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History
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Dealt a Different Hand: The Hanafuda Card Company That Became Nintendo
Long before Mario, Nintendo's empire was built on handmade 'Hanafuda' playing cards. Founded in 1889, this core business laid the foundation for an innovative spirit that, after a century of deals with Disney and strange business ventures, would eventually lead them to the world of video games.
When you hear the name Nintendo, your mind likely jumps to plumbers saving princesses, a hero clad in green, or pocket-sized monsters. It’s a brand synonymous with digital entertainment. But long before the first pixelated Goomba was stomped, Nintendo was a company built on paper, ink, and a healthy dose of chance. Its story begins not in a silicon lab, but in a small Kyoto workshop in 1889.
The House of Leave-Luck-to-Heaven
Founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi, the company was originally named 'Nintendo Koppai.' The name 'Nintendo' is often translated as 'leave luck to heaven,' a fitting moniker for a business whose primary product was playing cards used for gambling. These weren't the standard 52-card decks known in the West. Nintendo specialized in Hanafuda, or 'flower cards.'
Hanafuda cards are a distinct style of Japanese playing cards. They are small, thick, and feature beautifully illustrated flora and fauna representing the 12 months of the year. The gameplay revolves around collecting specific sets of cards to score points. Their creation was a clever workaround; when Japan isolated itself from the Western world during the Edo period, traditional Portuguese-style playing cards were banned. To circumvent the ban, new, smaller, image-based card games were invented, and Hanafuda was the most enduring of these creations. Nintendo's handmade cards quickly gained a reputation for their quality, and they became a favorite among players, including the Yakuza, who reportedly used the cards in their gambling parlors.
A New Deal and Strange Diversions
For over 60 years, playing cards were Nintendo's world. The business passed through the Yamauchi family until Fusajiro's great-grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, took over in 1949. The ambitious 22-year-old had a vision that extended beyond the traditional, and often shady, world of Hanafuda players.
His first major success was a landmark deal with Walt Disney in 1959. By printing cards featuring Mickey Mouse and other beloved characters, Nintendo opened itself up to a massive new market: Japanese families and children. The move was a resounding success, selling hundreds of thousands of packs and solidifying Nintendo's position as Japan's premier card manufacturer. But Hiroshi Yamauchi knew the card market had a ceiling. He famously noted:
There is no magic in the success of the Disney cards. It is a success that has been achieved by a second-rate company that has had the good fortune to be associated with a first-rate character. For this reason, the success will be short-lived.
Driven by this belief, Yamauchi led Nintendo on a series of wild business diversifications throughout the 1960s. The company tried its hand at a taxi service named Daiya, a chain of 'love hotels' (hotels offering rooms for short, private stays), instant rice packets, and even a vacuum cleaner. Nearly all of these ventures failed, leaving the company on the brink of collapse.
The Pivot to Play
Nintendo’s salvation came not from a business plan, but from an employee tinkering on the factory floor. In 1966, Yamauchi noticed a maintenance engineer named Gunpei Yokoi playing with a homemade extendable arm he had built to amuse himself. Intrigued, Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it into a commercial product. The result was the 'Ultra Hand,' an extendable toy claw that became a massive hit, selling over a million units.
This was the turning point. Yokoi was moved from maintenance to a new games and toys division, where he would go on to develop light-gun games, the Game & Watch series, and eventually, the Game Boy. The success of the Ultra Hand showed Yamauchi that Nintendo's future lay not in taxis or hotels, but in entertainment and innovation. It was a philosophy of play, honed over decades of making Hanafuda cards, now applied to a new technological age. This new direction led directly to the company's first arcade games and, in 1983, the Famicom—the console that would be released in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System, changing the world forever.
Today, Nintendo still produces Hanafuda and other playing cards in Japan, a quiet nod to the century of history that set the stage for its digital empire. The journey from a small card shop in Kyoto to a global video game titan is a testament to a company that has always understood the simple, timeless appeal of a well-crafted game.