What if you bought Nintendo in 2000?
World · Japan. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play5.7× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Nintendo at the start of 2000 would be worth about $5,667 today — 5.7 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Nintendo lives and dies by its hardware cycle, and this chart is basically a list of consoles. The GameCube sold poorly against Sony's PlayStation 2, and the shares sagged into 2003. Then the DS handheld and the motion-controlled Wii brought in grandparents and non-gamers, and the stock rose more than fivefold to a 2007-2008 peak. The hangover was severe: the 3DS launched at a price nobody wanted and was cut within months, the Wii U flopped, and smartphones looked set to make dedicated gaming devices obsolete. By 2012-2015 the shares were back near their 2003 lows, and longtime president Satoru Iwata died in 2015.
The Pokemon Go craze of 2016 reminded investors what Nintendo's characters were worth, even though Nintendo only owned part of the economics. The real rescue was the Switch in 2017, a hybrid home-and-portable console that became one of the best-selling machines ever, followed by licensing deals and the hit Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023. The Switch 2 arrived in 2025 to a strong launch and the shares hit record highs, before worries about profit margins and memory-chip costs pulled them sharply lower in 2026.
The lesson: Hit-driven businesses swing between genius and doom with each product; extrapolating the latest console's sales is a forecast about creativity, not about earnings.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $15.00 | $5,667 | $4,626 | 5.7× |
| 2003 | $9.00 | $9,444 | $7,727 | 9.4× |
| 2005 | $11.00 | $7,727 | $5,763 | 7.7× |
| 2007 | $30.00 | $2,833 | $4,789 | 2.8× |
| 2008 | $55.00 | $1,545 | $4,626 | 1.5× |
| 2010 | $22.00 | $3,864 | $6,071 | 3.9× |
| 2012 | $13.00 | $6,538 | $5,312 | 6.5× |
| 2015 | $12.00 | $7,083 | $3,301 | 7.1× |
| 2018 | $40.00 | $2,125 | $2,519 | 2.1× |
| 2020 | $42.00 | $2,024 | $2,092 | 2.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $9,444. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
On this day
- 21 April 1989: Nintendo launches the Game Boy
- 6 July 2016: Pokemon Go sends Nintendo shares soaring
- 18 October 1985: Nintendo tests the NES in New York
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Nintendo is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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