From Card to Console: The Lesser-Known Beginnings of Nintendo

From taxi companies and toys to love hotels

Fans have collected and documented examples of products Nintendo had previously dabbled in. In his blog beforemario.com, collector Erik Voskuil displays their Electronic Love Tester, which uses electric circuits to supposedly measure the level of compatibility between a couple, and the Ultrahand, which is simply an expanding plastic toy that can grab faraway objects when its handle is moved. Besides toys, in just five years, between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo also produced a taxi company, a TV station, a food enterprise selling instant rice, and even a love hotel chain, which some have said that the president of the time had frequented himself.

With many short-lived ventures and a diminishing market for playing cards, Nintendo’s financial situation had become seriously dire at one point—much like Japan’s own turbulent history, the company had to go through many obstacles before discovering their own future within the electronic market. 

‘Leaving Luck to the Heavens’

Nintendo’s foundations—clearly a gamble in itself—lay primarily in the opportunity seen by its founder Fusajiro Yamauchi in the legalisation of playing cards under the Meiji government. In Japan, the government historically discouraged gambling, and playing cards, created in light of Portuguese trade, were banned as a threatening foreign influence. But their popularity was widely endured nonetheless, prompting series after series of disguised card designs. By the 1800s, Hanafuda—meaning ‘flower cards’—was tolerated as a way of combining numbered playing cards with traditional card designs, and Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo with the purpose of finally mass producing them.

Hanafuda are still enjoyed by many today as an emblem of Japanese culture. Though Nintendo has largely moved on to video games, they have never ceased to make playing cards and have even introduced their own Mario-themed sets in commemoration.