Nintendo Facts

Originally, Nintendo was a playing card manufacturer.

The inventor of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, started at Nintendo as an assembly line maintenance worker fixing machines before being discovered by the company president and becoming one of gaming's most influential designers.

Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis had an online multiplayer mode.

Nintendo has banked so much money, they could run a deficit of over $250 million every year and still survive until 2052.

In 1991, Sony and Nintendo were building a console together. Then Nintendo secretly cut a deal with Philips and announced it the morning after Sony revealed their partnership at CES. Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi pushed to build a console anyway. Sony's president backed him. Nintendo tried to humiliate Sony. Sony answered with PlayStation.

A Nintendo Game Boy survived a barracks bombing in the 1991 Gulf War. The front was charred and the A and B buttons melted - but Army medic Stephan Scoggins shipped the wreck to Nintendo, and technicians heard the startup chime plugging in Tetris. It still worked. Nintendo replaced his unit and displayed the original at their New York store. They quietly retired it in 2023 - over 30 years later.