Original photo by Miyuki Satake/ Alamy Stock Photo
Nintendo has been synonymous with video games since the 1980s, but its first century of operation was rather different. Originally known as Nintendo Koppai by founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, the company was actually founded, on September 23, 1889, to sell playing cards, long before a certain Italian plumber was born. The hand-painted hanafuda (“flower cards” in Japanese) that it manufactured became Japan’s most popular playing cards by the early 1900s. This largely remained the case into the mid-20th century, by which time the company had tried expanding into different markets — instant rice, a taxi service, even ballpoint pens. Most of these ventures didn’t last, and it wasn’t until the video game crash of 1983 that Nintendo truly became the company it is today.
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It's a factThough it’s sometimes translated as “leave luck to heaven,” the true meaning of the word “Nintendo” remains a matter of debate more than a century later. Even the company's former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, is on the record as not knowing what it means.
With market saturation reaching its highest point and a quantity-over-quality philosophy leading to declining industry revenues, Nintendo released its landmark Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) at a time when the world of video games seemed doomed. The opposite turned out to be the case: More than 60 million consoles have been sold worldwide, alongside such influential games as Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Duck Hunt, to name just a few.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The bestselling video game of all time is often said to be ______.
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The bestselling video game of all time is often said to be Tetris.
Mario was named after Nintendo’s landlord.
Though he was originally known as Jumpman when he debuted in 1981’s Donkey Kong, Mario was renamed by the time he got his own game two years later. The name was a tribute to Mario Segale, who served as Nintendo of America’s landlord in an office park near Seattle at a time when the company owed him back rent. According to one story, at the conclusion of a particularly heated argument over said rent, then-president Minoru Arakawa promised that he would name the lovable plumber after Segale.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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