When Nintendo Was First Founded (And Why It Didn't Make Video Games)

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Nintendo has been a household name for decades now, and many people wonder exactly where and how the company started out. Nintendo has released over 20 different gaming consoles and sold over 100 million of them. It has also produced hundreds of games for each of these consoles and is still actively producing more.

Nintendo is currently made up of five main branches with over 6,500 employees: Nintendo Co., Ltd., Nintendo of America, Nintendo of Europe, Nintendo Australia, and Nintendo of Korea.  Most branches have multiple offices in different countries. The company also owns 28 subsidiaries, including Next Level Games, 1-Up Studios, Retro Studios, and partial ownership of The Pokémon Company, with most Pokémon games releasing exclusively on Nintendo consoles.

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Being so successful in the video game industry, it is a wonder how Nintendo first got started. In reality, it had nothing to do with video games at all because they did not exist yet. Nintendo, originally known as Nintendo Karuta, was founded on September 23, 1889, in Kyoto, Japan. Fusajiro Yamauchi originally founded the company to produce Hanafuda, a traditional Japanese playing card.

About 40 years after its creation, Nintendo was the largest card game company in Japan and flourished through the 1940s and 1950s. As the popularity of playing cards declined in the 1960s, Yamauchi invested in multiple industries, including instant rice, a taxi service, and love hotels. After a few failures, Nintendo caught a break in the early 1970s with their Nintendo Beam Gun toy, Japan's first electronic toy, which sold over one million units.

The Nintendo Entertainment System and the Game and Watch were