Nintendo Spent 80 Years Making Playing Cards Before Mario

On September 23, 1889, a Kyoto craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi started a small shop printing hand-painted hanafuda — flower cards, 48 to a deck, the kind used in a Japanese gambling game older than the company itself. He called the shop Nintendo Koppai. Hanafuda were legally tolerated where Western playing cards were not, which made them the standard deck in yakuza-run gaming parlors. Most respectable manufacturers wouldn't supply that market. Yamauchi did, and within a few years he was the dominant printer in Kyoto.

The family kept printing cards through three generations. By the time Hiroshi Yamauchi took over in 1949 — Fusajiro's great-grandson, 22 years old, and explicitly forbidden by the staff from being called by his first name on the factory floor — Nintendo was a card company and only a card company. He wanted out of that.

In 1959 he licensed Disney characters for plastic-coated decks aimed at families instead of gamblers. The cards moved through department stores instead of back rooms, and the company made enough money to try something else with it. In the 1960s Nintendo started a taxi service, a chain of instant-rice shops, and a small TV network. All three failed. A claim that Nintendo also ran love hotels in the same era turns up in David Sheff's 1993 book Game Over but isn't supported by the company's own filings, and Japanese historians have flagged it as folklore.

What survived from the diversification spree was a toy division, which made plastic novelties in the late 1960s and electronic ones in the 1970s. The first arcade hit, Donkey Kong, shipped in 1981 — 92 years after the first deck of hanafuda. Nintendo still prints those cards. They sit on a shelf at headquarters, next to the consoles, as a reminder that the original product line outlived almost everything the company tried to replace it with.