The cards behind Nintendo’s 1889 beginnings
Nintendo began in Kyoto as a maker of hanafuda, a Japanese playing-card deck whose name means “flower cards.” Instead of numbered suits, its cards show flowers and other seasonal images, grouped into 12 sets corresponding to the months of the year. Players combine cards to score points in games whose rules can vary.
That may sound far removed from a video-game company, but hanafuda were part of a much older world of card play—and gambling. Japanese authorities had repeatedly restricted gambling and certain kinds of playing cards. Hanafuda, however, were not simply an illegal product: their distinctive designs helped them persist as a deck that could be used for ordinary games as well as wagering.
A legal deck with a risky association
The controversy lay less in the cardboard itself than in what people might do with it. Card games could bring money into the picture, and gambling was tied to Japan’s illicit gaming scene. That gave a card maker a practical challenge: serve demand for a popular pastime while operating in a culture where gambling could attract legal trouble.
Nintendo’s early business was therefore not a secret video-game operation in disguise. It was a card-making enterprise, supplying a durable form of entertainment decades before electronic games existed. Hanafuda remained part of the company’s product history even as Nintendo later moved into other kinds of play. The surprising link is not that Nintendo began by making illegal cards, but that its first business grew from a game whose everyday use sat close to gambling’s underground edge.
