Before Mario, Nintendo spent decades selling flower-patterned playing cards
Nintendo opened in Kyoto on 23 September 1889 as a small workshop making hanafuda, handmade Japanese flower cards. Its best customers were gambling parlours run by the yakuza, which scared other card makers out of the trade. Fusajiro Yamauchi stayed, and within a few years he was the leading producer of hanafuda in Japan.
Hanafuda had boomed because Japan outlawed most gambling in 1882 but tolerated these cards. Success brought its own trouble: the cards were slow and costly to make, and so durable that customers rarely replaced them. Yamauchi answered with a cheaper, lower-quality line called Tengu and pushed into cities like Osaka where card games paid well. Even the company name is a puzzle. It is often translated as leave luck to heaven, but that reading lacks historical backing, and Yamauchi's own descendants do not know what he intended.
The firm passed down through adoption, a Japanese custom for keeping a family business alive: son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda took the Yamauchi name and by 1929 ran the largest playing card company in Japan. His grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi became president in 1950 and moved quickly. In 1953 Nintendo became the first Japanese company to mass-produce plastic playing cards, and a deal with Walt Disney put cartoon characters on decks and opened up the children's market. Sales topped 1.5 million packs by 1961, and the company listed its shares in 1962.
Then card sales slumped as adults drifted toward pachinko and bowling, and after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics the share price sank to a record low of 60 yen. A turning point came quietly in 1965, when Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi simply to maintain the card-making machines. Moved into a new research department, he designed the Ultra Hand, an extending grabber that sold over 1.2 million units, along with gadgets such as the Love Tester.
In 1970 the company released the Beam Gun, Japan's first electronic toy, designed by Masayuki Uemura, and later supplied a light gun for the Magnavox Odyssey. The 1973 oil crisis cost it billions of yen, but arcade games followed, then Donkey Kong in 1981 and the NES. Its consoles have now sold more than 860 million units.
Source: Nintendo
