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The history of Nintendo is the most unlikely story in entertainment technology. A company that started making playing cards in 1889 in a Kyoto workshop became the most influential video game company in human history. The path from hanafuda cards to Super Mario to the Switch is not a straight line. It runs through a family patriarch who bet everything on toys, an engineer who turned a factory broom closet into an invention lab, a designer who drew a carpenter fighting a gorilla, and a CEO who cut his own salary rather than lay off his engineers.
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in 1889 to manufacture hanafuda — traditional Japanese flower cards used for gambling. The name Nintendo roughly translates to “leave luck to heaven,” which turns out to be either an act of humility or an extraordinary piece of foreshadowing. For decades Nintendo was a successful regional business: it sold cards, survived two world wars, and made its products well enough that the yakuza was a reliable customer.
Then Hiroshi Yamauchi, the great-grandson of the founder, took over in 1949 at age twenty-two. He is the most consequential figure in Nintendo’s history. He was authoritarian, unsentimental, and willing to make brutal decisions without ceremony. His first act as president was to fire every senior manager. Through the 1960s he tried to diversify — a taxi company, a food company, instant rice, a love hotel chain. Every attempt failed. By the early 1960s Nintendo was near bankruptcy.
Then, almost accidentally, an engineer in Nintendo’s production facility built something that changed everything. Gunpei Yokoi was a maintenance engineer who had studied electronics and ended up running the assembly line. He built himself a toy in his spare time — an extendable arm with a claw on the end. He was playing with it when Hiroshi Yamauchi walked through. Yamauchi asked how quickly he could produce them. The Ultra Hand sold more than a million units in Japan in 1966 and established Nintendo as a toy company.
Yokoi spent the rest of his career refining what he called “lateral thinking with withered technology” — the insight that the most interesting technology for mass-market products is not the newest or most powerful, but the technology mature enough to be cheap, reliable, and applied creatively enough to feel surprising. The Game and Watch handhelds in 1980, the Game Boy in 1989, the DS in 2004 — all reflect the same logic. Use what already works. Apply it where nobody thought to.
The other person who changed Nintendo’s trajectory was Shigeru Miyamoto, who joined as an artist in 1977. Nintendo had licensed an arcade game called Radar Scope that bombed in America. They had three thousand unsold cabinets in a New Jersey warehouse. Miyamoto got assigned to create a new game for the existing hardware. He was twenty-eight and had never designed a game before. He drew a carpenter, a gorilla, a princess, a construction site. He called the gorilla Donkey Kong. The game became one of the most successful arcade titles in American history.
What Miyamoto understood is that games are about movement. The pleasure of Donkey Kong is a jump that lands exactly right. The pleasure of Super Mario Bros is the same thing extended through a world. Zelda is exploration — movement with meaning. Miyamoto’s games don’t feel like software. They feel like physical things, because he designs them starting from how they feel to touch. That instinct is why Mario is still being played by children who weren’t born when he started drawing him.
The NES launched in America in 1985, and it matters not just for what it was but for when it arrived. The American video game market had collapsed in 1983 — a seventy-five percent revenue drop in two years, caused by a flood of terrible games that trained consumers to distrust the category. Retailers wouldn’t stock game products. Nintendo disguised the NES as a consumer electronics device, packaged it with a small robot called R.O.B. to make it look like a toy, and shipped it with Super Mario Bros. The American game industry rebuilt itself around Nintendo, and it has been built around Nintendo ever since.
The Game Boy in 1989 repeated the Yokoi logic. Competitors shipped handhelds with color screens that looked better. The Game Boy looked washed out by comparison. It didn’t matter. It was cheap, launched with Tetris, and had a battery that lasted long enough for children to actually use it. Every competitor with a better screen and worse battery died. The Game Boy survived for over a decade.
Hiroshi Yamauchi’s worst decision came in the mid-1990s. Nintendo was developing a CD-ROM drive for the Super NES in partnership with Sony. Yamauchi pulled out at the last moment, publicly and humiliatingly, at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show. Sony had already built the technology. They pivoted and launched the PlayStation. The console that might have been a Nintendo peripheral became the platform that nearly destroyed Nintendo. Final Fantasy left. Square Enix left. The N64 and GameCube years were competitive struggles that Nintendo never dominated the way it had in the NES era.
What saved Nintendo from permanent irrelevance was Satoru Iwata, who became president in 2002. Iwata had been a programmer who wrote the code for Pokemon Stadium himself. His diagnosis was simple: the core gaming audience was getting bored, and people who had never started playing were intimidated by complexity. The answer was not better games for existing gamers. It was games that non-gamers would actually try.
The Wii launched in 2006 with motion controls and Wii Sports in the box. Your grandmother played Wii bowling. Your parents played Wii tennis. People who had never held a controller bought the hardware. Nintendo sold more Wiis than Sony sold PS3s. The insight is the Yokoi principle again, twenty years later: the motion-sensing technology wasn’t new. Accelerometers had existed for decades. Nintendo took cheap, mature technology and applied it in a way that made games accessible to people who had decided games weren’t for them.
Iwata died of cancer in July 2015 at fifty-five. During the Wii U years — when Nintendo shipped a confusing console that failed commercially — he cut his own salary in half rather than lay off engineers. He wrote in a shareholder letter that laying off employees might improve short-term numbers but would damage the culture in ways that would take decades to repair. The engineers who kept their jobs built the Switch.
The Switch launched in March 2017. The core concept — a console that is also a portable, that you pull out of a dock and carry with you and play in exactly the same way — resolves a tension that had defined Nintendo’s product line since the Game Boy. You no longer have to choose between the living room and the pocket. The Switch crossed a hundred and fifty million units sold. For a device that came after a commercial failure, built by a company declared irrelevant by analysts every decade since the 1970s, that number says everything.
A company in Kyoto that started by leaving luck to heaven turned out to not need luck at all. Just Yokoi’s withered technology. Miyamoto’s obsession with how things feel to touch. Iwata’s belief that the people who work for you are the most important thing you own. And a willingness, generation after generation, to make something nobody asked for and convince the world it was exactly what they needed.