History of Nintendo
Their first video arcade game was 1975's "EVR Race"; a handful of others followed in the next several years, "Radar Scope" and "Donkey Kong" being among the most famous of these. The early 1980s saw Nintendo's video game division (led by Yokoi) creating some of its most famous arcade titles. The massively popular "Donkey Kong" was created in 1981, with Shigeru Miyamoto as its mastermind, and released in the arcades and on the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision video game systems (although Nintendo themselves generally had no involvement with these early console ports). This release method would be used on several later Nintendo arcade games of this same period, including the original "Mario Bros." (not to be confused with the later "Super Mario Bros.") In addition to this arcade and dedicated console game activity, Nintendo was testing the consumer handheld video game waters with the Game & Watch.
History of Nintendo
Following the aforementioned success, in 1963 "Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd." was renamed to "Nintendo" by Yamauchi. Nintendo now began to experiment in other areas of business using the newly injected capital. During the period of time between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a taxi company, "love hotel" chain, food company (trying to sell instant rice, similar to instant noodles) and several other things (including a vacuum cleaner, Chiritory, which later appeared in a two-player minigame in "" in 2003). All these ventures eventually failed, except toymaking, where they had some earlier experience from selling playing cards. In 1964, while Japan was experiencing an economic boom due to the Tokyo Olympics, the playing card business reached its saturation point. Japanese households stopped buying playing cards, and the price of Nintendo stock fell from 900 yen to 60 yen.