Chapter 1 A family Business Nintendo is one of the leading game and electronics companies in the world It was founded in Japan in the late 1800s But Nintendo did not have global recognition until the 1980s This is when Hiroshi Yamauchi changed the company and electronic gaming forever fun fact The name Nintendo comes from three Japanese kanji characters They are nin and ten and do This translates roughly to leave luck to heaven Yamauchi was born in Kyoto Japan in 1927 He had a difficult childhood When Yamauchi was five his father abandoned the family Yamauchi was then raised by his mother’s parents who were very strict In 1939 World War II began The war made life difficult for everyone in Japan including Yamauchi When he was only 12 the Japanese government forced him to leave school He spent the next few years working in a military factory 4 Nintendo’s logo in Japanese kanji characters
Hiroshi Yamauchi was Nintendo’s president for 52 years Once the war was over in 1945 Yamauchi enrolled at Waseda University to study law He was married that same year to a woman named Michiko Inaba Together they would have two daughters and a son But Yamauchi would not finish law school He would leave his studies once again this time for a family member In 1947 Yamauchi’s grandfather Sekiryo Yamauchi the president of Nintendo suffered a stroke Sekiryo asked Yamauchi to leave the university to run the family business Yamauchi agreed In time he would build one of the most successful game companies in the world 5
Chapter 2 Playing Your Cards Right Yamauchi’s great-grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in 1889 The company made playing cards for the popular Japanese game hanafuda In hanafuda players collect cards by matching suits There are 12 suits in each deck Each suit is represented by different flowers and trees Fusajiro crafted his hanafuda cards by hand First he made paper by pounding the bark from mulberry trees into a paste The paste dried in thin layers that Fusajiro then put together to make cards Next he added designs The ink he used was made from flower petals and berries 6 Nintendo hanafuda cards These cards are traditionally tiny in size but much thicker than common playing cards
Hanafuda translates to flower cards in English Decks consist of 48 tiny but thick cards Nintendo’s hanafuda cards were very successful They were the most popular playing cards in Kyoto But the cards had a small market This is because hanafuda was only popular in Japan There was no demand for the cards overseas This limited the company’s market Yamauchi was very ambitious When he inherited Nintendo he wanted to think big Yamauchi dreamed of leading a powerful company and selling products in Japan and beyond But changing an established business is challenging It would take Yamauchi decades to steer Nintendo into this new global direction 7
