Nintendo

Nintendo is a Japanese entertainment company that is best known for their video games and consoles. They have created many popular series such as the long-running and highly successful The Legend of Zelda franchise.

History
Nintendo was founded in 1889 primarily to develop and distribute playing cards. Their biggest success was in Hanafuda cards, which Nintendo still produces to this day. Around the mid 1950's, Nintendo changed course and distanced themselves from the playing card industry, with the reason why often theorized to the rise in illegal gambling. Nintendo would spend the next several decades trying (and mostly failing) at many other industry. From 1963 to 1968 alone, Nintendo founded and discontinued a taxi company, a love hotel chain, a TV network, a food company, and the Chiritory vacuum cleaner. Nintendo would eventually settle into and find a footing in the toy industry. While in debt and struggling to stay afloat with many forgettable products, there were some success stories like the Ultra Hand and the start of a long relationship with the Walt Disney Company. Nintendo would officially enter the video game industry in 1973 with arcade game Laser Clay Shooting System. While having modest success in the arcades, Nintendo would make more of a splash in the home market with the Color TV Game and Game & Watch lines of handheld consoles. There true break came in 1981 where Nintendo tasked Shigeru Miyamoto with creating a game to use the unsold copies of Radar Scope in their warehouses. That game would become Donkey Kong, which would change the course of gaming history and put Nintendo on the map.

Nintendo would shake the industry again a few years later with the launch of the Famicom, named Nintendo Entertainment System in other regions. The Zelda franchise would be born in this era, with Miyamoto claiming inspiration from the forest around his childhood home that he would often explore. The franchise has since become a tentpole of the company, with entries consistently being released on every major consolse since.