The History of Nintendo: From an 1889 Hanafuda Shop to the Switch

Nintendo is known as the company behind Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon, but its history before video games is actually longer than its history with them. The company started in 1889 as a small shop in Kyoto, Japan, making hanafuda playing cards, and it has reinvented itself several times since: from card maker to toy maker, and from toy maker to console maker.

In this post, we follow Nintendo's 130-plus years from the perspective of the company rather than individual games. We look at what choices it made in each crisis, how success and failure took turns, and what design philosophy took shape along the way. Individual consoles and games are covered in separate posts, so here we focus on the company's overall path.

A Company That Began With Hanafuda Cards (1889–1960s)

Nintendo traces its start to a shop that Fusajiro Yamauchi founded in Kyoto on September 23, 1889. It was originally called "Nintendo Koppai"; koppai refers to cards and similar gaming pieces. What the shop made was hanafuda, a 48-card deck illustrated with the flowers and plants of the twelve months. How hanafuda traveled to Korea and became hwatu is covered in our post on the history of hwatu and Go-Stop.

The name "Nintendo" is often interpreted as "leave luck to heaven," but no historical records have been found to confirm this. What is certain is that the company's cards became popular enough that it hired workers and moved to mass production.

Leadership stayed in the family. Fusajiro had no son, so his son-in-law Sekiryo Kaneda was adopted into the family and became the second president in 1929. In 1949, Sekiryo's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi left university to become the third president. He led the company for more than 50 years, until 2002, and transformed Nintendo from a card maker into a global game company.

Yamauchi began by expanding the card business. In 1953, Nintendo became the first company in Japan to make plastic playing cards, and it then signed a deal with Disney to put Disney characters on its Western-style cards. Until then, cards had a strong image as gambling tools, but by selling them together with books explaining card games, Nintendo turned them into a family pastime. On the back of this success, the company went public in 1962.

Yet in 1956, when Yamauchi visited the largest playing card company in the United States, he was struck by how small its office was, and he realized the limits of the card business. After renaming the company from "Nintendo Koppai" to simply "Nintendo" in 1963, it tried its hand at several new fields, including a taxi company, instant food, and a vacuum cleaner. None of them lasted. When card demand fell in the mid-1960s, the company's share price also dropped sharply.

In the end, what paid off was toys, a business where its card-making experience could be put to use.

Toys and Electronic Play: From the Ultra Hand to Game & Watch

The turning point came from a single engineer. Gunpei Yokoi, who joined in 1965 to maintain production equipment, had built an extending arm toy for his own amusement. Yamauchi saw it and ordered it turned into a product. Released in 1966 as the "Ultra Hand," it became a hit, and Yokoi was moved into product development, where he created one toy after another, including the "Ultra Machine" pitching machine and the "Love Tester," which measured affection between two people holding hands.

Nintendo gradually shifted toward play that used electronics. The main milestones were:

• 1970, Beam Gun series: Developed with Sharp, these home toys let players shoot light at targets.
• 1973, Laser Clay Shooting System: A large-scale attraction that turned closed bowling alleys into shooting ranges, using the same light gun technology.
• 1977, Color TV-Game: A series of home consoles made with Mitsubishi Electric. The number in names like "Color TV-Game 6" and "15" indicates how many games were built in.
• 1980, Game & Watch: Handheld electronic games that combined a game and a clock on a calculator-style LCD. Each unit held just one game, but it became Nintendo's first big hit electronic product.
• **1981, Donkey Kong**: An arcade game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It was Nintendo's first worldwide hit and the first appearance of Mario.

At this point, Nintendo was a company doing toys, arcade games, and handheld electronic games all at once.

Famicom and NES: Becoming a Console Company

On July 15, 1983, Nintendo released the Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan, a home console that used interchangeable cartridges. That same year, the North American game market collapsed under a flood of low-quality games, an event known as the video game crash of 1983. When talks to have Atari distribute the console in the U.S. fell through, Nintendo decided to enter North America on its own.

The North American version, released in 1985, was called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The company deliberately used the phrase "entertainment system" to avoid sounding like a game console and gave it a gray, boxy design resembling a VCR. Seeing poorly controlled game quality as one cause of the crash, Nintendo put a lockout chip in its cartridges so that only licensed companies could release games, and licensed games carried a "Seal of Quality."

This structure became the basic model of the console business: the hardware maker releases its own flagship games and earns licensing revenue from other companies' games. Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) came out in this period, and Nintendo effectively became a game company. In Japan, it stopped making and releasing arcade games in late 1985 to focus on the home market.

Handheld Strength, Home Console Struggles (1989–2003)

The Game Boy, released in 1989, opened Nintendo's handheld era. Its story is told in detail in the history of the Game Boy, so here we look at the company as a whole.

With the arrival of the Super Famicom (SNES in North America) in 1990, fierce competition began with Sega's Mega Drive (Genesis). In the U.S., Sega raised its market share sharply with aggressive advertising aimed at teenagers, and Nintendo had to loosen some of its strict licensing terms, such as the rule against releasing the same game on other consoles.

Bigger changes came in the mid-1990s. Nintendo had been developing a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom with Sony but ended the partnership over contract terms, and Sony built on that experience to release the PlayStation in 1994. In 1995, the Virtual Boy, a 3D console designed by Gunpei Yokoi, was a major failure. Its red monochrome stereoscopic display caused eye strain, and only 22 games were ever released for it.

The Nintendo 64 (1996) set the standard for 3D game controls with Super Mario 64, but because Nintendo stuck with cartridges, outside developers who wanted cheaper CDs moved to other consoles. The GameCube, released in 2001, did not turn things around either, and became Nintendo's lowest-selling home console up to that time.

Even so, the company stayed stable thanks to handhelds. The Game Boy line, Pokémon (which began in 1996), and the Game Boy Advance (2001) effectively dominated the handheld market and made up for the weak home consoles.

DS and Wii: "Expanding the Gaming Population"

In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi named Satoru Iwata, a programmer and former president of HAL Laboratory, as Nintendo's fourth president. It was the first time since the founding that someone outside the Yamauchi family led the company.

Iwata saw people drifting away from games in Japan as a crisis, and set the goal of hardware that would put veteran players and complete beginners on the same starting line. The company called this direction "expanding the gaming population."

• Nintendo DS (2004): One of its two screens was a touchscreen, and it emphasized controls as simple as tapping with a stylus. It was followed by software for people who had never cared about games, such as brain training, cooking, and language learning.
• Wii (2006): Instead of competing on graphical power, it featured a motion-sensing controller shaped like a TV remote. Because the game moved the way you swung it, far more people began playing as families.

Both systems were less powerful than their rivals, yet they set some of the best sales records in Nintendo's history. Around 2010, Sony and Microsoft released similar motion-control add-ons, a sign of this trend's influence.

The Wii U Slump and the Switch's Success

Success was followed by hardship again. The Nintendo 3DS, released in 2011, started slowly and had its price cut sharply within months of launch, and as Wii sales also declined, Nintendo posted an operating loss for the fiscal year ending March 2012. The Wii U, released that same year, was built around a GamePad with its own screen, but it was sometimes mistaken for a Wii accessory rather than a new console. Iwata himself admitted that Nintendo had not done enough to help consumers understand the product, and lifetime Wii U sales stopped at 13.56 million units.

During this period, Nintendo also stepped into smartphone games. It partnered with mobile company DeNA in 2015 and released Miitomo and Super Mario Run in 2016. Iwata, however, died in July 2015 at the age of 55, and Tatsumi Kimishima succeeded him.

The Nintendo Switch, released on March 3, 2017, was a system that had been in preparation since Iwata's time. By combining a home console that connects to a TV with a portable handheld, it merged Nintendo's long-standing practice of releasing separate home and handheld systems into one device. Shuntaro Furukawa has been president since 2018. On June 5, 2025, its successor, the Nintendo Switch 2, was released.

Recently, Nintendo has been expanding beyond games as well. The animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out in 2023, and in October 2024 the company opened the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, on the site of its former playing card and hanafuda factory, a place that directly shows its origins as a card company.

Major Hardware and Sales by Year

The table below shows worldwide lifetime sales from Nintendo's official IR data. Release years are based on the earliest region of release. Systems without published official figures are marked "—".

Note: Switch and Switch 2 figures are as of the end of June 2026 and are still growing.

The table makes the pattern clear. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube, which fell behind in the performance race, and the Wii U, which failed to get its concept across, sold relatively little, while the Game Boy, DS, Wii, and Switch, which presented new ways to play in an easy-to-grasp form, each passed 100 million units. You can also see that handhelds supported the company whenever home consoles struggled.

The Design Philosophy Behind Nintendo

A few recurring ideas run through Nintendo's choices.

Lateral thinking with withered technology. This phrase comes from Gunpei Yokoi. "Withered technology" means technology that is already widely used and whose strengths and weaknesses are well understood, and "lateral thinking" means using it in ways different from before. Game & Watch, built from calculator LCDs, and the Game Boy, which chose a cheap and durable monochrome screen, are classic examples. The idea sometimes ended in failure, as with the Virtual Boy, but it carried on in the DS touchscreen and Wii motion controls, which competed on new ways to play rather than cutting-edge specs.

Making hardware and software together. At the 2011 Game Developers Conference, Satoru Iwata explained that Nintendo sees a console as something people buy, reluctantly, in order to enjoy software they really want to play. That is why Nintendo does not release its games on other companies' consoles, and why it plans games that are only possible on a system from the moment it starts designing the hardware.

Durability and easy controls. Because children are major users, Nintendo emphasizes durability so its hardware does not break easily when dropped. Former hardware development head Genyo Takeda explained that designs take into account the situation where a child would feel "it just broke" rather than "I broke it." The search for controls that feel natural without instructions, like the cross-shaped D-pad first used on Game & Watch, comes from the same mindset.

Widening the scope of play. From hanafuda and playing cards to toys, consoles, films, and theme parks, Nintendo has changed form with each era but has not strayed far from making "play that people enjoy together." Unlike the failed diversification of the 1960s, today's expansion puts the company's own characters and play experiences at the center.

Over more than 130 years, Nintendo has faced crisis many times, and each time it has tended to offer a different kind of play rather than follow its rivals down the same path. That choice has not always succeeded, but it is clearly that repetition that shaped the company's identity.

References

• History of Nintendo - Wikipedia
• 닌텐도 - 위키백과
• 任天堂 - Wikipedia
• 横井軍平 - Wikipedia
• Satoru Iwata - Wikipedia
• Dedicated Video Game Sales Units - Nintendo IR
• Historical Data - Nintendo IR
• Nintendo Switch 2 - Wikipedia