The most famous card company in video games could be younger, or even older.
Nintendo is one of the oldest companies in the video game industry and as you may already know, its origins go back more than 130 years, with the founding of the playing card company Fusajirou Yamauchi. Before turning to video games, Nintendo won over the public with some amazing electronic toys that, in many cases, bore the signature of Gunpei Yokoi.
The company founding date is world famous and 1889 is the year that has appeared in all the company’s history books, we can even find it in Nintendo’s official website. However, the researcher Marcus Richert has carried out a study on the origins of the company published by Techradarwhere the emblematic date is questioned.
Richert has found registrations in business directories from the Taisho and Showa periods, where the date of the company’s founding is consistently listed as 1892. The earliest mention that the researcher has found of 1889 appears in the 1936 edition of Teikoku Shinyo-roku by Sekiryo Yamauchi, second in command of Nintendo. Richert points to a possible error in the date remembered by Sekiryo.
1893 is a date that is repeated in the records of the timeThe famous photo of the Nintendo headquarters in its foundation also raises doubts in the researcher. This is based on the testimony of Japanese bicycle historians Masayuki Hasebe and Yuki Ootsu, who place the bicycle manufacturing date what do we see in the picture a decade later. Interestingly, other evidence points in the opposite direction to this later date, with the company’s roots stretching back to the Edo period, when card games were still banned by the shogunate.
This theory comes from playing card researcher Hisashi Ishikawa. Fusajiro Yamauchi’s biological father was Sosuke Fukui, before he was adopted by the Yamauchi, and Edo period playing card printing records published by the Dr Takashi Ebashi locate the ‘fuku’ logo in the circle, commonly known as Marufuku, which Nintendo still uses in their hanafuda cards. This investigation would suggest that Fusajiro’s biological father made the first cards and that the ‘fuku’ in Nintendo’s Marufuku logo comes from the surname Fukui. Now all that remains is to wait for the opening of the future Nintendo museum to learn more about the history of the company.
More about: Nintendo, History of Nintendo, Yamauchi and Hanafuda.
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