A history of Nintendo's success through times of global strife as it weathered world wars, a great depression, recessions, natural disasters, and now a pandemic
Hiroshi Yamauchi was a teenager when the first bombs dropped. The young man would become Nintendo's third-ever president … Tweets: @genepark , @winwinirwin , and @sancabmx Tweets: Gene Park / @genepark : Nintendo's earnings have been great during the pandemic. Founded in 1889, Nintendo has weathered world wars, depressions, recessions and natural disasters. a history of the company's resilience, by freelancer Jon Irwin https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Jon Irwin / @winwinirwin : Quite happy to make my @LauncherWP debut with this, a chronicling of Nintendo's success through times of global strife. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Santiago / @sancabmx : “It's 2020. The world is in the midst of a catastrophic health crisis. The Dow Jones witnessed its worst financial quarter since 1987 — and its worst first quarter ever. Yet Nintendo just announced its strongest fiscal results in a decade.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Written at the height of the pandemic, this Washington Post retrospective by Jon Irwin frames Nintendo's surging fortunes — Animal Crossing-era Switch demand — as the latest chapter in a pattern dating to its 1889 founding, tracing the company from Hiroshi Yamauchi's wartime inheritance through depressions and recessions.
The subsequent coverage validates the thesis while complicating it: Doug Bowser used the moment to describe Nintendo's evolution beyond gaming into live events and film (Bowser on the entertainment-company evolution), and by 2023 the strategy showed up in results — Q1 revenue up 50% YoY to ~$3.2B, driven by The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Zelda rather than hardware alone.
First-order effects
- Nintendo enters the pandemic with locked-down consumers driving record engagement around Animal Crossing: New Horizons, giving its leadership a rare demand tailwind while rivals face supply and retail disruption.
Second-order effects
- The crisis-era windfall funds a deliberate pivot: Bowser's interviews lay out expansion into theme parks, movies, and live events, reducing dependence on console-cycle revenue.
Third-order effects
- The 2021 H1 dip — profit down 25% YoY even as guidance was raised — suggests the durable asset is the IP catalog rather than crisis-proof hardware sales, pushing Nintendo toward an entertainment-licensing structure where each hit game seeds films, parks, and merchandise.
The trend: Nintendo is converting crisis-era engagement into an IP-first entertainment business, using pandemic-scale hits to build revenue streams that outlast any single hardware cycle.