Nintendo

Nintendo is older than the light bulb's mass adoption in most Japanese households. Fusajiro Yamauchi founded it in Kyoto in 1889, and the original product wasn't games in any modern sense. It was hanafuda, hand-painted Japanese playing cards used for a card game that dates back centuries. Nintendo has been in business for over 130 years, and spent the first 70 or so nowhere near a video game.

Between the card business and the console business, Nintendo tried on a lot of hats. Under the third president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the company at various points ran a taxi company, a love hotel chain, a TV network venture, and an instant rice brand. Almost none of it worked. What did work, eventually, was toys, starting in the 1960s with things like the Ultra Hand extendable arm gadget, which nudged the company toward electronics and, by the late 1970s, arcade games.

The name itself is debated. One common reading ties it to leave luck to heaven, a fitting motto for a company that spent decades trying random businesses before finding the one that stuck.

Everything from the NES to the Switch traces back to a playing card company that refused to fold when card games stopped being a growth industry.

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