Nintendo flips Switch: will new console make 2017 a winning year?
Nintendo's new portable platform seeks to bridge home life and travel - but the maverick company will need industry rivals to jump on board to win success
"Never underestimate Nintendo," runs the maxim, repeated by many a rival video game executive across the decades. By 1991 the company, founded in 1889 to manufacture playing cards, had replaced Toyota as Japan's most successful company, earning around $1.5m per year per employee. In the early 90s, its earnings exceeded that of all the US movie studios combined. That success filled a war chest on which the company has relied in leaner times - which recently have been frequent.
Nintendo has struggled to match the boisterous success of the Wii console, as well as with its identity as a game-maker. In December, after years of equivocation, it finally sent its Super Mario mascot on to the iPhone (a debut that Nintendo resisted for years. "If we did this," the company's late president Satoru Iwata said in 2011, "Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo.").
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