Nintendo
In 1975, Nintendo moved into the video arcade game industry with "EVR Race", designed by their first game designer, Genyo Takeda, and several more games followed. Nintendo had some small success with this venture, but the release of "Donkey Kong" in 1981, designed by Miyamoto, changed Nintendo's fortunes dramatically. The success of the game and many licensing opportunities (such as ports on the Atari 2600, Intellivision and ColecoVision) gave Nintendo a huge boost in profit and in addition, the game also introduced an early iteration of Mario, then known in Japan as Jumpman, the eventual company mascot.
History of Nintendo
In 1993, Nintendo announced plans to develop a new 64-bit console codenamed "Project Reality" that would be capable of rendering fully 3D environments and characters. In 1994, Nintendo also claimed that Project Reality would be renamed "Ultra 64" in the US. The "Ultra 64" moniker was unveiled in arcades on the Nintendo branded fighting game "Killer Instinct" and the racing game "Cruisin' USA". "Killer Instinct" was later released on the SNES. Soon after, Nintendo realized they had mistakenly chosen a name for their new console that the Konami corporation owned the rights to. Specifically, only Konami would have the rights to release games for the new system called "Ultra Football", "Ultra Tennis", etc. Therefore, in 1995 Nintendo changed the final name of the system to the "Nintendo 64", and announced that it would be released in 1996. They later showed previews of the system and several games, including "Super Mario 64", to the media and public. 1995 is also the year that Nintendo purchased part of Rare.