The History of Nintendo: From Playing Cards to the Switch

For most of us, Nintendo means Mario, Zelda, Pokémon and the Switch. But the history of Nintendo goes back much further than video games, or even television. The company was founded in 1889, and for its first 80-odd years, it made playing cards. Along the way, it also tried running taxis, selling instant rice and operating love hotels.

What did Nintendo originally make?

Nintendo was founded on 23 September 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, by a craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi, as Nintendo’s own company history records. Its original name was Nintendo Koppai, and its product was hanafuda, or “flower cards”, small, colourful Japanese playing cards decorated with seasonal flowers and plants rather than kings and queens. Japan had banned most forms of gambling a few years earlier, but hanafuda was tolerated, and the cards became popular, including in the yakuza-run gambling parlours of Kyoto, according to Wikipedia. Nintendo still makes hanafuda cards today.

What does the name Nintendo mean?

Nobody is entirely sure. It is commonly said to mean “leave luck to heaven”, but that translation has never been confirmed; it could also be read as something like “the temple of free hanafuda”, Wikipedia notes.

The strange detours of the 1960s

In 1949, the founder’s great-grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi took over, and he would run the company for more than 50 years. By the 1960s, he was looking for ways to grow beyond cards, and Nintendo tried some unlikely businesses, including a taxi company, instant rice, and a chain of love hotels, the short-stay hotels rented by the hour that are common in Japan, as the Super Smash Bros wiki’s company history summarises. Most of these ventures failed. What worked was toys.

The toy that changed everything – The extending Arm

In 1966, while touring one of Nintendo’s card factories, Hiroshi Yamauchi noticed an extending arm that a young maintenance engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, had built for his own amusement. Yamauchi turned it into a product called the Ultra Hand, which sold about 1.2 million units, and promptly moved Yokoi from maintenance into product development, as the Super Smash Bros wiki recounts. Yokoi went on to invent a string of toys, including the Love Tester and the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, and later became one of the most important designers in gaming history.

Into video games

Nintendo’s first home consoles, the Color TV-Game series, arrived in 1977; the first, Color TV-Game 6, played six versions of a tennis game similar to Pong, according to Giant Bomb. In 1980, Yokoi created Game & Watch, a range of pocket-sized games with LCD screens that also told the time, inspired, the story goes, by watching a bored commuter fiddle with a calculator. Around the same time, a young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto created the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, which introduced a character called Jumpman, who would later be renamed Mario. Then in 1983, Nintendo launched the Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan, released overseas as the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a huge hit and helped revive the home video game industry after a slump in the early 1980s.

The consoles that followed

The dates are for Japan, from Nintendo’s own company history. Not every machine was a hit; the Wii U struggled badly. But Nintendo has a habit of bouncing back with a new idea rather than just more power: the motion controls of the Wii, the two screens of the DS, and the Switch’s ability to work as both a home console and a handheld. The Switch went on to become one of the best-selling consoles of all time, and its successor, the Switch 2, launched in June 2025.

From cards to Switch

Few companies have changed this much and lasted this long: from hand-made flower cards in 1889, through taxis, rice and hotels, to a toy arm, a pocket game that told the time, and some of the best-loved video games ever made. And through it all, it never stopped making playing cards. If you like the hidden histories of playing cards, my post on whether the kings in a deck of cards represent real kings is a natural follow-on, and the history of the internet tells the story of the network that eventually let us play Nintendo games online.

Sources

• Nintendo: Company history
• Wikipedia: Nintendo
• Wikipedia: History of Nintendo
• SmashWiki: Nintendo
• Giant Bomb: Nintendo