Nintendo’s Switch in Games
Nintendo, whose current net worth is more than $95 billion, is the third most valuable company in Japan. Well-known for their video games and consoles today, they didn’t originally start as a video gaming company. Founded on September 23rd, 1889, by Fusajiro Yamauchi, the company originally started out as a playing card-selling business in Japan. The translation of the phrase Nintendo is debated a lot, but the consensus believes it means “leave luck/fate to heaven” or “the temple of free hanafuda” – hanafuda being a style of Japanese playing cards. The company went through a lot of phases, which is shown through their progression of logos with their different ventures. From 1889-1963 the company’s focus was on playing cards, then shifting its focus from 1963-1970 to different ventures like taxi services, ramen noodles, and short term ‘love’ hotels. From 1970 on, their focus completely shifted to making arcade machines, game consoles, and video games.
One of the flaws in Nintendo’s past is that there is no official credit to who has created any of their logos throughout the years other than the ‘Nintendo creative team’. Though, the team has talked about why the logo is presented the way it is. Nintendo’s first logo in 1889 is in the Japanese lettering Kanji, 任 meaning nin, 天 meaning ten, and 堂 meaning do. However, in 1950, they changed their logo to the Latin alphabet because they wanted to westernize their logo, since they were starting to expand their company into European and American markets. Notably, the only other time they’ve changed back to any kind of Japanese lettering was in 1973-1975, when they used another type of lettering system called Katakana. When it came time to make their westernized logo, they wanted to find a happy medium that would appeal to both local and international markets. This led their designers to create four different official Nintendo fonts, each being different from each other. Also, Nintendo has logos for several different products, most notably their gaming systems like the Nintendo Switch, Wii, Wii U, etc. Their creative team comes up with hundreds of different possible logos for just one of these products.
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