Older than the aeroplane
Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889, making hanafuda — handmade Japanese playing cards — fourteen years before the Wright brothers flew. It stayed a card company for most of a century.
The 1960s were spent flailing about for something else to be. Nintendo ran a taxi company, sold instant rice, made a love-hotel chain and produced a vacuum cleaner and a toy called the Ultra Hand. Most of it failed. Toys did not, and from toys came electronic games, and from electronic games came MARIO.
Old technology, used cleverly
Nintendo's in-house philosophy was summed up by the engineer Gunpei Yokoi as lateral thinking with withered technology: take components that are cheap, well understood and years out of date, then find a use nobody else has thought of. Cheap parts mean you can take risks, and an old chip nobody wants is an old chip you can afford to play with.
It produced the cross-shaped direction pad, invented in 1982 to fit a flat handheld game and copied by practically every controller since. The same instinct shows up later in motion controls that got grandparents playing tennis in the living room, and in the SWITCH, a console that lifts off the television and goes in a bag.
Characters that outlive their consoles
The machines come and go; the cast stays. MARIO and LUIGI, LINK from the world of ZELDA, the bounty hunter SAMUS from METROID, the pink puffball KIRBY, the ape Donkey Kong, BOWSER, WARIO, YOSHI, TOAD and the ever-squashed GOOMBA have all outlasted the hardware they were born on.
That is deliberate. Nintendo tends to build a new machine around an idea for play rather than raw power — and when the hardware is unusual, familiar faces are what persuade people to try it. Newer worlds like SPLATOON and PIKMIN join the roster the same way.
The game that got grandparents playing
In 2006 Nintendo put a simple collection of five sports in the box with its new console, controlled by waving a stick rather than pressing buttons. Wii Sports went on to sell more than eighty million copies, largely to people who had never owned a games machine and had no intention of learning one.
Bowling and tennis turned up in care homes, hospital rehabilitation wards and church halls. The graphics were plain and the games were shallow by any serious measure, and none of that mattered, because for once nobody had to be told which button did what.
Easy to pick up, hard to put down
The house style is a game a child can start without reading anything, hiding difficulty that takes years to exhaust. A PIKACHU or a MUSHROOM tells you what it does by how it looks, and the first minute of most Nintendo games quietly teaches the controls without a tutorial.
It is also why these games cross generations in a way little else in gaming does. A grandparent who last played in the 1980s and a seven-year-old with a SWITCH are both perfectly capable of losing an afternoon to the same game — which makes this grid a rare puzzle where the whole family recognises the words.