Nintendo Founded: The Birth of a Gaming Giant

Long before Mario, Link, or Pikachu, there were hanafuda cards. On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture and sell handmade playing cards painted with flowers, birds, and seasonal motifs. The modest card company would take nearly a century to become the most influential name in video gaming. Hanafuda cards had a complicated history in Japan. Western-style playing cards, introduced by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, had been repeatedly banned by the government because of their association with gambling. Japanese manufacturers responded by redesigning the cards with abstract images to evade the bans, creating hanafuda. By the time Yamauchi started his business, the cards occupied a gray area between legitimate entertainment and underground gambling dens. Yamauchi's cards earned a reputation for quality, and Nintendo became the largest playing card company in Japan. The business passed through three generations of the Yamauchi family. In 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder's great-grandson, took over the company at age twenty-two and spent the next decade trying to expand beyond cards. He experimented with a taxi company, a love hotel chain, and instant rice, all of which failed. The pivot to toys and electronics in the 1960s changed everything. Nintendo developed the Ultra Hand, a novelty extending arm that sold over a million units. Engineer Gunpei Yokoi's inventions led to the Game & Watch handheld series in 1980 and the Game Boy in 1989. Shigeru Miyamoto, a young artist hired in 1977, created Donkey Kong in 1981 and Super Mario Bros. in 1985, games that rescued the North American video game industry from its post-crash collapse. The company that Fusajiro Yamauchi built by hand-painting flower cards in a small Kyoto shop now controls some of the most valuable intellectual properties in entertainment, with a market capitalization exceeding $60 billion.