Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “NINTENDO – 43 Biggest SECRETS”.
Did you know, Nintendo has been around since 1889, like literally the time of the Ottoman Empire that they have an official accessory? That’S a one-to-one of a revolver all that until Mario came along Nintendo’s mascot was meant to be disco. He appeared on the manuals for lots of early games in Japan, but as soon as Nintendo saw people’s reaction to Mario, he was very quickly buried, but has shown up in a lot of places as an Easter egg, including the surprisingly awesome, Mario Bros movie. You think you know Nintendo right, you think they’re, just this normal gaming company, who made a couple of consoles well here, are 40 more things that you didn’t know that will completely switch that image right around. So what was Nintendo doing all the way back in 1889? I mean they weren’t, making Mario Kart.
That’S for sure. This company actually started out making hanafuda cards in Japan, which became really popular really quickly, because the government had recently outlawed most forms of gambling, but Nintendo’s hanafuda managed to loophole their way around that, and so, if you ever wondered what Nintendo actually means it can either Be translated to leave luck to Heaven, a reference to gambling or the more literal Temple of free hanafuda free, emphasizing the fact that Nintendo’s hanapuda were allowed and not outlawed. But after a few years of this, something crazy happened.
The president of Nintendo, at the time, while visiting one of the company’s hanafuda factories spotted this extending arm-like toy, it had been made by one of the maintenance Engineers gunpei yokoi, just for a bit of fun, but the presidents loved it and sensing that Nintendo was starting To reach their limits when it comes to playing cards, he ordered yokoi to actually develop this toy into a real Nintendo product just in time for the Christmas rush, so he did and it ended up being called the ultra. Thus, basically, overnight, pivoting Nintendo from a card company to a toy company and this guy gun pay from a regular maintenance guy to basically Chief inventor, that turned out to be a pretty good decision. Since he’s the man who, later down the line, ended up creating Nintendo’s. First, ever handheld game console The Game and Watch The even more iconic Game Boy and he’s also the one who’s responsible for basically the entire way that Nintendo operates.
You know how people always complain that compared to PlayStation and Xbox Nintendo is consistently behind. In terms of tech that they never use the latest components well, this was gunpe yukoi’s entire design philosophy, but he called lateral thinking with withered technology. The idea that people don’t need Cutting Edge Tech to have fun. It just requires the company to do some out-of-the-box thinking and if you can do that, you can have the same levels of success with far less cost and now you’re looking for it. I apologize if I’ve ruined Nintendo for you, but you will see traces of this Vision across every one of their products.
This is why Nintendo’s first game and watch use the same, fixed image display as a calculator and why today’s Nintendo switch released with a chipset. That was two years old, even when it launched. Am I happy about it? Not really is the switch still my most played current console by far yes, it is this guy yokoi was such a big part of Nintendo’s success over the years that Nintendo later decided to honor his contributions with a real video game, titled Grill off with ultra hat And Ultra hand, wasn’t the only toy Nintendo ended up making seeing the success of Lego in the late 1960s, who just introduced the concept of a wheel which changed the entire Paradigm of what was possible Nintendo started to think yeah.
We can do that too, and very shortly pivoted. Their efforts towards building their own lego-like nnb building blocks they’ve had ads directly, comparing their blocks to Lego, to show how their revolutionary circular design was more appealing and Lego sued them. Understandably, Nintendo actually won that lawsuit, but only later realized thanks to their very peed off customers that actually the pieces, all being so rounded made them work together, much less well than Lego.
It wasn’t until 1977 that Nintendo’s crew trajectory was set when they released the color TV game, their first ever video game console with each version of the console only able to play one single game. Imagine that nowadays Sony releases, the ps6 says you can only play Gollum on it right. So that’s basically Nintendo’s history time for some surprising durability, facts.
I really hope we caught that the Nintendo DS is the only console to have survived a trip all the way up to the top of Mount Everest, the moisture, the icy cold temperatures, the wind, the spilled Curry. Apparently, even when all other professional electronic equipment the climbers were carrying failed, this is what lived on during the Gulf War in 1990, a medic had left his game boy in a tent and that tent got bombed now, naturally, you’d assume any possession of yours that gets Bombed is a write-off you’d, throw it away, but just what seemed like a bit of a sick joke. This medic decided to send his melted Game Boy in for repair when he got back, but then the Nintendo repair staff, when they received this fry Game Boy and stuck a game of Tetris in just to try and see if it was even repairable, found that it Wasn’T just repairable, but it actually still worked, but it gets crazier because the Game Boy was also the first console ever to be taken to space. In 1993, Russian cosmonaut Alexander cerebralov spent an astonishing 196 days in the Russian space station, with the handheld and a copy of Tetris. So remind him what gravity feels like like all cosmonauts, I love sports. My particular favorites are football and swimming during flight.
In rare minutes of leisure, I enjoy playing Game Boy, ropes, cerebral in an autographed note that accompanies The Game and his game boy in a 2011 auction, so yeah. If there’s one brand of consoles that you could confidently take to war with you, it’s Nintendo. But what about the weirdness of Nintendo’s characters like how Mario in the original Donkey Kong arcade, where he first appeared, wasn’t meant to be? Mario Nintendo actually wanted to use Popeye as the main protagonist, but just couldn’t get the licensing rights, and it’s only then that they realize that they actually need a character of their own, so they decided to create Jumpman yeah.
I think the creative team were having a day off, but Jumpman over the coming years became Mario and Mario as a character now has managed to sell Nintendo over 800 million video games. Did you ever wonder why Mario’s gorilla Nemesis is called Donkey? Kong well donkey in a Japanese to English dictionary is an adjective meaning, stubborn and Nintendo wanted to make it immediately obvious to passers Via arcades that the enemy character is a stubborn, hey. Zelda is named after the famous novelist in playwright, Zelda Fitzgerald.
Some reason I think they just liked her name, but then, where does Link’s name come from? It’S not short for Lincoln. Well, the very first Zelda game was originally going to feature time travel with link being the literal link between past and future. They, of course, did go on to use this concept in later Zelda games, but a lot of people didn’t know that this was the intention right from the very beginning. If you look at Kirby game box, art in Japan versus the US you’ll notice, his face is angrier in the U.S and cute in Japan, and this is intentional Nintendo found from their market research that all demographics in Japan responded well to cuteness, but that in the Us they felt like they needed Kirby to be cool more than cute, because they didn’t think that boys would play otherwise, which is hilarious. Since Kirby was very nearly going to be called tinkle popo. I don’t think that would have been quite the same hit. One of Nintendo’s top lawyers, John Kirby, owns the exclusive worldwide right to name sailboats Donkey Kong. As a very strange thank you gift for winning Nintendo a massive lawsuit.
This was a huge Case by the way, funnily enough from Universal, who tried to sue them say That Donkey Kong was fringing on the rights of King Kong, oh and they also bought him a thirty thousand dollar boat for him to name the Donkey Kong. But that’s less funny than this idea of a god-given right of you, and only you can name your boats, Donkey Kong funny, but then also notice, something interesting about that guy’s name John Kirby. So the reason that Kirby didn’t end up being called tinkle popo was this. Guy right here, unsung hero right just before we get to the Easter eggs, which not gon na lie, is my absolute favorite thing.
I want to show you how, even though Nintendo does tend to stick to less cutting-edge Tech in their machines, that is also impossible to deny how much they’ve innovated in their own way they were the first to bring in the concept of a d-pad or directional pad. Funnily enough, also engineered by our guy gunpei, the same for the analog stick, which appeared on the N64 in 1996 before Sony or Sega, could beat them to the punch. They mainstream the ability to save game progress on cartridges in the west instead of having to use floppy drives. They basically installed tiny batteries into the cartridges which basically keep the game running in a really low power State when taken out, which is needed so that it doesn’t reset to its original state without progress.
These cartridge batteries have lasted 20 30 years with grown adults. Even now, carrying on their childhood save files, Nintendo made the first shoulder buttons appearing on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. At a time where developers were scratching their heads thinking.
What on Earth do we do with all of these inputs, which is funny because nowadays we have two times that Nintendo introduced controller Rumble in 1997, with the rumble pack for your N64 controllers? Again, at a time where the idea of a controller that could vibrate interactively with what was happening in a game felt like a whole new unexplored dimension. So many big gaming features that we nowadays just take for granted. Nintendo were the ones who either invented them or popularized them, and then there was the Virtual Boy, the first ever mass-produced virtual reality system, which is crazy, considering that this is 1995 we’re talking about it’s the year that I was born, but this was also a pretty Good example of why you shouldn’t always rush to be first, the virtual boy was VR, but long before VR was good enough to make the tag usable. It could only display images in black and red which ended up giving people headaches. It launched with no good games, because Nintendo was too busy prepping for the N64 that they knew would be a hit, and the main problem was that, while initially conceived as a lightweight set of goggles that you could wear and take anywhere, the Virtual Boy ended up.
Being so heavy that Nintendo had to build and ship a custom stand with it that required you to use it on a table and lean into it, making it a very literal pain in the neck. So we’ve talked a fair bit about the inventor gunpow yokoi, but he isn’t the only weirdly, well-known Nintendo executive because compared to other companies like Sony and Microsoft, who tend to keep one or two public facing figures, Nintendo likes to put their developers at the front and Center to the point where they become almost as beloved as the company’s actual characters like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Super Mario and the Legend of Zelda games, basically the architect of a lot of people’s childhoods. What I thought was so cool is that he created the original Zelda on NES as arguably the first open world game, because he wanted to give players the same feeling he had as a kid exploring outdoors in his hometown, especially the feeling of discovering a cave I.E. The very first thing you do in the game to get your sword or like the current president of Nintendo of America, whose name is literally Doug Bowser, that’s the fact and fun as that is even he has not yet lived up to the legendary meme Overlord status Of the previous president of Nintendo America, Reggie fills Amy. What I think it’s actually pronounced, Reggie fisa me, but I prefer my version, who came in hard with his very first introduction to the fans at E3 2004, and it’s not just this.
Reggie has had a million other golden moments, like my body is ready, which then became my body is Reggie, and then him actually adopting the fan nickname of the reginator, and then this satoru Iwata, who was the president of the entire company from 2002 until his tragic Passing in 2015., there are a million stories you could tell about Iwata like the fact that when the Wii – U was failing and tanking Nintendo’s entire stock value, this guy outright refused to fire. Any employees instead cut his own salary in half all, but he’s the reason that the second generation of Pokemon games feature both the region from the second game and the entire first game, bundled into one. The dev team was struggling already just to fit in one region, but Iwata was so insistent that he wanted to give the fans more, but he single-handedly developed a compression tool so powerful that it not only saved the game’s entire development but allowed them to stop almost Another full game in there too, and if you’re enjoying this video, then a sub to the channel would be Nintendo and dopamine inducing so at launch.
The switch had a hidden Easter egg left in there by developers in memory of Iwata a ROM of NES golf. The first game he worked on at Nintendo, which would only appear when he performed his signature directly to you gesture with both joy-cons, which he would do at the start of every Nintendo Direct presentation. Speaking of NES Golf and Easter eggs, no one seems to know this, but the golf course in Wii Sports enjoyed by tens of millions is actually the exact same course layout first created in NES golf in 1987, but just now in 3D, which is both really cool To see the original ideas brought to life, and also one really smart way to save yourself dropping out new courses, they also then reuse. Those same courses for Clubhouse games on the switch the GameCube launch jingle has two secret Alternatives, so this is what the normal one sounds like dead.
On your controller. It makes a squeaky dog sound and then, if you plug in all four controllers and hold Z on all of them, it turns into a traditional Japanese drum theme to honor the console’s country of origin and then as an homage to the GameCube. When you have to press the same button three times to launch your current Nintendo switch, I imagine most people just mash the a button, but if you press either ZR or ZL or clicking the sticks it’ll make. Similarly, unusual sounds: if you boot up a DS on your birthday. The boot jingle will be more sparkly on Wii. U, your Miis will sit there and applaud you. Also Nintendo picture chat will display a happy birthday message when you join a roof. Oh – and this is so cool on the dsi’s sound editor, if you record any sound and leave it idle for a minute, the console will remix that sound into the Super Mario Bros theme. If you transfer your data from the Wii to the Wii, U the data will actually be carried by Pikmin, which are iconic Nintendo characters. At this point they put way more effort into this animation than they really needed to, and I am all for it. The GameCube has a microscopic dolphin printed on one of its chips: referencing. The fact that dolphin was the console’s code name during development and, if you’ve ever wondered. This is how the Dolphin Emulator that lets you play. Nintendo games on other machines found its name and another physical, hidden, Easter egg, which has got to be my favorite, since a lot of you can go and find this right now, if you tilt your switch, Pro controllers right, stick down shine a torch at the top Of it, you can just about see thanks to all game fans printed on the circuit board.
If you want to see me, buy every single Nintendo handheld console ever then I give that video directly to you. .