Nintendo toys pre-1980

Here you have a cool collection of nintendo games, years before they date their first video games. Nintendo started as a small Japanese business by Fusajiro Yamauchi near the end of 1889 as Nintendo Koppai. Nintendo was originally named Marufuku. Based in Kyoto, the business produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The cards, which were all handmade, soon began to gain popularity, and Yamauchi had to hire assistants to mass produce cards to keep up with demand. In 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi established a joint venture with another company and renamed the company Yamauchi Nintendo & Company. The name “Nintendo,” means “entrust luck to the heavens” and “do what is humanly possible and leave the rest to fate". Since the original owner of the company is deceased, the exact details of the name are not clear. Around 1965, riddled with debt, Nintendo struggled to survive in the Japanese toy industry; it was still small at this point, and dominated by already well established companies such as Bandai and Tomy. Because of the generally short product life cycle of toys, the company always had to come up with new products. This was the beginning of a major new era for Nintendo.