This Day in History — Nintendo Is Founded
On this day in 1889
On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto — a handmade playing card business whose name roughly means "leave luck to heaven." He had no idea.
The Off-Key Bard steps into Kyoto in 1889, looking for the beginnings of one of the most influential companies in video-game history. There are no consoles, cartridges, controllers, plumbers, princesses, or Triforces.
"Instead, he finds playing cards. Nintendo's story begins nearly a century before anyone could play a video game at home."
On this day in 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi established Nintendo Koppai in the Shimogyō-ku district of Kyoto, Japan. The company name is generally translated as something like "leave luck to heaven" — nin meaning "entrusted," ten-dou meaning "heaven." Whether Yamauchi thought of himself as a philosopher or simply a craftsman, the name carried a certain fatalistic honesty about the card-playing business he was entering. His product was hanafuda — flower cards.
Hanafuda is a traditional Japanese card game system with 48 cards organized around the twelve months of the year, each suit represented by a different plant or flower. A standard deck contains cards for pine, plum, cherry blossom, wisteria, iris, peony, clover, pampas grass, chrysanthemum, maple, willow, and paulownia. The game dates back centuries and has a history intertwined with gambling — various card games had been banned by Japanese authorities repeatedly, with players responding each time by inventing new card systems that evaded existing prohibitions. Hanafuda had partly emerged from that long cat-and-mouse tradition.
By the late 19th century, hanafuda was popular in gambling parlors, including establishments with yakuza connections, and fresh decks were routinely opened for new rounds to prevent cheating — driving constant demand for new cards. Yamauchi made them by hand, painted them himself, and as the business grew hired assistants to keep pace. Nintendo became one of the most recognized card manufacturers in Japan.
Hiroshi Yamauchi and the Pivot
The company passed through the family over the following decades — to Yamauchi's son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda (who took the Yamauchi name upon marriage) and then to Fusajiro's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, who took over in 1949 at the age of 21.
In 1953, under Hiroshi, Nintendo became the first Japanese company to mass-produce playing cards from plastic rather than the traditional mulberry bark material used for hanafuda. The innovation helped Nintendo dominate the Japanese card market.
In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi traveled to the United States to meet with the United States Playing Card Company, the largest card manufacturer in America. He was shown around their offices and was, by accounts, genuinely startled by how small and limited the operation was. If the biggest card company in the biggest economy in the world operated at that modest scale, he concluded, the ceiling on the playing card business was fundamentally limited.
In 1959, Nintendo reached a licensing agreement with Walt Disney to put Disney characters on its playing cards. The deal was transformative — it opened the market for families and children who had little interest in traditional adult card games, dramatically expanding Nintendo's customer base. Playing cards with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on them were a very different proposition from cards associated with gambling parlors.
But Hiroshi Yamauchi had already understood that cards alone were not the future.
Toys, Games, and the Shape of What Was Coming
During the 1960s, Nintendo experimented with a remarkable and sometimes chaotic variety of businesses — a taxi company, a chain of "love hotels," instant rice, and a television network were among the ventures that went nowhere. What gained traction was toys.
A maintenance engineer named Gunpei Yokoi created the Ultra Hand — an extendable, claw-like grabbing toy built in his spare time from leftover factory materials. Yamauchi saw it, recognized its appeal, put it into production, and it became a major seller. Yokoi was moved out of maintenance and into product design. He would eventually develop the Game & Watch series of portable LCD games in 1980 and the Game Boy in 1989.
The philosophy Yokoi articulated — later formalized as "lateral thinking with withered technology," using cheap, well-understood components in surprising and creative ways — became central to how Nintendo approached hardware design for decades.
From toys the company moved into electronic entertainment. Nintendo entered the arcade business in 1973 and released its first home console, the Color TV-Game, in 1977. In 1979, a young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto joined the company. In 1981, Miyamoto designed Donkey Kong — featuring a carpenter known only as Jumpman who would soon become Mario.
The Famicom launched in Japan in 1983. Redesigned as the Nintendo Entertainment System, it reached North America in 1985, after the video-game crash of 1983 had devastated the industry. The NES and Super Mario Bros. rebuilt the home console market and established Nintendo as a global entertainment company.
Everything that followed — the Game Boy, the Super NES, the Nintendo 64, the DS, the Wii, the Switch — carried forward the same underlying instinct: find new ways for people to play.
And Nintendo never entirely left its origins. The company has continued to produce hanafuda cards throughout its history, including special Mario-themed editions. The same general product that Fusajiro Yamauchi made by hand in 1889 still exists in the Nintendo catalog alongside some of the most sophisticated interactive entertainment hardware ever built.
"Before the plumber made his leap,
Or Zelda stirred from legends deep,
There came a deck, by hand designed —
And games that changed with passing time."
History reminds us: companies don't always begin with the technology that makes them world-famous. Sometimes the underlying mission — finding new ways for people to play — survives completely intact while the tools used to express it change from paper and paint to silicon and pixels.
On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi wasn't founding a video-game company. He was founding a playing-card business, painted by hand, sold to gambling parlors in Kyoto. It turned out to be the same thing.
Sources
- Nintendo — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
- The Surprisingly Long History of Nintendo — Gizmodo — Gizmodo
- Nintendo — Google Arts & Culture / The Strong National Museum of Play — The Strong National Museum of Play
- Nintendo — Giant Bomb — Giant Bomb