Before Mario, Nintendo Made Playing Cards

On September 23, 1889, a craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small business in Kyoto. It made hanafuda, Japanese playing cards printed with flowers, birds and seasonal scenes instead of numbers. The company that would one day sell hundreds of millions of game consoles began as a workshop of card printers.

The name he used was Nintendo. It is often said to mean “leave luck to heaven,” though Wikipedia’s history of the company notes that there are no historical records confirming the meaning.

1889: A card business

The timing was good. Japan had banned most forms of gambling in 1882 but tolerated hanafuda, and the cards were popular in Kyoto’s gaming parlors. Nintendo’s cards sold well across the region.

Fusajiro also saw an opening in Western-style cards. Around 1902, by the usual account, Nintendo began selling Western playing cards made in Japan rather than imported. By the time Fusajiro retired in 1929, Nintendo was the largest playing-card company in Japan.

For decades that was enough. The company changed names several times and passed through the family, but its business stayed the same: printing and selling cards.

1949: A 21-year-old in charge

In 1949 Hiroshi Yamauchi, a 21-year-old member of the founding family, became president. He would run Nintendo for the next 53 years.

He modernized the card business. Nintendo began making plastic playing cards and, in the late 1950s, licensed Disney characters for its decks.

But cards were a business with a ceiling. There were only so many decks a country could buy.

The 1960s: Taxis, hotels and instant rice

Yamauchi went looking for something new, and he looked almost everywhere. According to The Week’s obituary of him, he tried selling instant rice, running a taxi fleet and developing “love hotels” that rented rooms by the hour. Google Arts & Culture’s account of the period adds household products such as vacuum cleaners.

None of it lasted. The ventures had nothing in common with each other or with what Nintendo already knew how to do. The same Google Arts & Culture account says they all failed except one: toys.

1966: The Ultra Hand

In the mid-1960s Nintendo hired Gunpei Yokoi as a maintenance engineer for the card factory’s assembly line. In 1966, during a visit to the factory, Yamauchi noticed an extending arm that Yokoi had built to amuse himself: a lattice of crossed slats that shot out to grab objects at a distance.

Yamauchi told him to turn it into a product in time for the Christmas season. Sold as the Ultra Hand, it became a hit, selling more than a million units, according to Nintendo Wire’s history of the period. Yokoi was moved off maintenance duty and into product development.

Toys turned out to be the venture that fit. Yokoi followed the Ultra Hand with the Ultra Machine, a ball-pitching machine, and the Love Tester, a gadget that claimed to measure how much two people liked each other. Nintendo had found its direction: products for play.

From toys to video games

Electronic toys led to electronic games. Yokoi went on to create the Game & Watch handheld games and, later, the Game Boy. In 1983 Nintendo released the Family Computer in Japan, sold abroad as the Nintendo Entertainment System, and with it the games that made Mario a household name.

Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down as president in 2002 and was succeeded by Satoru Iwata. He died in 2013.

Nintendo today

The card maker is now one of the biggest companies in Japan. In the fiscal year to March 31, 2026, which included the Switch 2’s launch in June 2025, Nintendo reported net sales of ¥2.3 trillion, about $14.6 billion, up 98.6% on the year before. The Switch 2 sold 19.86 million units in that year.

Nintendo still makes hanafuda cards. More than 130 years after Fusajiro opened his workshop, they are a small line of the business, sold mainly in Japan.

What the record shows

• A small product can carry a company for a long time. Nintendo lived on playing cards for more than 70 years before its first hit toy.
• Diversifying into anything is not a strategy. Taxis, hotels and instant rice had nothing to do with what Nintendo was good at, and none of them lasted.
• Talent can be hiding on the factory floor. The toy that changed Nintendo’s direction came from a maintenance engineer playing on his break.
• The old business never fully went away. Nintendo kept making the product it was founded on, even after games made it famous.

Other companies in this archive found their future in a side product. Play-Doh began as a wallpaper cleaner, and Corning’s glass waited decades for the iPhone.