The story
Nintendo established iQue in December 2002 as a joint venture with Wei Yen, a veteran of earlier Nintendo hardware collaborations. Yen had previously served as senior vice president at Silicon Graphics, where he contributed to Project Reality, the hardware project that became the Nintendo 64. After leaving SGI, Yen founded BroadOn, which developed the cryptographic security system used in the iQue Player to deter piracy.
The company introduced its first product, the iQue Player, in 2003. The system adopted a handheld TV game format in part to comply with a 2000 Ministry of Culture ban on the sale of traditional home video game consoles. In the following years, iQue distributed official Nintendo products for the mainland Chinese market, focusing primarily on handheld systems, which were not subject to the same ban. While Nintendo and iQue initially planned to release the Wii across mainland China, these plans were ultimately scaled back, and the iQue Player was the company's only home console released in China.
By 2013, iQue became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nintendo. During the early 2010s, iQue contributed to emulator development for Nintendo's Virtual Console services, including NES and Game Boy emulation on Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 64 emulation on Wii U. The company later supported development of the Nintendo 64 emulator used for Nintendo Switch Online.
Starting from 2017, Nintendo wound down distribution of older hardware under the iQue brand. Nintendo partnered with Tencent to introduce the Nintendo Switch in mainland China in 2019. iQue shifted to providing customer support for legacy products and began localizing Nintendo titles into simplified Chinese, while Nintendo Hong Kong handled traditional Chinese.
In 2019, iQue began hiring programmers and developers, transitioning to be a QA office for Nintendo.
From Wikipedia’s article on IQue, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4