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Nintendo makes video games and the consoles people play them on, including Mario, Zelda, and the Switch.
Nintendo is a video game company, and it makes money two ways that reinforce each other: it sells game consoles, and it sells the games that run on them. Its current console, the Switch, launched in March 2017 and doubles as a handheld and a living-room machine. People buy it because Nintendo's own games are the draw — the company is famously willing to sit on characters like Mario and Zelda for years to get a game right rather than ship something half-finished.
That caution with its own franchises is unusual. Nintendo treats Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and Donkey Kong as long-term assets, not annual releases. A mainline Zelda game arrives maybe once every several years. The payoff is a library with unusually high hit rates, and games that keep selling long after launch. The risk is that a console's fate can hinge on a handful of releases landing on time. The company is also a merchandising and licensing business, and that arm is bigger than people assume. It sells toys and clothing, licenses its characters for movies and theme parks, and operates official stores. It even made a Super Mario movie in 2023 that became one of the highest-grossing animated films ever, showing that Nintendo's characters earn money well beyond the console. Nintendo keeps a famously conservative balance sheet, holding a large pile of cash rather than loading up on debt. That also makes it vulnerable: its stock tends to swing on console-sales momentum, and a hardware flop hurts more than at rivals with diversified businesses. When Nintendo's console dominance fades, the stock can drop hard even if the characters remain beloved.
In Kyoto, Fusajiro Yamauchi began making and selling Hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. That small card business was the seed of Nintendo's long life in entertainment, though for a long time it was simply a card company.
The company dropped the words "Playing Card" and took the name it still uses today. A small change on paper, but a sign that its ambitions were already reaching past the card table.
Nintendo built a small handheld game called Game & Watch and set up a subsidiary in New York to sell abroad. It was the company's first real step into handheld video games and into foreign markets, two doors that would matter enormously later.
Nintendo launched the Family Computer, the home console known outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System, and listed its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It was becoming a serious public company built around games people played at home.
The game Super Mario Bros. came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System and became a global hit. Mario turned into Nintendo's face, a character people everywhere would recognize.
Nintendo launched the Game Boy, a handheld console, and it became a worldwide success. That cemented Nintendo's grip on handheld gaming, a lead it would defend for years.
Nintendo released the Switch, a console that works both plugged into a TV and carried in your hands. The hybrid idea caught on and became a major engine of growth.
Nintendo partnered to make an animated Super Mario Bros. movie, its first such film. It carried Mario beyond games and into theaters, opening a new way to make money from its characters.
Nintendo launched the Switch 2, the successor to the Switch. It kept the same hybrid design, sticking with the strategy that had worked so well.
The big question hanging over the business is succession and hardware timing. The Switch has had an extraordinarily long run, but hardware always ages, and the market scrutinizes Nintendo's succession plans after the death of its longtime leader Satoru Iwata in 2015 and inventive leader Shigeru Miyamoto aging. Nintendo's next console launch will be one of the most watched events in gaming.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026