Considerably older than the vast majority of its core demographic, Nintendo has a gaming history that reaches as far back as 1889 (no, that's not a typo), when it was formed in Kyoto, Japan, by Fusajiro Yamauchi to create handmade hanafuda game cards.
The Nintendo we know now has grown to become the most influential videogames company ever, with the likes of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid Prime ranking as some of the company's foremost creations. The company, while still based in Japan, also has studios situated around the world in places such as the US, Canada, Germany, Australia, China, and South Korea.
To date, Nintendo has racked up an amazing 387 million units in terms of hardware sales, while also selling an incomprehensible 2.2 billion units of gaming software.
The Nintendo DS, which launched in 2004, presently leads the handheld market (much as the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance before it), and the new Nintendo Wii is also performing exceptionally well since its launch in November of 2006.
Beyond gaming, Nintendo is also majority owner of the Seattle Mariners (a US Major League Baseball team), and also partly owns the Atlanta Hawks (a US National Basketball Association team).
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