Something you may or may not be aware of is the fact that Nintendo, the beloved video game company, is in fact incredibly old. It was founded 128 years ago in 1889. The NES is a pretty ancient device at this point, but it is absolutely not 128 years old – back then, Nintendo was making something much more wholesome: playing cards.
Specifically, they were making hanafuda cards, which are still reasonably popular in Japan. In fact, Nintendo still make and sell hanafuda cards, though presumably they’re not a core bedrock of the company’s revenue these days.
Enterprising Nintendo fans and historians spotted a little nugget of Nintendo history in the Meiji150 project – which is dedicated to documenting the history of Kyoto during the Meiji era, which ran from 1868 to 1912. Florent Gorges and Isao Yamazaki, two Nintendo historians, spotted this cool little image in the archives:
I have no evidence to prove this, but I believe Super Mario himself lived inside that building in 1889. Neat!
