On This Day in History: September 23
Nintendo Begins
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We called it “Nofriendo,” joking that guys who play video games all day have no friends. But Nintendo was founded on creating multiplayer games. In 1889.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 23, 1889--
In the 16th century, the Portuguese showed up in Japan to teach them about Jesus and playing cards. The Japanese eventually made Jesus illegal, but the cards caught on. Japanese people created hanafuda, which means “flower cards,” because they depicted fancy images of flowers n’ shit. They were used much like Western cards for playing a variety of games. The Nintendo Karuta company was founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in the city of Kyoto to produce and distribute hanafuda. The name Nintendo is assumed to mean “leave luck to heaven.” Heaven has been parsimonious in the granting of luck to me when I play that stupid fucking Mario Kart game with my son.
You know how your fucking iPhone starts going to shit after a couple of years? Apple didn’t invent that. Not sure if Yamauchi invented it either, but he sure used it. The early Nintendo company struggled because the cards were too well made. They lasted too damn long, so they started creating cheaper ones that fell apart and needed to be replaced often, and profits soared.
Four decades later, Nintendo was the largest card game company in Japan, and over the next few decades the company expanded and diversified, although World War II was a rough time for the company. Hell, it was a rough time for a lotta people.
Then in 1970 came the Nintendo Beam Gun as its first electronic game. I just googled that. I remember that fucking thing! I wanted one. It allowed you to shoot shit on a screen and they sold over a million of them. They partnered with Magnavox the following year to allow their gun to shoot shit using the Magnavox game console.
The move to electronic games opened up a new world for Nintendo, and they exploited the shit out of it, creating some of the most successful consoles and popular games in the world. Its annual revenue is over $15 billion, and the company employs more than 6,000 people. Alas, their environmental record is shit, because they refuse to publish any information about their environmental practices or their use of conflict minerals. A failure to disclose usually means something to hide.
My thumb joints still ache when I think of playing Tetris on my Game Boy.
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When I was in Japan in the '80s visiting family, the "FamiCom" was the big rage. Everyone had to have a FamiCom (portmanteau of "family computer" since the idea of a consumer PC in the average home was still years away). My cousins would ask in awe if I had a FamiCom in America, since "America" was still seen as this fabled land of riches beyond that of mortals. I did not, and that answer failed to compute in their minds :)
Back in the States, a friend had managed to get one sent to him by his family in Japan as well as the required voltage adapter, so that was my initial exposure to what would become the first NES in the western world a few years after that.