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.
1980s
The 1980s also was prominent for spawning several popular children's cartoons such as "The Smurfs", "ThunderCats", "Voltron", "The Transformers", "Masters of the Universe", "", "Inspector Gadget", "Muppet Babies", "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", "DuckTales", "Garfield and Friends", "The Raccoons", "Heathcliff" and "Beetlejuice".Popular video games include: "Pac-Man", "Super Mario Bros.", "The Legend of Zelda", "Metroid", "Donkey Kong", "Frogger", "Digger", "Tetris", and "Golden Axe".
"Pac-Man" (1980) was the first game to achieve widespread popularity in mainstream culture and the first game character to be popular in his own right.
Handheld electronic LCD games was introduced into the youth market segment.
The primary gaming computers of the 1980s emerged in 1982: the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Nintendo finally decided in 1985 to release its Famicom (released in 1983 in Japan) in the United States under the name Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was bundled with "Super Mario Bros." and it suddenly became a success. The NES dominated the American and Japanese market until the rise of the next generation of consoles in the early 1990s, causing some to call this time the "Nintendo era".
Sega released its 16-bit console, Mega Drive/Genesis, in 1988 in Japan and in North America in 1989.
In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, a monochrome handheld console.