If you've got even one geeky bone in your body, the odds are you have fond memories of something Nintendo related. Whether it's Donkey Kong, the Super NES, Dennis Hopper playing King Koopa or Pokémon cereal, the Big N has bestowed precious childhood memories on every one of us.
So brace your brain for a blast from the past as we don the nostalgia goggles and celebrate the weird and wonderful, as well as all the hits and misses of Nintendo.
The company now recognisable as Nintendo got its start in 1889 making playing cards, and didn't start cranking out video games until the latter half of the last century. Its first home system was the Color TV Game 6, which provided kids of the seventies with six glorious Pong rip-offs.
Arcade success followed, with the legendary Donkey Kong appearing in 1981, and the NES console making its debut later in the eighties.
Super Mario Bros, Excitebike, Metroid and the Legend of Zelda were just a few of the excellent NES titles kids could sink their teeth into. The console rescued the industry from the video game crash of 1983 and paved the way for the even-more-ace Super NES, or SNES.
The Game Boy, the horrible Virtual Boy, the N64, terrible kids cartoons, Gary Oak, that tune fromTetris, vibrating controllers -- there's an awful lot to talk about. I didn't even have time to mention the unending catalogue of excellent Nintendo music, or wax lyrical about falling through that one white block in Mario Bros 3 to get the warp flute.
But while Nintendo's past is littered with treasures, can it also look forward to a similarly glittering future? The company's next console will be the Wii U -- an attempt to satisfy Nintendo's new casual audience, while winning over hardcore gamers who may have been put off by the graphically-limited Wii.
(courtesy:cnet.com)
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