Nintendo

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For a complete history of Nintendo, see Nintendo.

Nintendo (Japanese for "leave luck to heaven") is the game developer and publisher of the Legend of Zelda series. Except for the Philips CD-i Games games, which are not part of the Zelda canon, no other developer has made a Zelda game.

Starting as a playing card company, and eventually evolving into electronic toys, Nintendo has been a mainstay of the video game industry since the premiere of the arcade game Donkey Kong in 1981.

Nintendo has produced seven different video game consoles (not counting Game & Watch or other LCD games), of which a Zelda game has appeared on each.

Offices
The main offices are in Kyoto, Japan. The American division, Nintendo of America, rests in Redmond, Washington. Richmond, British Columbia hosts Nintendo of Canada. The European offices, Nintendo Europe, are in GroÃostheim, Germany. Other main offices include China, Korea, and Australia.

Current Employees
Satoru Iwata is the current president and CEO of the company, hired in 2002 when Hiroshi Yamauchi retired. He is the fourth president of the company and the first to not be related to Yamauchi, the company's founder, by blood or marriage. He is known for being the software coordinator of the Kirby games.

Reggie Fils-Aime, the COO of Nintendo of America, was hired in 2003 as Executive Vice President of sales and marketing in North America. In 2006, he became chief operating officer, and is the first American to hold this position.

Shigeru Miyamoto still works as chief game designer, often balancing near forty projects at a time.

Revenue
Nintendo earned $7.8 billion in 2006, making their Forbes Fortune 500 rank 620. They employ 3,013 people.

Nintendo and Zelda
In the 70s, Nintendo began the process of moving from playing cards to toys to electronic toys. Hiroshi Yamuchi and Gunpei Yokoi facilitated this change after they noticed their profits being eaten by companies like Bandai and Namco. In 1977, Nintendo hired Shigeru Miyamoto, the progenitor of the Zelda series. During this time, Yokoi tutored Miyamoto, and the two combined innovative hardware with creative presentation.

In 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom system (the Japanese NES). Despite some hiccups, the sales were phenomenal.

The release of Super Mario Bros. marked a new trend in game goals - instead of trying to get a high score, the player would try to "complete" the quest. During the development of this game, Miyamoto also worked on "The Legend of Zelda" which would be a less linear gameplay experience. He based the idea around the caves, forests, and fields he explored as a boy in his hometown of Kyoto.

In February 1986, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Fantasy for the Famicom Disk System peripheral (a floppy disk drive that enabled savable games). In 1987, the game was released internationally, but in a cartridge format with battery backup. Nintendo feared this paradigm shift in gameplay during its development, but The Legend of Zelda sold more than a million copies in both Japan and North America, solidifying its dedication to the franchise.

Along with Mario, Nintendo focused heavily on the Link character in its marketing, including the Fun Club newsletter, commercials (which were expensive for Nintendo and thus had to be designed carefully), and merchandise.