Nintendo Koppai

On the drive home from the Mario movie last night, I thought back over how far Nintendo’s come since its founding in 1889. It opened in Kyoto as a card shop under the watchful eye of Fusajiro Yamauchi mainly to sell Hanafuda (“flower cards”), which at the time was something close to opening a play card shop in the US during prohibition. Japan had banned most forms of gambling, but tolerated Hanafuda for reasons I can’t fully grasp from the research I’ve done so far and Nintendo quickly took over the local market as their main competition consisted of yakuza gangs in the underground gambling parlors and Oishi Tengudo, who still makes the cards by hand today.

Nintendo’s middle history lends itself pretty well to the typical jargony business blog posts about the importance of innovation or whatever, but I’m not particularly interested in digging into that sort of thing. The only tidbit I’ll drop here, out of respect to the roadside Nintendo gods, is from Gunpei Yokoi who started at Nintendo as an assembly line worker and went on to design the Game & Watch and GameBoy as well as creating Metroid, Kid Icarus, and the Tamagotchi (post-departure). His core philosophy was "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (roughly translated), which argued that games and toys should focus on compelling gameplay and creators should repurpose tech that’s older, well-understood, and cheap to mass-produce. This applies to all sorts of other things and I’ll leave each of us to unpack that as we will.

What I was thinking about on my drive home is how strange and gigantic the Nintendo tree is from such a little seed. “A man opens a playing card shop” feels a lot like “someone threw a stone in a pond a long way away” at this point, and the ripple effects from Fusajiro Yamauchi and those who followed him are profound. On the one hand, you’ve now got legions of people eating digital mushrooms and guiding an Olive-Garden-Italian hero on a journey of self-actualization, and on the other hand you have a blueprint for how grand journeys actually go, which is a whole host of folks weaving in and out of each other’s lives with suspicions of a grand tapestry but no true understanding of it. And after wandering around inside that idea for a couple hours while looking for a new mechanical keyboard (not sure if I’ll get it yet but I like that one), I went to sleep happy that we get to spend our lives tinkering. The world is a strange place and we never know what’s about to happen, and while I’m not necessarily trying to sugar coat anything there is a certain amount of comfort that comes from focusing on the knick-knacks we love and shutting the rest of it out. I bought a pack of Nintendo’s Hanafuda cards so I can learn how to play, and if you want to do the same you can buy them here and learn how to play the various games they’re used with here.