While the Japanese toy market was already dominated by well established companies such as Tomy Co. and Bandi, Gunpei Yokoi, engineering degree steered Nintendo into the emerging world of electronic toys. These electronic toys, all conceived by Yokoi, were extremely popular and allowed Nintendo to carve out their own niche in the toy market. Soon Nintendo formed a joint venture with the Sony Corporation to develop electronic games, the first of which was called the Nintendo Beam Gun Game, a home version of the popular arcade light gun games.
In 1972 the US military test project, the Brown Box project became available to the American public as the first home video game console called the Magnavox Odyssey. Seeing potential for the next steps in electronic games, Nintendo made their first foray into the world of video games in 1975 by acquiring the Odyssey's distribution rights for Japan. This new and exciting market was growing in popularity and with the moderate success of the Odyssey Nintendo started developing their own games and consoles with the Color TV Game systems.
The Color TV Game line of home consoles started in 1977 with the Color TV Game 6, a dedicated console containing six pre-programmed Pong-like games. Developed with a small limited run, the system showed signed of promise and in 1978 Nintendo followed it up with the Color TV Game 15, another dedicated console, this one with a more comfortable design and nine additional games (all variations of Pong). This same year Nintendo released their first video game designed for Arcades called Computer Othello. Although a success, Computer Othello was never released outside of Japan.
Also in 1977, a newly graduated art student Shigeru Miyamoto, through his father's friendship with Nintendo's President Hiroshi Yamauchi, was hired as a staff-artist for Nintendo's planning department. Miyamoto would soon be mentored by Gunpei Yokoi and eventually become one of the most important players in the video game biz, creating Nintendo's most popular properties and being coveted as "The Father of Modern Video Games".
