Nintendo Was Founded in 1889 to Make Playing Cards — 130 Years Before Mario

Hanafuda and the Founding of Nintendo

In September 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi established a small business in Kyoto, Japan, to produce hanafuda — Japanese playing cards decorated with flower illustrations. Hanafuda (花札, meaning "flower cards") had been played in Japan since the 18th century, when the Portuguese card game of hombre was banned by the Tokugawa shogunate and Japanese players developed their own card systems to circumvent the prohibition. By the late 19th century, hanafuda was widely played across Japan.

Yamauchi's cards were made from mulberry tree bark paper, painted by hand using traditional artistic techniques. The quality of his products was high enough to attract a following, and the business grew steadily. The name Nintendo (任天堂) is typically translated as "leave luck to heaven" or "entrusted to heaven" — a name that carries an appropriately fatalistic quality for a card game company operating in an era when gambling was legally ambiguous.

The Long Middle Period

After Yamauchi's death, the company passed to his son-in-law and then to his grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, who took control in 1949 at the age of 21. Under Hiroshi's leadership, Nintendo pursued a strategy of diversification that reflected the uncertainty of the playing card market. The company tried taxicabs, instant rice, love hotels, and a toy company before finding more consistent success with toy manufacturing in the 1960s.

The transition to electronic games began in the 1970s when Nintendo partnered with Magnavox and then developed its own electronic toy products. The Game & Watch series, launched in 1980, established Nintendo as a maker of handheld electronic games. The Famicom (Family Computer) console, launched in Japan in 1983 and internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, transformed Nintendo from a toy company into the dominant force in video gaming.

What Playing Cards and Video Games Have in Common

The arc from hanafuda to Mario is less discontinuous than it might appear. Both products are fundamentally about accessible entertainment — games that can be played by multiple players, that create social situations, and that can be produced and distributed at scale. The playing card business taught the Yamauchi family about distribution networks, retail relationships, and the importance of product quality and consistency. These capabilities transferred surprisingly well to the toy and later video game businesses.

Hiroshi Yamauchi reportedly had no particular interest in video games as a hobby — he did not play them — but he understood the entertainment business and recognized that video games represented an opportunity to apply capabilities Nintendo had developed over nearly a century. His intuition proved more accurate than almost any contemporary could have anticipated.

The Card Division That Never Closed

Nintendo's playing card business continued operating even as the company became a global video game giant. Nintendo of Japan still produces hanafuda and Western-style playing cards, including themed decks featuring Mario characters that have become collectible items among Nintendo fans. The card that started it all — the flower-decorated hanafuda — is still made, nearly 140 years after Fusajiro Yamauchi first painted them by hand in a Kyoto workshop, in a company that has since sold hundreds of millions of game consoles and become a cultural institution on six continents.