Company: Nintendo

On February 14, 2013, Satoru Iwata announced the "Year of Luigi" in honor of the character's 30th anniversary. Over the next 13 months until the end of the Year on March 18, 2014, Nintendo released several games starring Luigi, including New Super Luigi U, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Dr. Luigi, and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. Additionally, Luigi was prominently featured in Super Mario 3D World and NES Remix 2, along with being featured in merchandise.

Beffitingly for Nintendo's famous underdog, Nintendo later reported $457 million in annual operating losses for 2013, making it one of the worst years in the company's history.

Nintendo's development philosophy is often described with the quote "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad," which is generally attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto. However, there is no evidence that he actually said the quote: a 2022 investigation by video game researcher Ethan Johnson revealed that it was first documented as "an industry catchphrase" in a November 1997 issue of Gamepro magazine. The quote was first tied to Nintendo in the June 1998 issue of Edge, in which an article about the protracted development of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time alleges that Nintendo saw it on a poster in a developer's office and took it to heart.

Over the next three years, the quote circulated among Usenet forum members when describing a variety of game developers, Nintendo included, and in 2003 it started being attributed to Miyamoto specifically. Johnson speculates that this came from people conflating it with comments Miyamoto made in a 2001 interview looking back on the making of Ocarina of Time, where he stated that "the entire staff starts to feel like 'if I let the game be released in this state, I will be ashamed.' Because if the development team doesn't end up feeling like craftsmen, artisans... then it won't be a good game." Johnson attributed the quote's longevity to the emergence of modern hype culture and growing public awareness about the significantly longer development periods needed for 3D games.

Despite Nintendo's current image as a family-friendly company, their initial success came from ties to organized crime. When the company was founded in 1889, hanafuda, which Nintendo manufactured cards for, was becoming increasingly controversial due to it being one of few betting games not covered by the Japanese Empire's anti-gambling laws, resulting in it becoming popular among the yakuza. While other companies were slowly exiting the hanafuda business as a result, founder Fusajiro Yamauchi pressed on, resulting in Nintendo becoming the country's most successful playing card manufacturer thanks mostly to strong sales among gang members.

Prior to a 2020 Nintendo Treehouse presentation, primarily intended to show off Paper Mario: The Origami King, it was announced that a new game from developer WayForward would be shown off in the presentation. Due to WayForward's reputation for platformer titles such as the Shantae series and the recent release of Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring the Legend of Zelda seemingly signifying an interest from Nintendo in indie collaborations, many fans expected the showcase to present a revival of a dormant Nintendo platforming IP such as Kid Icarus or Wario Land. In a futile attempt to temper expectations, Nintendo would vaguely clarify that the game was based on a "third party IP", redirecting speculation towards other companies' gaming IPs. When the presentation came, the game was revealed to be Bakugan: Champions of Vestroia, one of the licensed children's games that make up the vast majority of WayForward's gamography, which disappointed many, causing the Bakugan toyline to trend on Twitter and gaining the reveal trailer 3,500 dislikes against 1,500 likes on YouTube.

When former Nintendo of America spokesman and Nintendo Power editor Howard Phillips left the company in 1991 to work for LucasArts, his cartoon counterpart from the magazine's Howard & Nester comics was retired as well. As a farewell present, the Howard & Nester artists gifted him an exclusive racing-themed comic with scant amounts of adult humor that was not intended for publication, in which Howard, possessed by aliens, refers to Nester as a "little shit". Nester in turn calls the aliens "space bastards", and compares the situation to Howard having been a "junky for years and years", something that is not true of the real-life Howard Phillips. It's not known if this comic is meant to be themed around a specific game or not. The ending of the unreleased comic, where Nester discovers that Howard's tie is a clip-on after it falls off, somewhat parallels the published finale of Howard & Nester in Volume 25 of the magazine, where Howard gives Nester the tie as a parting gift. In the first two panels of its successor Nester's Adventures, Nester disregards the tie for being a clip-on and states that Howard was "too good to be real".

www.warioworld.com was an official Nintendo website made as a hub for developers and publishers licensed to work on Nintendo hardware. The site used Wario as a mascot, something that may not seem strange as his profession is designing video games in the WarioWare series. However, the site was opened in 1997, predating WarioWare by multiple years, and also predates the Wario World game for GameCube. Instead of renaming the site to avoid confusion and using the URL for the game's US promotional site, the URL www.wario-world.com was used for the game's website, something that more than likely caused confusion for Wario fans. WarioWorld was closed in 2016, having received very few visual updates since the 1990s, and now redirects to a more modern and professionally designed Nintendo developer hub.

In the E3 2019 Nintendo Direct presentation, the new CEO of Nintendo of America, Doug Bowser, was introduced with a joke comparing his last name to the antagonist of the Mario series, Bowser. However, in Japanese, the character’s name is “Koopa”, so in the Japanese broadcast of the Nintendo Direct, they clarified the joke with subtitles explaining that his name is Bowser in English-language releases.

Shortly after the Famicom's launch in 1983, Atari approached Nintendo offering to distribute the system outside of Japan as the Nintendo Enhanced Video System. Negotiations for the arrangement stalled when Atari saw a demonstration for the Coleco Adam home computer system that used the ColecoVision port of Donkey Kong as a demo title. Because Atari previously gained the exclusive PC port rights to the arcade game, they assumed that Nintendo was also working with Coleco behind their backs. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up, the North American video game industry had crashed and Ray Kassar had stepped down as CEO of Atari, causing the agreement to be called off entirely. The Famicom wouldn't reach international shores until 1985, when Nintendo began distributing a revised version in North America themselves as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In the Xbox One version of GoldenEye 007, the DK Mode - named after Donkey Kong for changing the proportions of in-game models to those of DK's from Donkey Kong 64 - retains its name. Given that Nintendo were directly involved in the project to re-release GoldenEye 007, with the game having a simultaneous relaunch on Nintendo Switch Online and Microsoft Store, this could be the first time Nintendo has officially allowed their IP to be referenced on a direct rival console.

Nintendo has had an interesting relationship with the film company Universal Pictures. In 1982, Universal attempted to sue Nintendo for its 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong being similar to their 1933 film "King Kong", to no avail. Universal would then feature a fictional video game tournament set at Universal Studios in the 1989 film "The Wizard", which also marked the debut appearance of Super Mario Bros. 3 in America. This film would later inspire Nintendo and Universal to host the real-life Nintendo World Championships at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1990. 25 years later, Nintendo and Universal would announce a collaboration with the development of Super Nintendo World located in various Universal Studios theme parks around the world. This partnership would then culminate in another collaboration with the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie".

While Nintendo's name is often translated as "leave luck to heaven," the veracity of this is dubious at best, owed in part to a lack of historical documentation and the wide range of possible readings for the name as written in Kanji. Among other things, "Nintendo" can also be interpreted as the more mundane "the temple of free hanafuda," referring to the company's initial purpose as a playing card manufacturer. Late president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was descended from company founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, admitted that he didn't know what "Nintendo" actually meant, and that "leave luck to heaven" was only accepted by the company because it seemed plausible.

According to Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo attempted to develop an erotic game called Fascination in the 1970's. Intended for the Laser Clay Shooting System, which combined a light gun with pre-recorded 16mm film clips, the game was designed as an adult-oriented sister title to 1974's Wild Gunman, where the goal was to shoot a woman's clothes off in response to cues in the footage; a successful gameplay session would end with the woman being left completely nude. Prototypes were created using footage of a hired model, but according to Yokoi, the game was ultimately shelved due to the machinery in the cabinets being infeasibly fragile and complex compared to Wild Gunman.

Shortly before Shigeru Miyamoto's GDC 2007 keynote was about to start, Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime was taking the time to sign autographs and pose for pictures, when one gamer shouted from the crown, "Kick his ass and take his name!". Reggie asked, "Who?" - to the reply of "Phil Harrison, front row!"

Phil Harrison, a representative director of Sony at the time, was seated in the center of the front row in the crowd. Reggie Fils-Aime smiled and responded with "Some would say we've already done that," referring to the Wii outselling the PlayStation 3.

According to Activision Blizzard's former CEO Bobby Kotick in an interview on the podcast "Grit", the American conglomerate holdings company Berkshire Hathaway was at one point interested in buying Nintendo, or at least exploring the idea of it. Former vice chairman Charlie Munger had mentioned this to him during a period in the early 2010's when French investment company Vivendi was forced to sell its stake in Activision Blizzard, as Berkshire Hathaway was one of the potential buyers (in the end, they would buy themselves back from Vivendi and go independent). Kotick claimed that Munger didn't like the business of video games, feeling that they were "a step removed from gambling" and that Kotick was "preying off people's addictions", but he saw financial value in Activision Blizzard and Nintendo as companies:


In the end, Munger never went through with the idea, and Berkshire Hathaway has not shown any interest or intent to buy a video game company since.

The first official crossover between a Nintendo property and a Sega property is often assumed to be either Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games or Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While these are indeed the first Nintendo-Sega crossovers within the gaming medium, there have been instances prior of crossovers in supplementary marketing material:

• A 1994 advert made by DIC for animation industry insiders showing their global reach through the Panda Club and Dragon Club TV blocks in China shows Sonic The Hedgehog waving through a TV screen while Mario pats him on the back, joined by Madeline from the Madeline book series and Billy Lee as seen in the cartoon adaptation of Double Dragon.
• The infamous Fight for the FoxBox promotional film made by 4Kids Entertainment in 2003, which utilizes existing anime and cartoon clips to make a new crossover story, shows Dr. Eggman and King Dedede as allies alongside Dial-bolic from Ultimate MUSCLE, Dr. K from Cubix: Robots for Everyone, and Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles working for Wayne from The Cramp Twins in an attempt to shut down the titular television channel. Although the villains do interact in this half-hour film, the heroes mostly do not, with Kirby and Sonic never sharing screen time in particular.

This is, of course, discounting instances of unauthorised parodies and mockery at the height of the console wars.

Monolith Soft was originally owned by Namco, but their relationship took a negative turn after Masaya Nakamura stepped down as president of Namco in 2002, three years prior to the company's merger with Bandai. As the company underwent changes, Monolith Soft felt that they were being given less creative freedom due to the newly-created Bandai Namco being less willing to take creative risks. They received consultation from Nintendo executive director Shinji Hatano, who advised them to continue making innovative projects. This inspired Monolith Soft to break away from Bandai Namco in favor of becoming a Nintendo subsidiary: Monolith Soft was allowed creative freedom in exchange for developing software exclusively for Nintendo platforms.

Initially, Nintendo had acquired an 80% share of the company, while Bandai Namco retained 16% of the company and remained as a development partner in part to strengthen their relationship with Nintendo. The remaining 4% was divided between the company's founders: Tetsuya Takahashi, Hirohide Sugiura, and Yasuyuki Honne. However, by April 2011, Nintendo had acquired the remaining 400 shares from Bandai Namco, granting them 96% ownership of Monolith Soft. The acquisition as a whole was notable for contrasting Nintendo's previous approach of not taking part in mergers and acquisitions of other companies. In a statement on the matter, former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated:


In December 2024, Nintendo purchased the remaining shares from the company's founders, fully acquiring Monolith Soft.

The NJS-3D1 was a PC flight stick made by Laral Group LLC - unusually, the flight stick bears the name and official quality seal of Nintendo on its packaging, along with a Nintendo 64 logo on the controller itself, despite not being compatible with any of Nintendo's hardware. The controller was made in a short-lived deal to manufacture PC accessories with Nintendo branding, with the only other product to come out of the line being a set of headphones.

At Spaceworld 2000 during the unveiling of the GameCube, there were five models that came from backstage each one holding a uniquely colored GameCube, the hot pink color never seeing an official release. Each GameCube featured a small window cut into the jewel (black circular disk atop the GameCube) allowing for the player to see the disk and disk tray. These prototypes do not actually function as they were made just to be shown at Spaceworld 2000.

Lexibook, a company infamous for low-quality unlicensed NES-based consoles (or "Famiclones") featuring plagiarized content from a variety of sources including Nintendo games, entered an official agreement with Nintendo in 2020 to license various Nintendo IPs including Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario.

Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé was approached by rapper Kanye West with an idea of a video game, later to be known as "Only One", which was based on his late mother, Donda West, where players have to "guide his mother to the gates of Heaven by holding her to the light." Fils-Aimé politely declined his offer due to the amount of projects that were currently in development within the company at the time.

According to a later article by Nintendo Everything, West attempted to pitch his game idea to Shigeru Miyamoto as well, showing him a prototype for Only One during E3 2015. Miyamoto described the game as "very interesting" and "very moving," voicing his approval for the idea, but ultimately didn't go through with it, likely due to Nintendo's glut of prior commitments.