A journey from hand-painted playing cards to an 8 billion-dollar-a-year corporation
When you hear the name “Nintendo,” you probably think of a mustachioed Italian plumber, an angry gorilla, and the latest handheld “switch.”
And you’re right.
Nintendo is easily the biggest name in video games today, delighting children and adults alike with its lifelike graphics and interactive virtual worlds.
But before Pikachu, Mario, and Donkey Kong, Nintendo was comprised of a single Japanese entrepreneur and his hand-painted “Hanafuda” playing cards. What began as a response to a country-wide ban on gambling would explode into a global corporation responsible for birthing the video game industry and saving it from near extinction.
So, buckle up as we travel back in time to meet a humble man named Fusajiro Yamauchi whose playing cards would lead to a deal with Disney, a “love hotel” and saving video games from the brink of death.
This is the story of Nintendo you’ve never heard before.
Chapter 1
The year was 1889. The Japanese government had implemented a country-wide ban on gambling, outlawing all Western-style playing cards containing a numerical value.
Exempt from the ban were Hanafuda cards (meaning “flower cards”), a type of playing card featuring hand-painted illustrations of birds, flowers, and trees instead of numerical values. Hanafuda cards were not very popular at the time, and as they were not typically used for gambling, the Japanese government allowed them to remain on the market.
Naturally, this was a mistake.
Fusajiro Yamauchi, a 30-year-old husband and father living in Kyoto, Japan, saw an opportunity. One that would grow beyond his wildest imagination.
He began manufacturing his own unique, hand-painted Hanafuda cards on the crushed bark of mulberry trees. Following the traditional Hanafuda style, Yamauchi split his decks into twelve “suits,” representing the twelve months in a calendar year. On each card, Yamauchi painted the different flowers and fauna associated with that month, elements that would later be incorporated into games like “Super Mario Bros”.
Yamauchi’s cards became wildly popular in Japan and were soon used in place of traditional playing cards to skirt the government’s ban on gambling.
The demand for Yamauchi’s Hanafuda cards was so high, he was forced to expand his one-man operation. Yamauchi began mass-producing his cards and opened a shop that he called “Nintendo Koppai,” which was later shortened to “Nintendo,” meaning, “leave luck to heaven.”
Thanks to modern production innovations, Yamauchi went on to develop several more styles of games such as the Daitouryou, or Napoleon, deck, and the Miyako No Hana Hanafuda deck, which are still popular in Japan today.
Yamauchi continued building his empire until age 70 when he passed his thriving business to his adopted son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda. Eleven years later, at age 81, Fusajiro Yamauchi passed away without knowing how his company would explode into a new kind of gaming industry in the coming decades.
Jordan Thompson 