Before Mario: How a Kyoto Card Maker Became Nintendo

In May 2026, Nintendo raised prices in Japan on the Switch 2, the original Switch and Nintendo Switch Online. Tucked into the same announcement was a line most players outside Japan would never notice: the prices of Nintendo's playing cards and hanafuda were going up too.

That is not a quirk. It is where Nintendo began. Long before Mario, Zelda or Pokémon, Nintendo was a Kyoto company that made cards, and it spent decades trying, and often failing, to become something more.

A card company in Kyoto

Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the business on September 23, 1889, in Kyoto, to make hanafuda, the small, thick "flower cards" used for traditional Japanese games. The company was first called Nintendo Koppai. Hanafuda were popular, handmade and, for a while, a good business.

The family firm grew steadily for half a century. Then, in 1949, a young member of the founding family, Hiroshi Yamauchi, left his studies at Waseda University to take over as president after his grandfather suffered a stroke. He was young, impatient and would run the company for more than fifty years.

The strange experiments of the 1960s

Yamauchi knew that cards alone had a ceiling. In the early 1960s, Nintendo tried almost everything. In 1960 it ran a Kyoto taxi company, Daiya, which it later sold. After changing its name to Nintendo Co., Ltd. in 1963, it launched an instant rice product with partner companies and a vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory.

Most of it failed. When Japan's playing-card market became saturated in 1964, Nintendo's share price collapsed from 900 yen to 60 yen.

You may have read that Nintendo also ran love hotels in this period. It is one of the most repeated stories in gaming, but it does not hold up well: Nintendo's securities filings and contemporary newspapers show no evidence of it, and the claim appears to trace back to a 1993 book. Treat it as legend, not history.

The engineer who built toys

The turning point came from the maintenance department. Gunpei Yokoi, an engineer who looked after Nintendo's card-making machines, built an extending, scissor-like arm for fun in his spare time. Yamauchi saw it and ordered it turned into a product. The Ultra Hand, released in 1966, sold hundreds of thousands of units, and Yokoi was moved into product development.

Yokoi became Nintendo's most important inventor of the next three decades. He made the Love Tester, an electronic toy that claimed to measure the "love" between two people holding its handles. Nintendo also built the Laser Clay Shooting System in 1973, a light-gun shooting range installed in abandoned bowling alleys; it proved too expensive to run and was shut down.

Into electronics, then video games

By the late 1970s, Nintendo was moving into electronic games. In 1977 it released the Color TV-Game consoles, developed jointly with Mitsubishi Electric. They were simple machines that played variations of a few built-in games, but they taught Nintendo about home hardware.

Then Yokoi had his biggest idea yet. Legend says it came from watching a bored businessman on a train playing with a pocket calculator. Whatever the inspiration, Game & Watch, a line of small handheld LCD games that also told the time, ran from 1980 to 1991 and sold 43.4 million units worldwide. It was Nintendo's first major success in electronic games, and its cross-shaped direction pad became a standard part of game controllers.

Why it matters

Nintendo's long pre-history explains a lot about how it still behaves. It is cautious with money because it remembers nearly running out. It values toys and play over raw power because its most successful early products, from the Ultra Hand to Game & Watch, were clever ideas made from cheap, well-understood technology. Yokoi called this approach "lateral thinking with withered technology", and you can see it in the Game Boy, the Wii and the Switch.

WGC's take: the most remarkable thing about Nintendo is not that it became a video game company. It is that it kept the card business while doing it. The company that raised hanafuda prices in 2026 is the same one Fusajiro Yamauchi opened in 1889, which makes Nintendo one of the oldest companies in the whole entertainment business.

For the next chapter, how Nintendo fought its first great rival, read our history of the Sega vs Nintendo console war.