On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a workshop in Kyoto to make and sell hanafuda, the Japanese flower cards used for a number of matching games. He was 30, from a family of merchants, and he called the business Nintendo Koppai, which can be read as leave luck to heaven. The cards were made from mulberry bark pasteboard, painted by hand, and sold in packets of twelve suits of four.
The circumstances were not favourable. Gambling with hanafuda was a police matter, and the government had been trying to suppress card games since the 1870s, which is one reason Yamauchi is said to have made cards that could be used for a non-gambling game. What he did have was a good product: cards with a lacquer finish that lasted, a distribution deal with the Hanshin railway, and the insight that the clubs and the hotels that used them wanted a steady supply of identical packs.
The company grew by being the reliable supplier rather than the cheapest. It opened a Tokyo branch in 1902, it began printing cards with a machine instead of by hand, and it survived the collapse of the domestic market after the war by making cards for the occupying forces. In 1949 Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder's great-grandson, became president at 22, fired most of the senior staff, and set about changing the business.
He went through several. Nintendo made instant rice, ran a love hotel chain and a taxi company, and sold a vacuum-cleaner-shaped toy. It got the licence to make Disney playing cards in 1959, sold 600,000 packs in two years, and floated on the Osaka exchange in 1962. It then made toys, including the Ultra Hand, and then in the 1970s went into electronics: light guns, and the Game and Watch handhelds designed by Gunpei Yokoi.
Games came in the 1980s. Donkey Kong in 1981, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, was the breakthrough, and it was followed by the Famicom in 1983, which became the NES abroad, and sold about 62 million units. The Game Boy in 1989 sold 118 million. The company has sold more than 800 million consoles and billions of games since, and has done it by controlling both the hardware and the software, which is the strategy Yamauchi's successors inherited.
The hanafuda business is still there. Nintendo of Japan sells playing cards, including hanafuda, and the company's headquarters is in Kyoto, a few kilometres from where Yamauchi started.