Nintendo and the Playing Card Business

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The name Nintendo is actually a multiple on Tantras. The kanji characters can be interpreted as leave luck to heaven, and also maybe the entrepreneurial spirit of a new venture. A hundred years earlier in Kyoto, Japan, when one fusagero Yamauchi, who was the head of a cement company at the time in Kyoto,. He saw that there was an opportunity to get out of the cement business, the boring cement business and enter the playing card business.

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away.

The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried!

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