Tag Archives: Nintendo history

Samus could handle space pirates, lava and a planet about to explode. Nintendo's three-pronged controller was apparently a different sort of problem. Yoshio Sakamoto, the director of Super Metroid, said he couldn't picture how to move her with it. Nintendo 64 went through its life without a new Metroid adventure. Anyone who remembers picking up that pad for the first time will understand the pause. Three grips. Two hands. A thumbstick in… Read more

Before Epona carried Link across Hyrule, Nintendo had talked about giving Mario a horse in Super Mario 64. Picture that for a moment: the plumber, the cap, the overalls, and a horse waiting outside Peach’s castle. Yoshi would have had questions. It never happened. But Yoshiaki Koizumi hadn’t lost interest in the idea, and when he worked on Ocarina of Time, he was determined to make horse riding happen there. Mario went… Read more

Mario’s first job had nothing to do with pipes. When he appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, he was a carpenter. The game took place on a construction site, so Shigeru Miyamoto gave its little hero a job that fitted the surroundings. The plumber everyone knows came later. There’s a nice reminder in an old Donkey Kong sticker card: underneath Mario, it says “The Brave Carpenter.” He’s got the cap, moustache and… Read more

Some people do their best thinking in the bath. While working on the original Donkey Kong in the early 1980s, Shigeru Miyamoto had a particularly convenient one: Nintendo’s company bath. Its hot water came from the boiler used by the playing-card factory. That’s quite a long way from an arcade cabinet, but apparently a good place to get your thoughts in order. He was staying in Nintendo’s company housing and bathing at… Read more

If you grew up tearing through Rainbow Road and tossing banana peels in Mario Kart 64, you probably never imagined that your favorite racing game once flirted with cigarette advertising. But that’s exactly what happened in the early versions of the game. Hidden in plain sight among the trackside billboards was a cheeky parody of Marlboro cigarettes, rebranded as “Marioro.” The red-and-white logo looked unmistakably similar to the real-life tobacco company’s branding,… Read more

Boo is one of Mario’s most beloved enemies, the little ghost that covers its face when you look at it but balloons into something terrifying when you turn your back. Generations of players have laughed and cursed at its strange behavior, but few casual fans know the story of where it came from. Boo wasn’t just pulled out of a sketchbook. It was inspired directly by a real woman: Takashi Tezuka’s wife.… Read more

When Nintendo Played Matchmaker Before it revolutionized video games, Nintendo dabbled in toys and novelties. One of the most infamous was the Love Tester, released in 1969. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of later classics like the Game Boy, the Love Tester claimed to measure the romantic compatibility of two people through simple electronics. Each person would hold a sensor, clasp hands, and the device would give a score from one… Read more

The Mother series has always held a special place in the hearts of retro role-playing game fans. In Japan it was known simply as Mother, while in the United States most people only experienced the second game in the series, which was released on the Super Nintendo under the title EarthBound. That game gained a reputation for its quirky humor, heartfelt storytelling, and unusual modern-day setting. Over time it became one of… Read more

Mario’s Mustache Was a Hardware Trick Mario’s iconic mustache wasn’t added for style — it was added because the technology of the time demanded it. When Shigeru Miyamoto designed Mario for Donkey Kong in 1981, he was limited to a tiny 16x16 sprite on arcade hardware. There simply weren’t enough pixels to draw a clear mouth and nose. The solution? A bold mustache that visually separated the nose from the rest of… Read more

When Super Mario Bros. 2 launched in North America in 1988, it introduced players to a whole new roster of characters. Among them was a pink dinosaur-like enemy named Birdo, who quickly stood out as one of the strangest and most memorable figures in the Mario universe. But Birdo’s legacy goes far beyond just being a quirky boss. In the original instruction manual, Nintendo described Birdo as a male who “thinks he… Read more

Zelda’s Real Inspiration Before Link ever picked up a sword or ventured into Hyrule, The Legend of Zelda began with the childhood of its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. Growing up in the countryside of Sonobe, Japan, Miyamoto often spent his days wandering through the fields, forests, and caves near his home. To a curious child with an adventurous spirit, every hill became a dungeon, every grove a hidden temple, and every dark cave… Read more

When people talk about Nintendo’s Game Boy, the usual memories are of Tetris marathons, trading Pokémon with a link cable, or sneaking in one more round under the covers with a flashlight. But there is one Game Boy out there with a history so wild that it belongs in a museum, and it actually does. During the Gulf War in the early 1990s, a soldier’s Game Boy was caught in the middle… Read more