Nintendo San Francisco Opens May 15, 2025
Nintendo is opening its second official store in the US in San Francisco this spring in May on the iconic Union Square at 331 Powell Street, 20 years almost to the day after the first US Nintendo store opened in New York in Rockefeller Center, Manhattan.
The multinational consumer electronics and video games company based in Kyoto, Japan, will decorate the store with famous characters from games like Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and many more.
“Nintendo San Francisco will offer a unique shopping experience filled with Nintendo’s characters, worlds and exclusive products including accessories, apparel, home goods and souvenirs available only at this location,” the company said in a press release.
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The Evolution of Nintendo
Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in Kyoto, Japan, producing local playing cards called Hanafuda. Roughly 10 years later it became the first company in the country to manufacture Wester-style playing cards.
In 1947, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the great-grandson of the founder, took over as head of the company and started experimenting with growth in diverse areas, including a taxi service, instant rice and toy manufacturing, and a “love hotel” chain. Most of these ventures failed in the 1950s-1960s.
It wasn’t until the following decade that Nintendo transitioned to electronic games and throughout the 1970s went from strength to strength with a series of successful products and acquisitions, most noteworthy the rights to distribute Magnavox Odyssey in 1974, the first home console in Japan.
The Golden Era of The 1980s And Onwards
The Decade of Decadence proved incredibly successful for Nintendo. It started with the Game & Watch series which were simple handheld games in 1980. The year after introduced Donkey Kong to the world, and Mario except he was simply called Jumpman then.
In 1983 Nintendo conquered the world with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, followed by Super Mario Bros in 1985 and the Legend of Zelda in 1986. There’s been no slowing down for the company in the decades that followed, including Pokémon in 1999, Wii in 2006, and the Nintendo Switch in 2017
Many of Nintendo’s consoles, games and characters are household names across the world today. From the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System more than 30 years ago, the company has sold more than 5.8 billion video games and over 850 million hardware units globally.
