In May 32st, 2002, after 53 years running Nintendo and steering it to the forefront of the gaming industry, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired from his position as President, and became chairman of the Nintendo board of directors. His successor, Satoru Iwata, head of Nintendo's Corporate Planning Division, was named as his successor and became the first Nintendo Present outside of the Yamauchi family.
Under the new presidency, Nintendo started looking for more out-of-the-box approaches to the market, not just by increasing the quality of the games, but how the games are played. First they released the Nintendo DS in 2004, the world's first home gaming system with a touch sensitive screen, and the first Nintendo handheld to not use the Game Boy moniker since the Nintendo Game & Watch. The Nintendo released the DS in direct competition with Sony's handheld the Sony PSP and the Nokia N-Gage. The new approach to gameplay was a hit and drove the DS to the #1 selling handheld, even breaking the Game Boy Advance's sales record in a fraction of the time.
After 5 years of planning the Nintendo Revolution is renamed the Nintendo Wii and releases in North America on November 19th, 2006, making the Wii the first Nintendo console to ship in the United States before Japan. The Wii features numerous innovations from its unique motion controls, backwards compatibility with GameCube discs, and the Wii Virtual Console that includes numerous interactive features including Wii Shop Channel's Virtual Console where gamers can purchase and download classic NES, SNES and N64 titles as well as games from their previous competitors such as the SEGA Master System and Genesis, The TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD, and the Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD. In Europe many Commodore 64 titles are also available, plus in Japan games from the classic MSX computer system. All of these features combined in a single system selling at a lower cost than any other Next-Gen console on the market.
Maintaining their stance that the gameplay is more important over super HD graphics quality, the Wii sold out in just a few hours at its launch and nearly two years later it is still difficult to track down with demand increasing faster than Nintendo can manufacture them. The success of the Nintendo DS and the Wii has shot Nintendo back to the top of the console market and predicting them as the winners of the console wars.
With its 117 year lineage Nintendo has seen the entirety of video game history and the only console manufacturer to consistently release a system for every generation of gaming console. They continue to remain on top, now with new ways to deliver classic games to a mass audience.
