Fusajiro Yamauchi founds Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards.
Western playing cards came to Japan in the sixteenth century with Portuguese traders, but over the next three centuries, a variety of card games were created in Japan. The most popular in the late 1800s were hanafuda, cards printed with beautiful, colorful images of flowers. The yakuza often used hanafuda in their illicit gambling halls.
The fact that the cards were often used for gambling was reflected in the name Yamauchi gave to his company. Nin-ten-do is written with characters that mean, roughly, “luck-heaven-hall,” or the place where you put your fortune in the hands of the gods. Nintendo became the country’s preeminent maker of playing cards, expanding into making toranpu (meaning “trump,” for Western playing cards). The firm struck a deal to print cards with Disney characters, which widened the market for playing cards, turning a gambler’s tool into a children’s toy.
The company stayed in the hands of the Yamauchi family for over a century. Fusajiro Yamauchi’s great-grandson Hiroshi took over in 1949 at the young age of twenty-two. One of his first acts was to have all remaining Yamauchi family members fired, to make it clear who was in charge. Yamauchi oversaw the expansion of the company into a wide variety of other products, all failures—until the company moved into electronic toys and games.
After the company forged a partnership with hardware maker Sharp, Nintendo engineers developed unique electronic toys, such as the Beam Gun, which used solar cells to let kids imagine they were firing guns and making targets explode. From there, the company expanded into video games (see here).
Nintendo is still the dominant playing-card maker in Japan, and it still produces hanafuda decks, although some now have Super Mario characters instead of flowers.—CK