Nintendo/Awesome

• How about bringing the entire American game industry Back from the Dead, basically single-handed? Others took up the torch, but Ninty led the way after Atari screwed the pooch.
• Nintendo showed why they were top banana after Universal Studios tried to sue them for Donkey Kong. Nintendo tried to be reasonable and offered partnership. Universal refused, hoping to destroy the video game company. At a formal dinner where Universal expected Nintendo to agree to pay profits from their game they were slapped with the truth: the story King Kong is actually public domain^[1], and Nintendo were now taking Universal to court.
  • Even moreso, Universal had a case prior to this with a similar topic, only Universal succeeded in trying to prove that King Kong was public domain
• E3 2010. Just... E3 2010.
• Technically a Real Life example, but directly related to video games: The year is 2006. Nintendo has been lagging behind the competition since 1995, when Sony Playstation overtook the video game industry. The PSX beat Nintendo 64 by a landslide, and the somewhat more popular Gamecube was still no match for the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. People were wondering what Nintendo had up their sleeve next, and about a week before E3 2006, Nintendo finally announced their long-awaited new console. It was called Wii. It was only slightly more powerful than Gamecube. It used a freaking remote control instead of a traditional gamepad. Many laughed it off as marketing suicide. Then E3 came along, and now that everyone had gotten the laughter out of their system, they were starting to admit that it could be pretty cool. September 2006 comes along and the Wii outsells every other console and is basically the biggest mainstream success for the video game industry to date, putting Nintendo at the top of the heap for the first time in a decade. And two years later, it's still the top seller. This wasn't marketing suicide; it was marketing genius. It's a Crowning Moment of Awesome that most likely resulted in some big fat raises for all involved.
  • One should also note that most consoles (both versions of the Xbox, PlayStation 2, Play Station 3, Gamecube) sell at a loss, making a profit on the games themselves. Each Wii console sold at $250, while costing only $150 to make, giving Nintendo a $100 profit per console.
  • Also in there has to be Nintendo's 1984 decimation of Universal Studios in court, then. Nintendo, a small maker of games, has a bona-fide hit with Donkey Kong, a game clearly inspired by King Kong. Universal Studios lets them quietly go ahead for a while, then sends in the lawyers, demanding that Nintendo wholly cease the production, turn over all profits to Universal, and basically crawl back with their tail between their legs. Nintendo, in response, tells Universal Studios, a massively larger company, that they're ready to see them in court. (Purportedly, the announcement of this over a business dinner caused the Universal reps to heatedly storm out of the room.) Nintendo's clever legal strategy consisted of a single fact: Universal Studios didn't own King Kong, as the property had in entered public domain. In fact, Universal Studios themselves had gone to lengths to prove this in a previous court case. Needless to say, Nintendo won, and they quickly earned a reputation as a tough company to push around.
    • The fact that King Kong had entered public domain is what made Nintendo strategy so brilliant: basically, Universal cried "You Ripped Off King Kong!" Nintendo's answer was Yes, we did, and No, we're not going to pay you ONE CENT for this.
  • Then there's the story of when Microsoft tried to buy out Nintendo. During I think 2005, before the Wii was announced, Nintendo was of course dead last in the console race. Microsoft, who almost literally have their US headquarters right across the street from Nintendo's US headquarters, decided to take some time off during lunch and walked over to try to buy out Nintendo. The response was to send them to Japan to talk to Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, to talk about it (quite a reasonable course of action given what was happening). So they did, and during the meeting Iwata did something so bizarre, so offensive, so unspeakably against all normal code of conduct for Japanese (and American) businessmen that the Microsoft representatives left out of sheer confusion. The best part? We don't know what he did.
  • Nintendo's E3 2010 Conference has become the stuff of industry legend, due in no small part to their drastic change in how they presented their games that year. After two years of focusing heavily on casual games at E3 (and having several Narm-worthy live demos with Nintendo staff members who looked embarrassed and out of place), the company ditched the Powerpoint presentations and went back to basics. The 2010 conference consisted of Reggie Fils-Aime, Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata announcing triple-AAA franchise after triple-AAA franchise, along with several sequels to classic Nintendo games of yore. They included a new Legend of Zelda title with Wii Motion Plus control, a new Kirby reimagining, an updated port of GoldenEye (starring Daniel Craig's voice and likeness in the title role), a new Metroid and a new Donkey Kong Country game. They followed these announcements up with the unveiling of the Nintendo 3DS, the first 3D gaming system not to require special glasses, and its platform of launch and upcoming titles (which included, among several others, a new Kid Icarus game (lampshaded by main character Pit in a trailer when he proclaims, "Sorry to keep you waiting!"), a 3D port of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and a new Assassin's Creed title). The whole presentation ended with a commercial where Fils-Aime laughs at Miyamoto and Iwata (who have been digitized into the 3DS) before having his face burned off by Bowser, and then booth babes walking into the audience to let them play the portable 3DS for the first time, along with Legend of Zelda demos rising from just below the stage. What truely made the 2010 conference brilliant is that you just know Nintendo was probably waiting three years for Sony and Microsoft to jump onto the "casual" bandwagon, and THEN they went into an all-out hardcore frenzy, practically reviving every single franchise that fans were thinking they'd forgotten.
    • As Penny Arcade noted, one thing that wouldn't have been out of place in Nintendo's presentation was "Santa Claus...in our booth, giving out fucking handjobs."

1. ↑ Something that's copyrights have expired, i.e. Shakespheare