Nintendo: From playing cards to playing consoles

Nintendo is founded in 1889 as a card game company. In the 1960s, the company’s heir Hiroshi Yamauchi experimented in other business areas and, under the name Nintendo, founded, among other things, a taxi company and a chain of hourly hotels, and produced remote controlled vacuum cleaners. All these ventures are failures until the surprising success of a telescopic hand (developed by the later Game Boy inventor Gunpei Yokoi) establishes the company as a toy manufacturer.

With the advent of electronic toys a few years later, Nintendo produces a series of lightgun games and soon afterwards arcade games and pong consoles. The worldwide success of other Yokoi developments such as the Game&Watch series (1980) and the game hall hit Donkey Kong (1981; together with Shigeru Miyamoto) finally gives the company the financial backing to develop a console with the Famicom in 1983 that will dominate the market for years.