Nintendo video game consoles
Nintendo video game consoles
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Nintendo video game consoles

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Nintendo video game consoles

The Japanese multinational consumer electronics company Nintendo has developed eight home video game consoles and multiple portable consoles for use with external media, as well as dedicated consoles and other hardware for their consoles. As of September 19, 2025, Nintendo has sold over 869.95 million hardware units.

The company's first console, the Color TV-Game, was a success in Japan but was never released in other territories. Their first systems to achieve worldwide success were the Game & Watch handheld series, before achieving greater worldwide success with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), originally released as the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan in 1983. The NES restarted the video game industry after the video game crash of 1983, and was an international success. In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, which became the first handheld console to sell in large numbers. In the early 1990s, Nintendo's market lead began to decrease; although the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was a strong seller, the Sega Genesis was a very strong contender. Nintendo and Sega would both lose a significant portion of the console market towards the end of the 1990s, as Sony's PlayStation became the most popular console, beating the Nintendo 64, though Nintendo managed to sell more than Sega Saturn.

The Dreamcast, released in 1998, PlayStation 2, released in 2000, and Microsoft's Xbox, released in 2001, would eventually relegate Nintendo to third place in the international market, despite the release of the GameCube. However, they retained their lead in the handheld console market, with the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance models. Towards the middle of the 2000s, Nintendo introduced the first successful handheld device with a touch screen (DS) and the first successful console designed for motion controlled inputs (the Wii); they became some of the best-selling consoles of all time. In 2011, Nintendo became the first major company to release a handheld game console with stereoscopic 3D capabilities, with the 3DS, which had very strong sales from the beginning. The Wii U, released in November 2012, was much less successful, and sales were significantly lower than predicted. The Nintendo Switch, by contrast, was released in March 2017 and has become the company's best-selling home console and overall third best-selling console of all time. A successor, the Nintendo Switch 2, was released on June 5, 2025.

Color TV-Game is a series of five dedicated home consoles released only in Japan. Each of the consoles contained a small number of games and a built-in controller. In total, approximately 3 million units were sold.

The Color TV-Game series consists of:

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is an 8-bit home video game console. It was first released in Japan on July 15, 1983, as the Family Computer (Famicom) and would become Nintendo's first home video game console released outside Japan. It was released in US test markets as the redesigned NES in October 1985 and fully launched in North America the following year. The NES was distributed in South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Africa throughout the 1980s under various names.

Selling 61.91 million units worldwide, the NES helped revitalize the video game industry following the video game crash of 1983, and set the standard for subsequent consoles in everything from game design to business practices. The NES was the first console for which the manufacturer openly courted third-party developers. The console also launched many of Nintendo's most iconic franchises, such as The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. Nintendo continued to repair Famicom consoles in Japan until October 31, 2007, attributing the decision to discontinue support to an increasing shortage of the necessary parts.

Nintendo released a software emulation-based version of the Nintendo Entertainment System on November 10, 2016. Called the NES Classic Edition, it is a dedicated console that comes with a single controller and 30 preloaded games.

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