Intelligent Systems – some tidbits about the company’s history

The folks over at Nintendo-Online recently decided to research the history of Intelligent Systems and were kind enough to send over some of their findings in English. There are some interesting tidbits about the company’s origins, among other things. Check out the full summary below.

– Intelligent Systems was founded in December 1986 as the successor studio to a company known as Iwasaki Giken.
– The cooperation between Nintendo and Iwasaki Giken started with the development of Donkey Kong jr. in 1982
– Contrary to common believe, Intelligent Systems is not a Nintendo subsidiary. It’s independent, but because of its strong connections to Nintendo, it can be refered to as a Nintendo studio. The case is comparable to other well known studios like HAL Laboratory or Next Level Games.
– In its early years, Intelligent Systems existed to help programming Nintendo games. Its first games were cooperations with Nintendo R&D1.
– Famicom Wars was not solely created by Intelligent Systems. Instead, it was designed by R&D1 and programmed by Intelligent Systems. After that, the team split up and R&D1 developed Super Mario Land, while Intelligent Systems started working on Fire Emblem. It was the first project where Intelligent Systems was deeply involved in designing the game.
– In the next years, Intelligent Systems developed many new games while continuing assisting on R&D1 games. The studio’s output decreased for a few years during the N64 and Virtual Boy era.
– Intelligent Systems is best known as a game development studio, but it is more of an engineering company. It had developed many dev kits and dev tools for Nintendo. In fact, Intelligent Systems is Nintendo’s most important source of dev kits.