiro's, pressed Nintendo engineers to design their own home console. Yamauchi told his engineers to leave out all extraneous frills to save money and speed up production.

The system was rushed by the pressures Yamauchi placed on his designers, and was released no more than six months since the release of the Sega Master System. The first shipments were riddled with defects because of the short design period, thus making many retailers very upset. However, using the marketing already established by competing companies, Nintendo executives channeled nearly all of the company's resources into advertisements. These advertisements hit the American and Japanese consumers at the exact right time. Sales for the Nintendo Entertainment System would skyrocket over the next few months, and Nintendo would not be able to manufacture enough systems to keep the stores stocked.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) would become the highest selling system in history, and also the most notorious.

(author unknown)