Translated from the original Spanish article. Read in Spanish
The company behind your favorite video games… started out selling gambling cards. Before Mario, Zelda and Pokémon, Nintendo was a small playing-card workshop in Kyoto.
A card workshop in Kyoto
Kyoto, Japan, 1889. Fusajiro Yamauchi opens a workshop making hanafuda cards, Japanese cards decorated with flowers, animals and moons, widely used for playing and gambling.
Its name: Nintendo. The cards were good quality and sold well for decades. But the card business had a limit: you couldn't grow much selling only cards.
The strangest businesses
Decades later, the founder's great-grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, took charge of the company and wanted to diversify. And between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo tried some very strange businesses:
A taxi company. A chain of hotels rented by the hour. A TV channel. And a food company that tried to sell instant rice, similar to instant noodles.
Almost everything failed. The company was in trouble, and it needed to find something that really worked.
Nintendo had taxis, hourly-rate hotels and instant rice before making video games.
The toy that saved it
The solution came by chance. A young engineer at the company, Gunpei Yokoi, had built an extending arm in his spare time: a kind of tongs that stretched out to grab things.
Yamauchi saw it and decided to sell it. It was called the Ultra Hand and it was a hit: it sold more than a million units. Yokoi moved into product development, and Nintendo discovered its future lay in toys.
From toy to video game
Nintendo bet on toys… and then on video games. Yokoi kept inventing: in 1980 he created the Game & Watch, small pocket consoles with a single game each. They introduced the D-pad, the cross-shaped button almost every controller uses today.
And in 1989, Yokoi created a handheld console that fit in your hand and changed history: the Game Boy. It came exactly one hundred years after Fusajiro's first cards.
The D-pad on game controllers was born on Nintendo's Game & Watch.
A hundred-year lesson
The most curious thing about Nintendo is that it never fully left its roots: it still sells hanafuda cards in Japan today. But its great success was knowing how to change in time, even if it failed with taxis and rice along the way.
From gambling cards… to consoles in half the world.
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Sources (in Spanish)
- Historia de la empresa: Wikipedia, Nintendo, y Wikipedia, «History of Nintendo».
- El fundador: Wikipedia, Fusajiro Yamauchi.
- Hiroshi Yamauchi y los negocios de los años sesenta: Wikipedia, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
- Gunpei Yokoi, la Ultra Hand, las Game & Watch y la Game Boy: Wikipedia, Gunpei Yokoi, y Den of Geek.
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