The plumber Mario, the one from the famous video game, is 131 years old. Indeed, he is not really like that to tell the truth. The anniversary, to be more precise, is celebrated by the company that created it, the Japanese Nintendo. But at the beginning he dealt with card games and only in 1981 did he create Mario, one of the most iconic characters in the world of video games, and then his brother Luigi too. Nintendo was founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, a Japanese entrepreneur who decided to produce decks of Japanese playing cards, known as hanafuda or daitoryo and famous because each card was produced using the bark of mulberry trees (or mitsu-mata). The company initially manufactured in Kyoto and Osaka, but nearly a century later it moved into electronic games, becoming the global giant it is today.
Nintendo entered the world of video games in 1975 as distributor of the Magnavox Odyssey console, and soon – in 1977 – began building a series of its own consoles called Color TV Game. Thanks to the enormous success in Japan, it arrived in the North American market in 1985 and the following year it landed in Europe. Since the 500s, Nintendo has produced over 64 games and seven tabletop consoles: the Famicom/NES, Super Famicom/SNES, Nintendo XNUMX, Nintendo GameCube, Wii, Wii U and Nintendo Switch. In addition to table consoles, the centuries-old company has produced various portable consoles, including seven versions of the legendary Game Boy, four versions of the Nintendo DS, six versions of the Nintendo 3DS, the Virtual Boy, the Game & Watch, Pokémon mini and the Nintendo Mini Classics.
In thirty years, Nintendo has sold over 577 million consoles and 3,5 billion copies of directly developed video games. It has been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 1983. Today the CEO and president of the company is Shuntaro Furukawa, after the death in 2015 of Satoru Iwata, former president and architect of the great exploit of the Wii, whose success relaunched the company after a period of tarnish at the beginning of the years 2000, also due to competition from Sony's Playstation. The mascot of the group is always, needless to say, Mario, a legendary character created in 1981 for the video game Donkey Kong.
