Today marks the 125th anniversary of Nintendo as a company!
Kind of strange to think of a company best-known for video games being so old, huh? Started on September 23, 1889, Nintendo had humble beginnings as a maker of Hanafuda cards, a Japanese gambling game. To this day, Nintendo still produces Hanafuda cards, as well as regular playing cards, and even mahjong sets!
It wasn’t until the 1970s that Nintendo started to get into the video game market, still making it one of the oldest video game companies in the world, not to mention one that is still around today, and relatively successful. While they started by reselling the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan, they eventually got into producing arcade machines, and then the Game & Watch handhelds throughout the 1980s. Of course, the introduction of the NES (or Famicom) in 1983 is what propelled Nintendo to what it is today.
Happy Birthday, Nintendo! May you live on for another 125 years!
If you want to learn more about old video games, make sure to check out, “The 10 Home Video Game Consoles Worthy of Putting into a Museum“!
