Over its decades of operation, Nintendo has collected millions of diehard fans. But for as dedicated as they may be, they don’t know everything about the company. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these facts we were able to dig up on the publisher. We’ll bet at least a few will surprise even the most informed Nintendo fan.

Enjoy using that simple, plus sign-shaped directional pad to get around? Then be thankful that back in 1982 the Game & Watch developers at Nintendo came up with it. Headed by Gunpei Yokoi (who later went on to design the Game Boy), the team decided on the cross shape and concave middle as the best way to control 2D movement in their G&W port of Donkey Kong. Nintendo patented the d-pad and has used it ever since, which explains why its console competitors like Sony and Microsoft use variations on that design for their d-pads, since they legally can’t directly copy Nintendo’s.

For millions of gamers, Duck Hunt is known as the other game that came with the NES on the same cartridge as Super Mario Bros. But it was actually a remake of one of Nintendo's more popular toys of the 1970s. That earlier Duck Hunt worked pretty much the same as on the NES, using a projector to place ducks on a wall that you would then shoot with a light gun. The ducks still fall straight down if you hit them, but no dog laughs at you when you miss, so maybe the more primitive original is the superior version.

Once Nintendo moved fully into toys and away from card games in the late 1960s, the company imported the classic western game Twister to try and sell to its home country. Unfortunately, the game didn't catch on, and some feel that the social standards in Japan at the time are to blame. Unlike in the US, it was seen as improper for people--particularly girls--to get as close as they do in the admittedly suggestive game.

Gunpei Yokoi is one of most important people in gaming history, thanks in part to his strong influence on the creation of the D-pad and portable gaming. But his greatest creation might just be the Ultra Hand, an extending reaching tool that the kids of Japan just loved. It was Nintendo's first big toy success, setting the playing card company on a path that would lead to arcade games 20 years later. And Nintendo still pays tribute to this important item, giving it multiple cameos in games like WarioWare and obscure Wii downloadable Grill-Off With Ultra Hand.

Nintendo’s main seller for decades were playing cards, many featuring kiddie favorites like Mickey Mouse and Snoopy. But recent one blog found at least one example of Nintendo trying something more risqué. This card series featured a number of women in different states of undress, though the photos are rather tame by today’s standards. We’re betting it didn’t sell all that well, since this was basically Nintendo’s last attempt at adults-only material until the mid-‘90s.

This is well known to dedicated Nintendo historians, but many still don’t know that the console maker got its start more than 100 years ago selling playing cards. For the longest time it was a simple toy manufacturer based in Kyoto, Japan that made the majority of its income off playing cards and other toy fads. Once the video game boom hit Japan, Nintendo tried to cash in on the trend like many other toy makers, though obviously it ended up being the most successful. The company currently celebrates its card selling history by offering traditional hanafuda cards via its Club Nintendo consumer service.

To current Nintendo fans the top man at the company has always been Satoru Iwata, but for gamers paying attention before 2005, they knew a different boss, one that was seemed as stern as Iwata is friendly. Hiroshi Yamauchi not only ran the company from the launch of the NES all the way up to the last years of the GameCube, he was in charge of since 1949! He was known for being a tough boss, but also had a very keen eye for what games would end up being popular. After retiring as head of Nintendo in 2005, he’s still the company’s largest individual shareholder, which makes him (according to Forbes) the 11th richest man in Japan, valued at over 2.7 billion dollars.

Donkey Konga was one of the weirder games for the GameCube, mostly due to its eclectic song collections and sturdy conga drum peripheral. Interestingly, it also had a spiritual predecessor from Nintendo in the 1970s called the Ele-Conga. It was one of Nintendo's earlier electronic toys, and while the resemblance between the two drums could just be a coincidence, we think Nintendo is far too nostalgic for it to be an accident.

Before he ever cared about video games, Shigeru Miyamoto dreamed of being a comic book artist in Japan, and was first hired at Nintendo as a member of its art team. Soon he used his visually-oriented mind to conceive Donkey Kong, and that game’s success forever established him as one of the top creators in gaming. Still, Miyamoto loves the manga medium, and has done his best to give it a boost from time to time. For example, he got celebrated manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori to create a Link to the Past comic in the early 1990s that appeared in Nintendo Power in the US, introducing many Americans to the format (even if they didn’t know it).

Final Fantasy VII did such a good job at getting consumers around the world to buy a PSOne, it’s surprising to think it was once planned for the SNES. After FFVI’s successful launch in 1994, Squaresoft began planning FFVII as another SNES game, but then the development of Chrono Trigger (among other titles) needed more attention, so the FFVII’s launch was moved to the next generation of systems. The game was first publicly announced for the N64, but once Square learned Nintendo was sticking with memory-limiting cartridges, they made the move to Sony’s console because CD-ROMs could had the extra storage needed for the cutscenes and soundtrack.

2013 marks the 30th anniversary of Luigi, but it turns out that his first appearance wasn't technically in the Mario Bros. arcade game. While it's very likely that the arcade classic was in development first, the earliest game with Luigi was the 1983 Game & Watch handheld, also titled Mario Bros. Luigi is still wearing his trademark green in the box art, but Mario and Luigi are working in some sort of bottling plant, a far cry from their plumbing business. Perhaps they were moonlighting?

Most Nintendo fans know the story of the creation of Donkey Kong ,such as that the game only exists because Space Invader clone Radar Scope was a flop in the US. Those arcade cabinets were then reformatted to house Mario's initial battle with DK, but many don't know that a little bit of Radar Scope stayed behind. Specifically, Mario's distinct walking sound effect is the exact same noise as shooting a laser in Radar Scope.

Donkey Kong became such an international phenomenon that it's easy to forget Nintendo released anything else in 1981, let alone another game where you fought a gorilla. Around the same time as DK hit the US, Nintendo released Sky Skipper in Japan, a flight game that had you collecting saved royalty as you dropped explosives on giant apes (a premise only slightly odder than Donkey Kong). The game got a US-only 2600 port and hasn’t been seen in the 30 years since, meaning it’s long overdue for a 3D reboot. Perhaps Retro Studios could handle it?

For the longest time, Nintendo of America had some of the strictest content rules of any publisher, particularly when it came to religious imagery. Games like Castlevania and Dragon Quest had to remove crosses and such from the campaigns, while the restriction completely prevented Miyamoto’s Devil World from coming to the US. Released in Japan and Europe early in the NES’s lifespan, it was a fairly straightforward Pac-Man clone, only it was about killing demons with the power of the cross and the Bible. Despite Nintendo relaxing its standards and the game hitting the Virtual Console in both Japan and Europe, Devil World still hasn’t been made available officially in the US.

Memory space was at such a premium in classic arcade games that every asset included in a game had to be chosen carefully and reused as necessary. That explains why so many early arcade games featured a second playable character that was a clone of the main character, and that includes Luigi. The developers couldn’t add any new colors to the game for him, so they recycled the ones used for the game’s turtles. And that practical decision is why Luigi is so famous for wearing green.

It’s difficult to get permission to have a character as famous as Mario make a cameo in any game, even when said game is made by Nintendo. You normally have to deal with a ton of red tape and approvals, but back in the wild days of the NES, Mario appeared as the referee in Punch-Out!! simply because artist Makoto Wada drew him as the ref. Wada didn’t even bother checking with Miyamoto to get approval, which explains why Mario’s face is a little...off in the game.

Long before Game Freak bestowed the addiction that is Pokémon upon the world, it was a small time developer creating games for Sony, Nintendo, and Sega. Its first game after establishing itself was the late NES title Yoshi, a very simple matching puzzle game. This was an early sign not only of Game Freak’s interest in mixing strategy with cute creatures, it was also the beginning of a billion dollar partnership.

Though some Sega fans may prefer the metallic quality of Genesis music, true audiophiles of the 16-bit days know that the SNES had the superior soundtracks, thanks in no small part to its excellent sound chip. And Nintendo fans can credit Sony for that. Ken Kutaragi, a Sony engineer, began designing it without Sony’s knowledge out of a desire to push the electronics giant to enter the gaming business. His bosses were annoyed but ultimately approved working with Nintendo, and after completing the chip Ken was tasked with creating a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. After Nintendo infamously cancelled that project, Kutaragi transitioned that work to his next major project, codenamed “Play Station.”

A recent expose on the very unsuccessful Super Mario Bros. film reveals just how many changes the movie went through on its way to infamy. First off, both Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks were offered the part of Mario before the filmmakers went with the cheaper choice of Bob Hoskins. And the script went through an unbelievable number of rewrites before they settled on the gritty Blade Runner vibe of the final product. If you’ve got a spare couple of days, take a look at the many different versions of the script here. Perhaps somewhere in there is the Mario movie you envisioned as a child.

Nintendo has always had some trouble selling the ultra cute Kirby to the masses in America. Apparently many of the young boys in its core audience reject the cute, pink puffball, which is their loss because Kirby is badass. But Nintendo would have had an even tougher time selling him abroad under his original name, Tinkle Popo. As revealed at the GDC 2011 keynote, Kirby developer and current Nintendo President Satoru Iwata ultimately changed it to Kirby after realizing that name would likely never sell in the US as Tinkle Popo.

Wave Race 64 was one of the more technically impressive early N64 games, pulling off water physics that competing consoles could only dream of. Perhaps to add an extra level of reality to the game, Nintendo teamed with jet ski manufacturer Kawasaki to put that company’s branding all over the release. However, when Nintendo wanted to re-release Wave Race more than a decade later on Virtual Console, the deal had expired, so Nintendo had to meticulously go through the game and replace every reference to Kawasaki with ads for Nintendo products like the Wii and DS.

Once Nintendo’s fiercest rival, Sega, left the console game in 2001 after multiple market failures like the Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast. The publisher became a third party developer, meaning it depended on Nintendo to publish games on the GameCube and GBA. And though Super Monkey Ball and Sonic Adventure were early arrivals on the GC, history will always remember the adorable puzzle title ChuChu Rocket as the first game to feature a Sega logo on a Nintendo system, something that would have blown our minds in 1992.

The Metroid and Kid Icarus franchises share a common ancestry dating back to the NES era. Both were created by Nintendo’s R&D2 team, overseen by the creator of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, and was later renamed Intelligent Systems. And that connection is recognized in the long awaited Kid Icarus sequel, Kid Icarus: Uprising, via a new enemy in the series. Known as Komaytos, Kid Icarus star Pit immediately identifies them as Metroids, though it’s quickly explained to him in a very meta way that the two series don’t exist in the same universe.

Nintendo made a bold choice sticking with cartridges as the medium for the N64, which ended up making N64 games more expensive and technically limited compared to the CD-based games of its competitors. Nintendo intended to close that gap some with the 64DD, a disc drive that would greatly expand the system’s memory. It was only released in Japan and adopted by very few consumers, meaning many of the games being developed for it had to find new homes. Pokémon Stadium, Animal Crossing, Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario, Banjo-Tooie, and Resident Evil 0 all began as 64DD before their creators had to change them--radically in some cases--thanks to that add-on’s failure.

The original Pikmin was a clever concept from the mind of Shigeru Miyamoto, but it didn’t sell like most Nintendo releases do, either abroad or in its native Japan. However, even though the game didn’t go mainstream, the song featured in its Japanese commercial did. The CD single for Ai no Uta by Strawberry Flowers became so popular that it sold 100,000 copies before the game eventually did. Based on that success, the song makes an appearance in both Pikmin 2 and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Strawberry Flowers wrote a sequel song for the second game as well. Should we expect another new melody when the third Pikmin game comes to Wii U?

Pikmin came out about a month after the GameCube launched, and it was one of the more high profile games on the young system. Pikmin was in development for the system back when it was codenamed Dolphin, which likely explains why protagonist Olimar’s spacecraft is known as the S.S. Dolphin. By the way, you can even spot the S.S. Dolphin flying through space in Super Mario Galaxy.

Of all the planned 64DD games, Mother 3 ended up being the most dramatically changed. The sequel to cult hit Earthbound (it’s much more popular in Japan), Mother 3 was to be one of the marquee games for the 64DD, but when the add-on died, Mother 3 moved to the N64. But development slowed there as well and the game was all but cancelled. Eventually Mother 3 got another chance at life when RPG maker Brownie Brown began working with series creator Shigesato Itoi to rebuild the game on a much more fitting home, the Game Boy Advance.

When the N64 hit the market, some doubted its chance for success based on its very limited library of games, but Nintendo emphasized quality over quantity, and its system seller Super Mario 64 was the key example of that. In fact, Nintendo was so invested in Super Mario 64 making the N64 a big hit that many of the system’s design choices were based on that game alone. The controller was made to fit SM64 first and all other games second, while the quick load times of cartridges worked best with SM64, less so with most other games that would be big that generation. The wonky controller might have hurt the system down the line, but it did help Super Mario 64 become arguably the most important game of its generation.

When Nintendo first entered the gaming world, the company not only was famous for Donkey Kong, but also had a big hit with single game handhelds/clocks known as Game & Watch. The systems repurposed cheap LCD calculator tech to create simple games, but the demo units were even simpler. As explained in an informative Iwata Asks, the teams responsible for those games would create test models out of paper and light bulbs before creating the games. It’s amazing now to think of the modest solutions developers had to come up with in those early days.

Back in the late 1980s Nintendo ruled the gaming market with the NES, which meant it could dictate some pretty tough guidelines to third party publishers. For example, Nintendo restricted how many titles a company could publish in a year and how many copies of said game were manufactured. While many learned to live with the situation, Namco executives were publically unhappy about the situation. When American game maker Tengen found a way to make as many non-Nintendo approved NES games as they wanted, Namco started publishing games with them, and then it was Nintendo’s turn to be unhappy. Nintendo sued Tengen for illegally breaking the NES system security, and the companies eventually settled out of court. The episode caused friction between Namco and Nintendo for a number of years, though based on the fact Namco is currently making the next Smash Bros., we can assume they’ve made up.

Uniracers was an interesting collaboration between Nintendo and developer DMA Designs, the company that would one day become Rockstar. This quirky game was all about 2D unicycles racing at breakneck speeds--mainly to prove that the SNES could match Sonic’s quickness any day of the week. Unfortunately for the game’s legacy, a fledgling film company named Pixar felt Uniracers was far too similar to their short Red’s Dream. When seen together, the resemblance is hard to deny, and the courts felt the same--meaning no more copies of the game were made after its initial run, even to this day.

Though Nintendo mainstays Koji Kondo and Hip Tanaka are two of the most famous Nintendo composers, Kazumi Totaka has recently gained some fame after working on Nintendo games for decades. The inspiration for Animal Crossing’s K.K. Slider, Totaka is now known for the simple melody that he’s snuck into more than a dozen games. As this informative video series details, the song has been found in titles like Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Paint, and Link’s Awakening. Who knows where it will be found next?

Most creators of early arcade games shuffled off into obscurity for one reason or another, often unable to keep up with a rapidly growing industry. But Eugene Jarvis wouldn’t disappear so easily. After creating iconic arcade games like Defender and Robotron, Jarvis stayed in the gaming industry long enough to help Nintendo create Cruis’n USA, a proto-N64 game meant to showcase what the graphics of that upcoming console would theoretically look like.

Back when Super Metroid had just arrived on the SNES, Metroid dev Yoshio Sakamoto bragged that he knew the location of a secret beauty mark (aka mole) on series star Samus Aran. For years it went unseen on the character’s body, even in Metroid Prime. It wasn’t until Team Ninja’s Metroid: Other M that the beauty mark on her face was finally added, even though it had always been intended to be part of her design. At least now people can stop jumping to gross conclusions about its location.

To many Nintendo fans, Reggie Fils-Aime exploded onto the scene with his pronouncement of kicking ass and taking names at E3 2004, but he’d actually been an executive at Pizza Hut before entering the games industry. Anyone remember the Bigfoot pizza? Or the Big New Yorker? Both overseen by Reggie. He also worked at VH1 prior to Nintendo, though we aren’t sure if we can blame him for I Love the ‘80s.

Because most professional sports are played by adults, it’s not unusual to celebrate winning by cracking open a classy bottle of champagne. In the Japanese version of Super Mario Kart, almost every characters’ winning pose had them grasping a bottle, though Bowser and Peach were the only ones that went so far as to drink from it. Nintendo of America wasn’t as cool with alcohol back then, so the animation was cut when it was localized.

Donkey Kong Country was full of the cheeky sense of humor that developer Rare is known for, and the belligerent Cranky Kong was one of the funniest parts. He continually complained about how terrible then-current games are compared to the old days, continually talking about the arcade original Donkey Kong. And his memories are firsthand, because multiple DKC titles confirm that he is the original Donkey Kong from the 1980s. Since he's the grandfather of the DKC’s Donkey Kong, just where is Donkey Kong Junior? Is he the missing link in the evolution?

Masahiro Sakurai is currently revered by fans all over the world thanks to his creation of Super Smash Bros., which he still directly oversees, as well as resurrecting the Kid Icarus franchise. But Sakurai’s first big hit was Kirby, a character he created at HAL. In fact, his earliest game directing jobs were on the earliest Kirby games. Sakurai expressed his admiration for the character by making sure to include him in the original Smash Bros. roster.

Fire Emblem has a history of creating direct sequels, but more often than not, a new entry means a whole new dimension of warring nations. The 3DS entry, Awakening, initially seems unconnected to any previous release--but eventually, references start getting thrown in that allude to the earliest games in the series. And while Awakening never says it outright, when the maps of the first two Fire Emblems are placed next to Awakening’s, it’s clear that all three games take place in the same universe, separated only by centuries.

One of greatest strengths of the long-awaited Kid Icarus sequel was its stupendous sense of humor, usually embodied in protagonist Pit’s many fun, fourth-wall-breaking quips. The wannabe angel is a free spirit, but apparently a happy smile is a turnoff to American consumers, at least according to the box art. The Japanese cover is virtually the same as in the US, but Americans saw his mouth closed in a determined frown, perhaps to show us what a badass he is. Sheesh.

The change to Kid Icarus’ cover art was hardly a first for Nintendo. Almost every Kirby game released in the US alters the star on the box art, giving him angry eyes--likely in an attempt to make the character a little more edgy. Look, Nintendo, we know Kirby games are colorful adventures that star a fluffy pink marshmallow. Arched eyebrows won’t make us forget Kirby’s adorableness.

In Japan, Dragon Quest went from an early success on the NES to the most popular game in the country by the time the third entry hit stores. It became such a phenomenon in its home country that Nintendo of America bet heavily that it would be a smash hit in the US as well, and NOA published a huge number a copies to meet that supposed demand. Instead the game was met with indifference and low sales, leaving NOA with truckloads of unsold copies. Eventually the company made the best of the situation by giving away copies of the game with subscriptions to its relatively new magazine Nintendo Power. That ended up adding tens of thousands of subscribers to the mag, something original Nintendo Power editor Howard Phillips credits to the magazine’s longevity.

Luigi’s Mansion got a long-overdue sequel on the 3DS, but the reasoning for the series moving to handhelds revealed an interesting secret from Nintendo’s history. The sequel came about after the original Luigi’s Mansion stages were rebuilt on the 3DS to test out the 3D. Why choose that game to test the new feature? Because the GameCube was originally intended to have optional 3D visuals, and Luigi’s Mansion was initially developed with those capabilities in mind. The functional 3D version of the 'Cube never left Nintendo’s internal testing, but Luigi got to reach his full graphical potential in the sequel.

Ever wonder why Nintendo made so many Ken Griffey Jr. games? That’s because Nintendo owns the Major League Baseball team the Seattle Mariners, the club Ken belonged to for more than a decade. Nintendo bought the team in 1992 mostly as thanks to Seattle, WA for being its home base in the US for many years. Though there was an initial outcry among some fans that a Japanese company purchasing an American baseball team, it’s now so accepted that 20 years later many aren’t even aware of the fact. It’s also worth noting that former Nintendo of America President Howard Lincoln is now chief of the franchise.

As we mentioned earlier, the mastermind of the Mother/Earthbound series is Shigesato Itoi, though in Japan he’s more well known as a novelist and pop culture icon. Itoi’s many varied credits includes voice work in Studio Ghibli’s beloved My Neighbor Totoro. In the original Japanese recording, Itoi plays the amiable father of the two girls that befriend the well known creature.

Star Fox might be known to many Nintendo fans as a brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto, but he actually was responsible for shepherding its original developers into creating the final game. Star Fox began as a design of Argonaut, a British developer that had previously worked on the Commodore 64. The team worked very closely with Nintendo to create the game and eventually the team moved permanently to Japan. After the team dissolved, former Star Fox designer Dylan Cuthbert eventually set up Q Games, which is best known for the PixelJunk games.

Longtime Pokémon fans are used to getting games months after they're released in Japan, and occasionally those fans have even seen some Pokémon games that never got a western release. Pokémon Puzzle League was the very rare reversal of that situation. Intended primarily for US fans of the anime series, it was decided that the N64 had become too unpopular in Japan to make importing worth it, and it remains the only Pokemon game not officially released in Japan.

Fire Emblem had long been a success in Japan when its first hero, Marth, joined the roster of the GameCube Smash Bros. entry--but he was a stranger to Americans. Thankfully, Nintendo chose to include him in the US release, and they even kept his Japanese voice actor, Hikaru Midorikawa. Perhaps it was because Hikaru had experience with the role, since he also played Marth in a short lived anime based on Fire Emblem.

Everyone remembers when Mario and his friends appeared in NBA Street and SSX games on GameCube, but many forget Nintendo lent its characters to a third EA Sports game. In the GameCube edition of Fight Night Round 2, Little Mac of Punch-Out!! fame is an unlockable fighter. Hopefully this was able to satisfy Punch-Out!! fans during their long wait for a true sequel on the Wii.

When we first played Super Mario Bros. 3, our childhood selves were so scared of the Chain Chomps that we ran from them as fast as we could. The toothy ball-and-chain combo was inspired by an angry dog pulling at its leash, and those brave enough to stay close to it got a special surprise. If the Chain Chomp yanks on its chain 49 times, it will break free and chase after Mario.

Any of these catch you by surprise? Have any other Nintendo facts we should add when we update this later in the week? Let us know in the comments!

Desperate to know more about Nintendo? Check out Unknown Mario - 40 obscure facts and random trivia about Nintendo's mascot and Pokémon facts - 25 little known pieces of trivia from the classic franchise.