A Brief History of Nintendo in Hong Kong and Mainland China #gaming #nintendo #gaminghistory

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Mani Limited is a Hong Kong-based private company specializing in toy manufacturing. Incorporated on May 30th, 1991 under the name Tana Limited, they had renamed themselves to Mani as early as August 8th of the same year. Now, here's where things get interesting.

[00:00:14]From here on, I'm going to tell this story a little backwards, you know, for dramatic effect. Also, full disclosure, a lot of this section is sourced from a 2013 write-up by Metal Maniac, which was translated by IQ Brew. A full list of all my sources will be in the description below. On April 7th, 2005, Nintendo founded its Hong Kong branch of operations. But before that, starting in 1994, it was Mani Limited that handled the distribution of Nintendo products in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and until the founding of iQue in 2002, mainland China as well. iQue has its own detailed and much more documented history involving neat little oddities like the iQue Player, which was basically a plug-and-play Nintendo 64. Though, for the sake of this video, I'm going to keep the iQue talks brief. iQue Limited was founded in 2002 as a joint venture between Nintendo and Taiwanese-American technologist and entrepreneur Wei Yen, with the goal of the company being a new, superior way to bring Nintendo products to mainland China. This was needed because in 2000, China's State Council had passed a bill banning the sale of video game consoles within the country, meaning the iQue Player was only allowed to be released 3 years later via loophole, saying that it's not technically a video game console, but instead a plug-and-play toy. The other reason for iQue's creation was that Nintendo had allegedly grown frustrated with Mani's hands-off approach to combating piracy in mainland China. Now, take this with a grain of salt, but according to IGDB, which is owned by Twitch but is also publicly editable, so again, grain of salt, but Nintendo was allegedly so furious with Mani at this time that they revoked their distribution rights around 1997-1998 and handed them over to the Chinese toy company Aldi. I couldn't find a verifiable source for this claim, but I did find an entry on console variations for an Atomic Purple Game Boy Pocket that Aldi released, however, only in China. So, if this is true, it likely just means that Manny was booted out of China a little earlier than 2002.

[00:02:03]Anyway, back to Manny. Focusing specifically on their country of origin, Hong Kong, it seems like their reign was from 1994 to 2004-2005.

[00:02:12]The systems I could find that Manny verifiably produced for Hong Kong are the Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance SP, and the original Nintendo DS. The original DS first launched in North America on November 21st, 2004.

[00:02:29]So, assuming this Hong Kong and Macau model came out soon after, that would place it right before the formation of Nintendo's Hong Kong branch, which all tracks. From what I can tell, the Game Boy ended up being their biggest success, perhaps thanks to a marketing strategy revolving around Hong Kong actor and musician Aaron Kwok, including promotional packaging and a commercial.

[00:02:58]Young