Nintendo: from playing cards to ruling video games

When you think of Nintendo, what comes to mind is Mario, Zelda, the Wii remote, or that hybrid console that plugs into your TV and also fits in your bag. But the company that today moves millions of players was founded in 1889, back when most homes didn't even have electric light, let alone a television. Its first product had nothing to do with screens: it was hand-painted paper cards.

A card workshop in Kyoto

Nintendo started as a small workshop in Kyoto, Japan, making hanafuda: traditional Japanese playing cards decorated with flowers and images instead of numbers. Back then, Western card games were frowned upon or outright banned because of their link to gambling, so hanafuda filled that gap. The business did so well that it kept going, with essentially the same product, for more than half a century.

Here's the first interesting detail: for decades Nintendo wasn't a technology company, it was a tabletop entertainment company. That identity, the idea of getting people to have fun together, turned out to matter more than any single product.

Try everything and fail a lot

By the middle of the twentieth century, with the founder's descendants in charge, Nintendo realized that selling cards had a ceiling. So it began trying everything to grow. And when we say everything, we mean everything.

• A chain of love hotels for couples.
• A taxi company.
• Instant rice and ready-to-cook meals.
• A vacuum cleaner and assorted mechanical toys.

Almost all of those experiments flopped. But that stumbling period taught the company something valuable: it wasn't doomed to sell only cards. It could shed its skin. What it lacked was figuring out which direction was actually worth changing toward.

The leap to toys and then to screens

The clue came through toys. In the 1960s, a young company engineer named Gunpei Yokoi invented an extendable mechanical hand that became a sales hit. That lucky break convinced Nintendo that its future lay in making clever, fun toys, not in imitating other industries.

From mechanical toys to electronic play was a short step, and Nintendo took it. First with arcade machines, where a character called Donkey Kong became famous and a mustachioed plumber went from sidekick to star. Then, in 1985, came the console that changed everything: the NES, with Super Mario Bros. The video game industry was coming off a brutal crash, and Nintendo practically brought it back to life.

Fun over the numbers

This is where the philosophy that still sets Nintendo apart shows up. While its rivals bragged about more powerful processors and more realistic graphics, Nintendo bet again and again on the experience, not on the technical specs. The Wii wasn't the most powerful console of its generation, but its motion control had grandmas and kids bowling in the living room. The Switch doesn't win on raw power either, but the idea of playing on the TV or on the bus with the same machine won the world over.

People don't buy specs; they buy good times. Nintendo understood that a century before almost everyone else.

That stubbornness has cost them criticism and sometimes sales, but it has also given them the most original ideas in the industry. Whenever they tried to compete on raw power alone, they almost always did worse than when they invented something new.

What you can take from all this

Nintendo's story isn't about a company that got lucky once. It's about a business that reinvented itself several times over more than a century: from cards to toys, from toys to arcades, and from there to consoles. But through every turn it kept one thing intact: the obsession with making people have fun.

For your business the lesson is clear. Products can change, the market can push you to try new paths, and you'll even have failures along the way. What shouldn't change is the underlying promise you make to your customer. Find the thing you do well that people genuinely value, and defend it even as everything else transforms. In the end, serving people well and leaving them happy is still the best long-term strategy there is.