23. The Growth of an Entertainment Giant
Most of Nintendo’s ventures were unsuccessful, except for toys. So by the 1960s, Nintendo was mainly a toy company. In 1974, the company got involved in video games for the first time, when it secured the rights to distribute Magnavox’s video game console in Japan. A year later, they moved into arcade games, with some limited success, until 1981, when they released the smash arcade hit Donkey Kong. The rest was video game history.
Long before all of that, when Nintendo had been founded in Kyoto by Japanese entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889, the world was still in the steam power era, and electricity and electronics were considered newfangled inventions. When Yamauchi founded Nintendo, London, half a world away, was still trembling in fear from the depredations of the gruesome serial killer, Jack the Ripper, believed to have between active from 1888 until 1891. Perhaps in a nod to that historic overlap, in 2013 Nintendo 3DS launched Mystery Murders: Jack the Ripper, a game rated M for Mature.