Dates You Should Know: Nintendo is Founded
A man who needs no introduction, pictured with some guy in green.
Today, A Matter of Time is coming directly to you…
… with a Date You Should Know: September 23, 1889.
130 Years Young
Nintendo has been many things to many people.
The company has, at various times, owned taxis and a baseball team. It’s marketed instant rice and vacuum cleaners. It’s been the litigant in a court case over the word “Kong”. It’s about to open a theme park. To most people, though, Nintendo is synonymous with video games. Nintendo’s games aren’t just successful, they’re some of the most successful franchises of all time, and have brought us games considered some of the best ever. The history of Nintendo is a long and storied one, and it’s one that most people wouldn’t expect began in 1889. No, that’s not a typo.
This September saw the world’s most famous video game company turn a venerable 130.
“But, Joel,” you say, “That can’t possibly be right. There were no video games in 1889!”
And that’s true. Not only is the world’s most famous video game company a century old, it wasn’t even a video game company for most of that time. Nintendo didn’t start making video games until the 1970s, and the company was almost exactly a century old when it introduced the world to Mario (then called “Jumpman”) with the release of Donkey Kong in 1981. For the first seven decades of its existence, Nintendo was a playing card company.
Originally founded in Kyoto by an aspiring businessman named Fusajiro Yamauchi, Nintendo’s humble origins saw it producing handmade playing cards, specifically the cards for a Japanese game called Hanafuda. Nintendo’s primary business hasn’t been playing cards since the 1960s, but the Japanese branch of Nintendo has never stopped making playing cards and, in honour of the company’s early history, sponsors a card tournament called the Nintendo Cup.
A poster from the Early Days of Nintendo, showing the Company’s catalogue of Playing Cards.
Leave Luck to Heaven
The most common translation for Nintendo’s name is something along the lines of “leave luck to Heaven”. Now, there’s a lot of luck to be had in 130 years, both good and bad. Nintendo has had its share of both.
Nintendo had early success as a card company, introducing Western-style playing cards and mass-produced plastic cards to Japan. From there, Nintendo popularised card games among families and children, thanks to obtaining the rights to put Disney characters on its cards. The company started slumping in the 1960s, leading to wide-ranging attempts to expand the company’s range of products. Most failed (the aforementioned instant rice and vacuum cleaners), but the company found major successes when it began developing toys and games, like the instantly-popular Ultra Hand. The company introduced its first video games in the 1970s. The 1970s saw the introduction of arcade games, home systems like the Color TV-Games consoles (featuring an off-brand version of Pong) and a portable device that combined simple games with the functionality of a watch, the aptly-named Game & Watch.
The 1980s were particularly good for Nintendo. This was the decade that saw the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, making Nintendo a household name; the first appearances of iconic Nintendo characters like the Mario Brothers and Link; and the foundation of Nintendo of America, which has become the face of the company in the English-speaking world. Since then, Nintendo has become a trillion-yen company and the most recognisable name in video games.
Not bad for a company that started out making cards by hand.
Read More Here:
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Corporate/Nintendo-History/Nintendo-History-625945.html
Joel Balkovec
Joel Balkovec has an MA in Classics, so he knows a thing or two about history. When he’s not professionally writing at Algonquin, he’s writing family-friendly Fantasy stories at home as J.B. Norman. Visit his website at www.realmgard.com