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发表于 2006-1-27 21:38:23
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encarta2006
Nintendo Co., Ltd., leading manufacturer of home video games and portable video games. Nintendo helped revive the home video-game market in the United States in the mid-1980s. The company is based in Kyōto, Japan.
Nintendo evolved from the Marufuku Company, founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. The company made playing cards for hanafuda, a Japanese game (see Cards and Card Games). In 1949 Hiroshi Yamauchi, the great-grandson of the founder, changed the company’s name to Nintendo Playing Card Company, Ltd., and improved its manufacturing capabilities with modern equipment.
In 1953 Nintendo became the first Japanese company to manufacture plastic playing cards. In 1959 the company began selling playing cards illustrated with Walt Disney Company characters, a move that led Nintendo into the children’s market. Four years later the company changed its name to Nintendo Co., Ltd.
In the mid-1970s Nintendo teamed up with Mitsubishi Electric (see Mitsubishi Group) to develop a home video-game system. Introduced in Japan in 1977, the new system, Color TV Game 6, played six versions of electronic tennis similar to Pong, a popular game pioneered by Atari Corporation in the United States. Nintendo opened a U.S. subsidiary, Nintendo of America, in 1980. The following year Nintendo introduced Donkey Kong, a coin-operated video-arcade game that became widely popular. The game’s mustachioed main character, Mario, starred in many of Nintendo’s subsequent games and became the company symbol.
In 1983 Nintendo introduced a home video-game system in Japan called Famicom. The system enjoyed enormous popularity, and by the mid-1980s 35 percent of Japanese homes owned Famicom. In 1985 Nintendo launched an American version of Famicom called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The product featured an 8-bit computer and advanced graphics, and it was technically superior to anything else in the home video-game market at that time.
In the mid- to late 1980s Nintendo captured almost 80 percent of the U.S. market for home video games. Surveys found that Nintendo’s Mario character was more popular in the United States than Mickey Mouse. Nintendo’s Game Boy, a handheld video game system introduced in 1989, became extremely popular in the United States due to the success of Tetris, a game involving interlocking blocks.
Nintendo dominated the home video-game market until 1989, when Sega Enterprises Ltd. of Japan introduced Genesis, a 16-bit home video game that featured better graphics than Nintendo’s 8-bit system. Nintendo came out with its own 16-bit game system, Super NES, in 1991.
In 1996 Nintendo leapfrogged its competitors by introducing a 64-bit video game system, Nintendo 64. The system, developed in cooperation with Silicon Graphics, Inc., featured smooth three-dimensional graphics never before seen in home video-game systems. Initial consumer demand for Nintendo 64 outstripped supplies in Japan and the United States. Also in 1996, the company introduced its Pokémon trading cards in Japan. Pokémon cards and accessories proved wildly popular. Two years later Nintendo debuted Pokémon in North America, where they were equally successful. In 2001 Nintendo released the GameCube, an advanced game console, to compete with the PlayStation2 from the Sony Corporation and the Xbox from Microsoft Corporation.
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